Life & Wisdom Quote by Nathaniel Parker Willis

Willis aims a pin straight at the era's sentimental worship of purity. In his formulation, innocence is not a shield; it is an exposed throat. The line turns the usual moral arithmetic inside out: guilt, the state we’re trained to fear, comes with street smarts - an earned suspicion, a sense of consequence, an instinct for self-protection. Innocence that "feels no risk" and has been "taught no caution" is, by contrast, unarmed. It doesn’t recognize danger early enough to avoid it, and it can’t name what’s happening when danger arrives.

The subtext is pointedly social, not merely personal. Willis writes in a 19th-century Anglo-American culture that prized feminine virtue and childlike purity while often refusing to equip the "innocent" with knowledge about predation, money, sex, or power. Teaching caution could look like contaminating virtue; better to keep people unschooled and call that goodness. Willis sees the trap: innocence becomes a credential others can exploit, an invitation to the unscrupulous who rely on ignorance and politeness to get close. "Oftener assailed" suggests a predator's logic - attackers select targets least likely to anticipate them, resist them, or be believed afterward.

The line also contains a quiet rebuke to moralizers: if you produce innocence by withholding warnings, you share responsibility for the vulnerability you’ve manufactured. Willis isn’t romanticizing guilt; he’s arguing for literacy in risk, the kind of caution that lets virtue survive contact with the world.