a degradation of the State, and, if persisted in, can only
lead to its dissolution. No person or class of persons must
be under the cringing fear of having imputed to them offenses
of which they are innocent, and of being taken into custody
in consequence of such imputation. They must not be liable
to be detained in custody without so much as a _prima facie_
case being made out, such as in the opinion of a responsible
judicial officer leaves a presumption of guilt. They must not
be liable to be detained for an indefinite time without having
the question of their guilt or innocence investigated by the
best attainable methods. When the fact comes to be inquired
into, the best attainable methods of eliciting the truth must
be used. In default of any one of these securities, _public
liberty_ must be said to be proportionately at a very low ebb.
Great effort has been made to introduce this system into the United
States, and a National Board of Health, created by Congress in
1879, is carefully watched lest its irresponsible powers lead to
its encroachment upon the liberties and personal rights of women.
A resolution adopted March 5, 1881, at a meeting of the New York
committee appointed to thwart the effort to license vice in this
country, shows the need of its watchful care.
_Resolved_, That this committee has learned with much regret
and apprehension of the action of the American Public Health
Association, at its late annual meeting in New Orleans, in
adopting a sensational report commending European governmental
regulation of prostitution, and looking to the introduction in
this country, with modifications, through the medium of State
legislative enactments and municipal ordinances, of a kindred
immoral system of State-regulated social vice.
Even the Latin races in their lowest degradation did not put the
sanction of law upon the open sale of women to vice, says Mrs. Butler.
This remained for the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races, under the highest
christian civilization in a class of women licensed by the State, under
protection and name of the head of the Anglican Church, as “Queen’s
Women,” “Government Women,” both Church and State here uniting in the
nefarious business of making women, by law, the slaves of man’s lowest
nature. A system which openly declares “the necessity” for woman’s
foulest degradation, in order to protect man in his departure from the
moral law, a system that annually sends its tens of thousands down to
a death from which christian society grants no resurrection. Similar
religious beliefs beget similar results. Times change, and with them
methods, but as long as the foundation of the christian church of
every name, rests upon the belief in woman’s created inferiority to
man, and that she brought sin into the world, so long will similar
social, industrial, and moral results follow. The Catholic, Greek, and
Protestant divisions, all degrade women but under different forms. That
the woman of every christian land fears to meet a man in a secluded
place by day or by night, is of itself sufficient proof of the low
state of christian morality. Several states have at different times
attempted the enactment of similar laws through bills introduced into
their legislatures; requiring constant watchfulness on part of the
friends of social purity lest this great wrong be consummated, a
wrong primarily against woman. In certain cities, as St. Louis, where
such registration and license was for some time demanded, the foulest
injuries were perpetrated upon entirely innocent and reputable women,
injuries for which they had no redress.[72] Under the legalized vice
system, women are slaves, not possessing even the right of repudiating
this kind of life.
A gentleman traveling in France, 1866, relates a most pathetic instance
of the attempted escape and the forcible return to the house of
infamy, of a young girl whose person there was at the command of every
brute who chose to pay the price of her master. The tram car in which
this gentleman was riding, crowded with ladies and girls of refined
appearance, was suddenly stopped on one of the principal streets of
Havre, by a dense crowd swaying back and forth across the track. He
said:
I then became aware that two men, tall powerful fellows, were
carrying or rather trying to carry, a young woman seemingly
between sixteen and eighteen years of age, who occupied
herself in violently clutching at everything and anything
from a lamp-post to a shop door handle, a railing, and the
pavement itself.
As a matter of course, her body swayed between the two men,
half dragging on the pavement, her clothing besmeared with mud
and blood. For the rough handling had superadded crimson to
other stains. This proved the case to be not one of accident,
although the screams, shrieks and cries of the poor girl might
well have led to the belief of her having been the victim of
a run over, and of being in convulsions of acute agony. Her
agonizing cries for “pity,” “police,” “protection,” “help,”
“murder,” “Oh! oh! oh!” were reiterated incessantly. At one
particular moment her contortions, and the violence of her
efforts to free herself, or even to bring her head into a more
convenient position than hanging face downward, while a yard
or so of long, bedraggled hair, all loose, was sweeping up the
dirt from the pavement, were so violent that her two carriers
had to let her slip from their grasp on to the flagstones.
All this time, unmoved by, and totally indifferent to her
piercing cries, stood by, or strolled calmly onward with the
crowd, a policeman in uniform and on duty. My enquiry of,
“What is all this piece of work about? Is it an accident? Is
the woman drunk, or what?” He smilingly answered: “Oh! not
drunk, sir, not at all, not at all. It’s only one of those
young licensed girls, who has been trying to escape from her
house, and that’s her master, who has just caught her again,
and is carrying her back to his place. That’s all!”
