like a red rag upon a rageous bull. I should rather say that it excited the
so-called "Sexual I Journal" by suggesting another opportunity for its unclean
sensationalism: perhaps also the staff hoped to provide company and a
fellow-sufferer for their editor, who was then in durance vile, his of fences
being "inciting to an indecent assault" and an act of criminal immorality. I
should not have felt called upon to remind my readers of a scandal half
forgotten in England, while still held in lively remembrance by the jealous
European world, had not the persistent fabrications, calumnies, and slanders
of the Pall Mall, which continue to this day, compelled me to move in
self-defence, and to explain the mean under lying motives.
Some three years and a half ago (June 3, '85), the paper startled the world of
London by a prodigy of false, foul, and fulsome details in the shape of
articles entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." The object of the
editor, Mr. William T. Stead, a quondam teacher in the London schools and a
respectable Methodist strengthened by non- Conformist support, in starting
this ignoble surprise on the public was much debated. His partisans asserted
that he had been honestly deceived by some designing knave as if such
child-like credulity were any excuse for a veteran journalist! His foes opined
that under the cloak of a virtue, which Cato never knew, he sought to quicken
his subscription list ever dwindling under the effects of his exaggerated
Russophilism and Anglophobia.
But whatever may have been the motive, the effect was deplorable. The
articles, at once collected into a pamphlet (price two pence), as the "Report
of the Pall Mall Gazette's Secret Commission," and headed by a laudatory
quotation from one of the late Lord Shaftesbury's indiscreetly philanthropic
speeches, were spread broadcast about every street and lane in London. The
brochure of sixteen pages divided into three chapters delighted the malignant
with such sensational section-headings as--How Girls are Bought and
Ruined--Why the Cries of the Victims are not Heard--Procuresses in the West
End--How Annie was Procured--You Want a Maid, do You?--The Ruin of Children--A
London Minotaur(?)--The Ruin of the Young Life--The Demon Child and--A Close
Time for Girls, the latter being intended to support the recommendation of the
Lords' Committee and the promise of a Home Secretary that the age of consent
be raised from thirteen to sixteen. And all this catchpenny stuff (price 2d.)
ended characteristically with "Philanthropic and Religious Associations can be
supplied with copies of this reprint on special terms." Such artless
benevolence and disinterested beneficence must, of course, be made to pay.
Read by every class and age in the capital, the counties and the colonies,
this false and filthy scandal could not but infect the very children with the
contagion of vice. The little gutter-girls and street-lasses of East London
looked at men passing-by as if assured that their pucelages were or would
become vendible at £3 to £5. But, the first startling over men began to treat
the writer as he deserved. The abomination was "boycotted" by the Press,
expelled from clubs, and driven in disgrace from the "family breakfast table,"
an unpleasant predicament for a newspaper which lives, not by its news, but by
its advertise meets. The editor had the impudence to bemoan a "conspiracy of
silence," which can only mean that he wanted his foul sheets to be bought and
discussed when the public thought fit to bury them in oblivion. And yet he
must have known that his "Modern Babylon" is not worse in such matters than
half-a-dozen minor Babylons scattered over Europe, Asia, and America; and that
it is far from being, except by the law of proportion the "greatest market of
human flesh in the world." But by carefully and curiously misrepresenting the
sporadic as the systematic, and by declaring that the "practice of procuration
has been reduced to a science" (instead of being, we will suppose, one of the
fine arts), it is easy to make out a case of the grossest calumny and most
barefaced scandal against any great capital.
The revelations of the Pall Mall were presently pooh-pooh'd at home; but
abroad their effect was otherwise. Foreigners have not yet learned thoroughly
to appreciate our national practice of washing (and suffering others to wash)
the foulest linen in fullest public. Mr. Stead's unworthy clap-trap
representing London as the head-quarters of kidnapping, hocussing, and
child-prostitution, the author invoking the while with true Pharisaic
righteousness, unclean and blatant, pure intentions and holy zeal for good
works was welcomed with a shout of delight by our unfriends the French, who
hold virtue in England to be mostly Tartuffery, and by our cousins-german and
rivals the Germans, who dearly love to use us and roundly abuse us. In fact,
the national name of England was wilfully and wrongfully defiled and bewrayed
by a "moral and religious" Englishman throughout the length and breadth of
Europe.
