Honesty, the quality corresponding to honour, may be said to be relative, according to the customs of different countries. For mankind generally, honesty consists in not exceeding the limits of licensed dishonesty. Thus in commerce, which is, at bottom, a cheating game, integrity is not, as Dr. Dubois says, the same everywhere. “There are communities, little cultivated in other respects, where it is observed scrupulously; there are others in which, in spite of scientific, artistic and literary development, this moral perception seems to be atrophied. A people whose business honesty is proverbial may have a very elastic conscience in regard to morality between the sexes.”

In the professions, or in social positions which place the individual above the mass of people, a man’s honesty consists in adapting his conscience to the circumstances of the moment.

In questions of commercial or industrial enterprise, intellectual ventures, public or private morals, general or particular interests, masculine honesty is an adjustable matter which springs from the desire for free action, without infringing upon the law.

Woman’s honesty is quite a different matter. It consists simply in safeguarding the “honour of the home,” in keeping away all “intruders” upon the sacred ground of marriage, and in averting any fracas tending to diminish the authority of the man, the husband, the owner, and free the feminine soul from its ancestral slavery.

This is why men and women cannot be in perfect accord, so long as honesty, taken in the widest sense, is not the same for both. Based upon respect for what is fair, just and good, honesty has essentially no sex. Whether strict or comparative, it does not imply a different moral law for individuals of different natures.

This primordial question has always been treated too lightly, though it has been the source of continual misunderstanding, especially in matrimonial questions.

How many examples one could give of want of scruple violating the idea of honesty and responsibility!

How many sins, grave in themselves, are committed by men in power, knowing themselves safe from the arm of the law; how many actions, unpunishable, yet which are an outrage upon the liberty of others, a breach of respect for human nature, and an injury to society!

How many men sacrifice, for the sake of ambition, their country’s vital interests, and incur no censure save that of powerless public opinion!

The orator who, in a moment of national excitement, throws his visionary dreams and interested lies broadcast into the press; the leader who, in full consciousness of his abominable work, deceives the people; the perjured politician who denies his convictions to attain promotion, should all have their honour called in question. To such as these, as to others, woman owes respect and obedience, without the option of comparing her own honour, based on imperative duty, with that of these empty talkers and tub-orators.

It is true that, on the other hand, a woman may, without censure, give out that her dearest friend’s husband is making love to her—that she may thus, by a word, destroy a home’s peace—without any pangs of conscience, and without the man attacked being able to call her to account.

In the relations between men and women some solution should be found by which both may be placed on equal ground as regards morality and responsibility. In this way loss of esteem between them would be avoided, and the value of each enhanced.

But, to obtain such a result, tolerance and the principle of harmony must first be taught; men must become less selfish, and women learn that their life is not only a work of love but a work of reason. Social rights must be equalised in the light of conscience and moral responsibility. In fact, thorough sincerity must bring about loyalty both in business and private affairs, creating a moral atmosphere in which forgery, fraud, plagiarism, the lie that corrupts the soul of a people, all the monstrous growths of our modern society, can no longer exist. Then honesty, from being comparative, will become supreme, incumbent equally upon man and woman, bound no longer only by social, but by moral ties.