“I was powerless to help.” In many christian countries a traffic in
girls exists under government protection and license.
Criminal vice chiefly finds its feminine prey among the poorest
and most helpless class who are the victims of this new commercial
business, its customers scattered in every christian land, and
accepting their spoil only upon the certificate of some reputable
physician as to their innocence and previous uncontamination. Crime,
vice, and cruelty, were never before so closely united in one
infamous system; the purchase of young innocence by old iniquity
under protection of law.[73] A bill was introduced into the English
parliament to check this business of girl destruction, accompanied
by proof so direct, and proof of the necessity of immediate action
so great, that it was not doubted that the bill would pass at once.
Yet it encountered secret[74] and powerful opposition, was finally
referred to a committee already so overburdened with work and so far
behindhand that it was manifest that the bill could not be reached in
years. Gilded vice laughed at this result, and the iniquitous business
proceeded as before. At that period the _Pall Mall Gazette_ entered
into an investigation whose results roused the whole civilized world.
Even clergymen, ignoring the fact that christian teaching had brought
this vice into being, joined the press in scathing reproof of patrician
London iniquity.[75] Societies were formed for the protection of young
girls from the vice of men who used the power of wealth and station to
corrupt the daughters of the poor.[76]
Under English christian law it has never been a crime to morally
destroy a girl of thirteen, because under that law she is held
responsible for her own undoing. Girls of this tender age, infants,
in all that pertains to the control of property, incapable of making
a legal contract, because of immaturity of understanding, are yet
held by that law as of age to protect themselves from a seducer; held
to possess sufficient judgment to thwart all the wiles of men old in
years and crime—of men protected in their iniquities by laws of their
own making—men shielded by the legislation of their own sex—men who
escape all punishment because men alone enact the laws. It is not
alone the waifs of society who fall a prey to the seducer, but the
children of reputable parents and good homes are waylaid on their way
to and from school and lured to ruin.[77] To the modern ghoul it is
of no moment upon whom he preys, provided his victim be but young and
innocent. Lecky has portrayed the standard of morals of the present
day as far higher than in pagan Rome, but we must be allowed to doubt
this. Immoral sentiment is more deftly hidden, and law more dependent
upon public opinion. As soon as the general consensus of public opinion
rises in opposition to girl destruction, the law will regulate itself
in accordance with this standard.
Lord Shaftesbury, upon this point, said:
The _Pall Mall Gazette_ has published to the world disclosures
of a most horrible, and many would think of an incredible
character. Not even the questionings of peace or war or most
intricate foreign policy, ought to interfere with energetic
measures to suppress these evils. But before we can make any
great advance, there must be a considerable move of public
opinion. It must be vigorous and determined, and I will tell
you why. You may depend upon it that no government undertakes
a question of a really important and social character until
it has been forced upon it by the voice of public opinion.
Consequently it is our duty to bring the voice of that
public opinion to bear on this question. Law can be evaded
in every possible way. The only thing that defies evasion
is a wide spread and universally extended public opinion. I
hope that we shall be able to create such a public opinion
throughout the country that persons will be induced to come
forward voluntarily and give evidence. The plague spot is too
deep, too wide, and there are too many persons interested in
the continuance of it, to enable us easily to wipe it out.
Uncommon energy will be necessary; and I hope we shall raise
such an amount of popular indignation that the effect will be
irresistable.
But the public feeling, the public indignation against these enormities
did not rise to the height of restrictive legislation. The policy
of a portion both of the English and the American press was that of
suppression, upon the plea that a knowledge of these crimes would be
injurious to the morals of society. Suppression was also the aim of the
“royal princes, dukes, nobles, and leading men,” who were the principal
patrons and supporters of this nefarious system. Suppression is the
strongest opposing weapon against reform. To compel change needs light
and discussion. “It is only when wrongs find a tongue that they become
righted.” Woman, legally powerless in the doing away with abuses, or
the punishment of crime, must depend upon publicity for the creation of
a public sentiment in her favor.
One of the most remarkable facts connected with disclosures of this
crime against womankind was the extent to which men of all ages and
character were found identified with it. The world of business and that
of politics were equally as well known in the haunts of vice as in the
outside world, but they were judged by a different standard and their
relative importance was altogether changed.[78] It was a literal day of
judgment, in which evil character, deftly hidden during public life,
was there unveiled.
