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Then some chap from the Y. M. C. A. proposed timidly to lead us in prayer. What a glare he got from all over the room! "Damn fool," I heard someone mutter. Bad form! Politics also were tabooed. Here again there were exceptions. A still fiery son of the South could rail about niggers, rapes and lynchings and the need for disenfranchising the blacks. It was good fun to hear him.
In connexion with the Norman occupation of Sussex the curious and arbitrary system of "Rapes" by which the county is divided should be noticed. These six blocks of land have no apparent relation to the natural features of the country; each contains a powerful castle to overawe the division to which it belongs.
Already I behold the swarms of angry Barbarians: our opulent cities, the places flourishing in a long peace, are shaken with fear, desolated by slaughter, consumed by rapine, and polluted by intemperance and lust. I see the massacre or captivity of our citizens, the rapes of our virgins and matrons.
If you could go to a theater and see put upon the stage the scenes of the old testament, with its butcheries and rapes and deeds of violence, you would detest it all the days of your life.
You would frame your question thus: "Shall we stand by idly and pusillanimously while our neighbor invades our land and rapes our women?" This is a moral issue of the deepest sanctity. You would present it. The priests would do their little something somewhere out of sight. From the great stone image would come a bellow which resembled "No."
"Dearest to every man are his children and kindred, by the contrivance and designation of nature. These are snatched from us for recruits, and doomed to bondage in other parts of the earth. Our wives and sisters, however they escape rapes and violence as from open enemies, are debauched under the appearance and privilege of friendship and hospitality.
"The civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar' often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in marriage than outside it.
What stories did we not believe of him? what murders, rapes, robberies, not lay to his charge? we who were living within a few miles of his territory, and might, by books and newspapers, be made as well acquainted with his merits or demerits as any of his own countrymen.
There are artifices and artifices, and some are better than others. The automobile is a more cunning artifice than the ox-cart, the subway than a palanquin. Devices come and devices go. Change is the essence of progress. All is development. The end of rapes and romances is the same perpetuation. There may be head love as well as heart love.
I will not take issue with so distinguished an authority as Mr. Johnson regarding the competency of our courts to deal with criminals in accordance with the laws of the land; but the people see that despite the vigilance of officers, the erudition of judges and the industries of juries, murders multiply, rapes increase and portable property remains at the mercy of the marauder.
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