Hard upon these "revelations" came the Eliza Armstrong case whereby the editor
of the "Sexual Gazette" stultified thoroughly and effectually his own
assertions; and proved most satisfactorily, to the injury of his own person,
that the easiest thing in the world is notably difficult and passing
dangerous. An accomplice, unable to procure a "maiden" for immoral purposes
after boasting her ability as a procuress, proceeded to kidnap one for the
especial benefit of righteous Mr. Stead. Consequently, he found himself in the
dock together with five other accused, male and female; and the verdict,
condemning the archplotter to three months and the assistants to lesser terms
of imprisonment for abduction and indecent assault, was hailed with universal
applause. The delinquent had the fanatical and unscrupulous support, with
purse and influence, of the National Vigilance Association, a troop of
busybodies captained by licensed blackmailers who of late years have made
England their unhappy hunting-ground.[FN#446] Despite, however, the "Stead
Defence Fund" liberally supplied by Methody; despite the criminal's
Pecksniffan tone, his self-glorification of the part he had taken, his
effronté boast of pure and lofty motives and his passionate enthusiasm for
sexual morality, the trial emphasised the fact that no individual may break
the law of the land in order that good may come therefrom. It also proved most
convincingly the utter baselessness of the sweeping indictment against the
morality of England and especially of London--a charge which "undoubtedly had
an enormous influence for harm at home and cruelly prejudiced the country
abroad." In the words of Mr. Vaughan of the Bow Street Police Court (September
7, '85) the Pall Mall's "Sensational articles had certainly given unlimited
pain and sorrow to many good people at home and had greatly lowered the
English nation in the estimation of foreigners." In a sequel to the Eliza
Armstrong case Mr. Justice Manisty, when summing up, severely condemned the
"shocking exhibition that took place in the London streets by the publication
of statements containing horrible details, and he trusted that those who were
responsible for the administration of the law would take care that such
outrage should not be permitted again." So pure and pious Mr. Stead found time
for reflection during the secluded three-months life of a "first-class
misdemeanant" in "happy Holywell," and did not bring out his intended articles
denouncing London as the head- quarters of a certain sin named from Sodom.
About mid-September, when Mr. Stead still lay in durance vile, a sub-editor
Mr. Morley (Jun.) applied to me for an interview which I did not refuse. It
was by no means satisfactory except to provide his paper with "copy." I found
him labouring hard to place me "in the same box" with his martyred principal
and to represent my volume ("a book of archaic delights") as a greater outrage
on public decency than the two-penny pamphlet. This, as said the London Figaro
(September 19, '85), is a "monstrous and absurd comparison." It became evident
to me, during the first visit, that I was to play the part of Mr. Pickwick
between two rival races of editors, the pornologists and the anti-
pornologists, and, having no stomach for such sport, I declined the rôle. In
reply to a question about critics my remark to the interviewer was, "I have
taken much interest in what the classics call Skiomachia and I shall allow
Anonymus and Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also treat with scornful
silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent prospect, a landscape
adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art, can only see in a field
corner here and there a little heap of muck. 'You must have been looking for
it, Madam!' said, or is said to have said, sturdy old Doctor Samuel Johnson."
Moreover Mr. Morley's style of reporting "interviews" was somewhat too
advanced and American--that is, too personal, too sensation-mongering and too
nauseously familiar--to suit my taste, and I would have none other of them.
Hereupon being unable to make more copy out of the case the Pall Mall Gazette
let loose at me a German Jew pennyliner, who signs himself Sigma. This pauvre
diable delivered himself of two articles, "Pantagruelism or Pornography?"
(September 14, '85) and "The Ethics of the Dirt" (September 19, '85), wherein
with matchless front of brass he talks of the "unsullied British
breakfast-table," so pleasantly provided with pepper by his immaculate editor.
And since that time the Pall Mall Gazette has never ceased to practice at my
expense its old trade, falsehood and calumny, and the right of private
judgment, sentence and execution. In hopes that his splenetic and vindictive
fiction might bear fruit, at one time the Pall Mall Gazette has "heard that
the work was to be withdrawn from circulation" (when it never circulated).
Then, "it was resolved by the authorities to request Captain Burton not to
issue the third volume and to prosecute him if he takes no notice of the
invitation;" and, finally, "Government has at last determined to put down
Captain Burton with a strong hand." All about as true as the political
articles which the Pall Mall Gazette indites with such heroic contempt for
truth, candour and honesty. One cannot but apply to the "Gutter Gazette" the
words of the Rev. Edward Irving:--"I mean by the British Inquisition that
court whose ministers and agents carry on their operations in secret; who drag
every man's most private affairs before the sight of thousands and seek to
mangle and destroy his life, trying him without a witness, condemning him
without a hearing, nor suffering him to speak for himself, intermeddling in
things of which they have no knowledge and cannot on any principle have a
jurisdiction * * * I mean the ignorant, unprincipled, unhallowed spirit of
criticism, which in this Protestant country is producing as foul effects
against truth, and by as dishonest means as ever did the Inquisition of Rome"
(p. 5 "Preliminary Discourse to Ben Ezra," etc.).
Of course men were not wanting to answer the malevolent insipidities of the
Pall Mall Gazette, and to note the difference between newspaper articles duly
pamphleted and distributed to the disgust of all decency, and the translation
of an Arabian limited in issue and intended only for the few select. Nor could
they fail to observe that black balling The Nights and admitting the
"revelations" was a desperate straining at the proverbial gnat and swallowing
the camel. My readers will hardly thank me for dwelling upon this point yet I
cannot refrain from quoting certain of the protests:--
Sir,