The most horribly striking fact connected with this investigation was
the extreme youth of these victims. The report of the committee of the
House of Lords, 1882, declared the evidence proved beyond doubt that
juvenile vice from an almost incredibly early age was increasing at an
appalling extent in England, and especially in London; ten thousand
girls, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years of age, had been drawn
into this vice, an English paper declaring the ignorance of these girls
to be almost incredible. The condition of these girl-children is far
more horrible than that of the victims of infant marriage in Syria,
Egypt, India; the infant victims of christian lands are more fully
destroyed, soon becoming mental, physical and moral wrecks; alternate
imbecility and wild screaming being common among these child victims of
vice.[79]
Christianity created the modern brothel, which as closely follows in
the wake of evangelical work of the Moody and Sankey style, as did
public women the ancient church councils.[80] While in the past the
legal wrongs of woman in the marriage relation, in which she is robbed
of name, personality, earnings, children, had a tendency to drive her
to live with man outside of the authority of church or state, the
occupations recently opened to her whereby she can gain a reputable
livelihood by her own exertions, has greatly increased the ranks of
single women.[81] No longer compelled to marry for a home or position,
the number of young girls who voluntarily refrain from marriage,
by choice living single, increases each year. No longer driven to
immorality for bread, a great diminution has taken place in the ranks
of “public women.”[82] No longer forced by want into this life, the
lessening number of such women not meeting the requirements of patrons
of vice, resulted in the organization of a regular system for the
abduction, imprisonment, sale, and exportation of young girls; England
and Germany most largely controlling this business, although Belgium,
Holland and France, Switzerland, several countries of South America,
Canada, and the United States are to some extent also engaged in this
most infamous traffic.[83]
Foreign traffic in young English girls was known to exist long before
the revelation of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ made English people aware of
the extent of the same system under the home government. It was this
widely extended and thoroughly organized commerce in girl-children
which roused a few people to earnest effort against it, and secured the
formation of a society called “Prevention of Traffic in English Girls.”
To the chairman of this society, Mr. Benjamin Scott, was the first
official suggestion due that terminated in that investigation by Editor
Stead, which for a moment shook the civilized world, and held christian
England to light as a center of the vilest, most odious, most criminal
slave traffic the world ever knew.
London, the great metropolis of christian England, the largest city
of ancient or modern times, is acknowledged by statisticians and
sociologists to be the point where crime, vice, despair, and misery are
found in their deepest depth and greatest diversity. Not Babylon of
old, whose name is the synonym of all that is vile; not Rome, “Mother
of Harlots,” not Corinth, in whose temple a thousand women were kept
for prostitution in service of the god, not the most savage lands in
all their barbarity have ever shown a thousandth part of the human
woe to be found in the city of London, that culmination of modern
christian civilization. The nameless crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, the
vileness of ancient Greece, which garnered its most heroic men, its
most profound philosophers, are but amusements among young men of the
highest rank in England; West End, the home of rank and wealth, of
university education, being the central hell of this extended radius
of vice. The destruction of girl-children by old men is paralleled
by the self-destruction of boys and youth through vices that society
hesitates to name. Yet each is the result of that system of teaching
which declares a woman a being divinely created for the use and sensual
gratification of man.
Having for years tacitly consented to the destruction of the
girl-children of its poor, at the rate of twenty thousand annually,
England was yet greatly shocked to find its boys of tender age and
aristocratic lineage sunken in a mire of immorality. Eton, the highest
institution of its kind in Great Britain, having in charge the
education of boys connected with the most illustrious English families,
recently became the source of a scandal which involved a great number
of students. An extensive secret inquiry resulted in the suspension
of nearly three hundred boys after full confession. Supplied with
unlimited pocket money, they had bribed parkkeepers and the police to
silence.
But a few years previous to these disclosures in reference to Eton,
the civilized world was horrified at the discovery of the vice which
destroyed Sodom, among some of the most wealthy, aristocratic young
men of London. And yet with knowledge of the depravity into which this
most christian city had sunk, the shocking character of the disclosures
of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in reference to the traffic in young girls,
involved details of vice so atrocious as to exceed belief had not the
testimony been of the most convincing character. These mere children
were lured by the most diabolical vices into traps, where by drugs,
force, or cajoling, tens of thousands were brought to moral and
physical ruin, innocent victims of a religious theory which through the
christian ages has trained men into a belief that woman was but created
as a plaything for their passions. That boys of the highest families,
in the earliest years of their adolescence, should voluntarily
associate with those vicious women who form a class created by the
public sentiment of man as necessary to the safety of the feminine
element in households, is not surprising to a philosophic observer. It
was the direct result of an adequate cause. The wrong to woman passed
so silently by, reached its culmination in the destruction of young
boys. At Eton, suspension was tenderness, expulsion from that school
ruining a boy’s future.
