Now, side by side with this attitude of the true Man, this perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such, ay, even degraded womanhood, place the present debased attitude of men, even of some Christian men, which we are looking to you mothers of boys to change in toto.  Is not a powerful writer in the Westminster Review right when he says, “There is not found a chivalrous respect for womanhood as such.  That a woman has fallen is not the trumpet call to every noble and wise-hearted man to raise her up again as speedily as may be; rather it is the signal to deepen her degradation and to doom her to moral death.”  Is it not a received code even among Americans as well as Englishmen that if a woman knows how to respect and protect herself men are to respect her—­it is only a scoundrel that will dare to say an insulting word to her?  But if she is a bit fast and giddy, if she has little or no respect for herself, if her foolish feet have slipped ever so little, then she is fair game.  “She gave him encouragement; what else could she expect?  It was her own fault.”  To expect that any man with an ounce of true manhood in him would at once say, “That young girl does not in the least realize the danger she is in, and I must get between her and the edge of the precipice, and see that she comes to no harm.”—­this would be to expect the wildly impossible.  Have we not made up our mind that the beast and not the Christ is our master here; and does not every beast spring at once on a fallen prey?  It is human nature, and you will never get men to think and act any differently.  As to faith in man as such, not only in the church-going man, but in the rough-spoken fisherman, the contemned publican, the infidel Samaritan, faith in his power of recognizing and rising to the truth, the higher standard placed before him, that I sometimes think lies buried in that Eastern garden—­in the Sepulchre “wherein never man yet lay."[22] And yet it is the man as revealed in Jesus Christ, not the man as fashioned by the world, with its low traditions and low public opinion, that is true to human nature.  In moments of excitement or danger he reverts to this true nature, which has been so warped and overlaid by the world.  In the great mass meetings which I held for the purpose of pleading with men to come over on my side and help me in the work of saving women from the awful doom to which men sentence them, I used to bring this home by saying to them:  “If a fire were to break out in this vast hall, who would be the first person that you would try to save?  It would be me because I am a woman”; and the roar of assent that burst forth from all parts of the building showed that I had struck home.  I used to bring before them—­and the sooner you bring it before your boys the better—­the conduct of the men on the ill-fated Birkenhead—­ah! dear men, voiceless and nameless, and lost in that “vast and wandering grave” into which they sank, what have they not done to raise the tone of