Succeeding the revelation of London vice, came divulgence of similar
shameless practices on the part of high government officials and men
foremost in public life, in the Canadian Colonies. In Ottawa and other
Canadian cities in which upon this side of the Atlantic the wholesale
despoliation of young girls but too closely paralleled London and other
trans-Atlantic cities. These were closely followed by the revelations
in regard to the north-western pineries of the United States, to whose
camps women are decoyed, under pretense of good situations and high
wages into a life whose horrors are not equaled in any other part of
the christian world; where the rawhide is used to compel drinking and
dancing, and high stockades, bull-dogs and pistols prevent escape,
until death—happily of quick occurrence—releases the victim. As
elsewhere, men of wealth and high position, law-makers, are identified
with this infamy.[84]
Among the notable facts due to an investigation of prostitution is that
its support largely comes from married men, the “heads of families”;
men of mature years, fathers of sons and daughters. To those seemingly
least exposed to temptation is the sustaining of this vice due. Men
of influence and position no less in this country than in England
frequent disreputable houses. In 1878, the body of a woman buried in
the principal cemetery of Syracuse, N.Y. was exhumed on suspicion
of poison. One of the prominent city dailies said, “she commenced
leading an abandoned life and went to Saratoga where she ran a large
establishment of that character. Her place was the center for men of
influence and position.” A few years since the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage
accompanied by high police officials investigated such houses in
person. In a sermon based upon knowledge there obtained Mr. Talmage
declared those dens of infamy to be supported by married men, chiefly
of the better classes.
He found them to be judges of courts, distinguished lawyers,
officers in churches, political orators that talk on the
Republican, Democratic and Greenback platforms about God and
good morals till you might almost take them for evangelists
expecting a thousand converts in one night. On the night
of our exploration I saw their carriages leaving these
dignitaries at the shambles of death. Call the roll in the
house of dissipation, and if the inmates will answer you
will find stock-brokers from Wall street, large importers on
Broadway, iron merchants, leather merchants, wholesale grocers
and representatives from all the wealthy classes.
But I have something to tell you more astonishing than that
the houses of iniquity are supported by wealthy people
when I tell you that they are supported by the heads of
families—fathers and husbands, with the awful perjury upon
them of broken marriage vows; and while many of them keep
their families on niggardly portions, with hardly enough to
sustain life, have their thousands for the diamonds and the
wardrobe and equipage of iniquity. In the name of high heaven
I cry out against this popular iniquity. Such men must be cast
out from social life and from business relations. If they
will not reform, overboard with them from all decent circles.
I lift one-half the burden of malediction from the un-pitied
head of woman and hurl it upon the blasted pate of offending
man. What society wants is a new division of its anathema.
Without the support of the heads of families, in one month
the most of the haunts of sin in New York, Philadelphia and
Boston, would crumble into ruin.
That one-half of the children born into the world die before maturity,
is acknowledged. Physiologists and philanthropists seek for the cause
except where most likely to be found. To that mysterious interchange
of germs and life principles, whose chemistry is still not understood,
must we look for aid in solving this great problem. These questions
woman is forced to consider; their investigation belong to her by
right, as she and her children are the chief victims. She can no longer
close her lips in silence, saying it does not concern me. No longer
does the modern woman allow her husband to think for her; she is
breaking from church bonds, from the laws of men alone, from all the
restrictions the state has pressed upon her; she is no longer looking
without, for guidance, but is heeding the commands of her own soul.
With such facts before us, we are not surprised that women are found
who prefer the freedom and private respect accorded to a mistress,
rather than the restrictions and tyranny of the marital household. Mr.
Talmage but followed in the footsteps of Anna Dickinson, who took upon
herself an acquaintance with this class of women. Asking one woman
living as mistress why she did not marry, the girl contemptuously
ejaculated:
Marry! umph! I too well know what my mother suffered in the
married state. She was my father’s slave, cruelly treated,
subject to all manner of abuse, neglected, halfstarved, all
her appeals and protests unheeded. How is it with me? I am
free. I have all the money I want to use, a thing my mother
never had. I come and go as I please, something my mother
could never do. I am well treated, my mother was not. Should I
be abused there is no law to hold me, no court to sit upon my
right to my own child as there was with my mother. No, no, no,
I am infinitely better off as a mistress than as a wife.