The worst effects of drunkenness are, perhaps, after all, its indirect
ones. It is a sad sight to see man stricken down in his prime, and woman
in her beauty; to see individuals' hopes and prospects blighted; to see
in that carcase staggering by the utter wreck and ruin of an immortal
soul. But this is but a small portion of the damage done to humanity by
the ravages of intemperance. Look at our great social evil. I need not
name it. No one who walks the streets of London by night requires to be
informed what that is. Has drink nothing to do with it? Ask that
unfortunate, who has just commenced her evening's walk. She will tell
you that when she parted with her innocence she had previously been
drugged with drink; that if it were not for drink she could not pursue
her unhallowed career; that her victims are stimulated by drink; and that
without the gin-palace or the public-house she and such as she could not
exist. I do not now speak of the worst forms of prostitution, of the
gin-palaces in the East frequented by drunken sailors, where women are
kept as a source of attraction and revenue; but of the better classes, of
the dashing women who are supplied with expensive dresses by respectable
Oxford-street tradesmen in the expectation of being paid by some rich
victim; the women whom you meet dressed so gay in Regent-street or
Portland-place.
Once upon a time there was a rascally old nobleman who lived in a big
house in Piccadilly. Mr. Raikes describes him as "a little sharp-looking
man, very irritable, and swore like 10,000 troopers, enormously rich, and
very selfish." He sat all day long at a low window, leering at beauty as
it passed by, and under his window was a groom waiting on horseback to
carry his messages to any one whom he remarked in the street. If one did
not know that we lived in a highly moral age, one would fancy many such
old noblemen lived in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, for in the
streets leading thence, and reaching as far back as Tottenham-court-road,
we have an immense female population, all existing and centred there, who
live by vicious means--all with the common feeling of their sex rooted
out and destroyed; all intended by nature to diffuse happiness around;
all a curse on all with whom they have to do. In this small circle,
there is enough vicious leaven to leaven all London. It is impossible to
get a true estimate of their number. Guesses of all kinds have been
made, but none are exactly to be depended on. In a great capital like
ours, where wealthy sensualists can and do pay enormous sums for the
gratification of their whims--(I have seen it stated that on one occasion
a gentleman went into a house in Norton-street with a 500 pounds
bank-note, and after staying a few hours received but 20 pounds
change)--it is not alone the professedly vicious--the class whom we call
prostitutes--who prostitute themselves. As fine shops are pointed out in
fashionable streets, which are said to be houses of the most infamous
description, in spite of the display of lace and millinery in the window,
so there are thousands of women, supposed to be respectable, and to live
in a respectable manner, who yet are to all intents and purposes
prostitutes, though they would not be classified as such. Now the number
of this latter class is much exaggerated. Towards the close of the last
century, when the population of London amounted to about a million, Dr.
Colquhoun, magistrate of the Thames Police, asserted the number of
prostitutes to be at least 50,000. If prostitution has followed the same
ratio of increase as the population, the number now must be considered as
truly appalling. But evidently the Doctor's estimate is exaggerated. At
a period much nearer to our own, Mr. Chadwick puts down the number,
excluding the City, at 7,000; Mr. Mayne, at from 8,000 to 10,000. The
City Police estimates the number at 8,000, and this estimate is supported
by Dr. Ryan, and Mr. Talbot, secretary to the Association formed in
London for the protection of young girls. This is a very high figure;
but a recent French writer tells us that in London, in the higher ranks
of life, the proportion of vicious women to virtuous are as one to three!
and in the lower ranks virtue does not exist at all!!! At any rate,
there is reason to believe that in London there are 5,000 infamous
houses. If besides we reckon up the procuresses, the keepers of low
gin-palaces and beer-shops, where women are the bait, we are lost and
bewildered, and dare not trust ourselves to give in numbers any idea of
the persons directly and indirectly connected with prostitution, or of
the sum spent annually in London on that vice alone. And all this is
carried on in the most methodical way. There are men and women whose
constant employment is to search all parts of the metropolis for fresh
victims; and to them young girls from the country and servant
maids-of-all-work are easy prey. Then letters are written and sent to
the clubs and to the patrons of such infamy, and they are furnished with
all the particulars, and the price of the victim's willing or unwilling
seduction and shame. This state of things is progressive. Last year the
returns of the City missionaries show an increase in their districts of
fallen women to the number of 1,035. Of course it is only with the dregs
that the City missionary comes in contact. While a woman preserves her
health, and youth, and good looks, she lives in better quarters than
those into which the City missionary generally finds his way. For a time
she is gay; she dresses fine, spends money freely, drinks, and sings, and
then prematurely becomes old, and sad, and poor.
Is this ever to be so? Is woman always to sell herself to man? And is
man to dream that the smile thus bought is no lie, but a precious truth?
I don't suppose that if men were temperate universal chastity would be
the result; but that we should have less immorality is, I think, an
admitted fact. Why are women, prostitutes? Chiefly, we are told,
because of poverty; and of all causes of poverty, is not intemperance the
greatest? Would you see how one vice is connected with another? Come up
Portland-place at night. True, there are no public-houses here, but they
are plentiful enough in the neighbourhood; and in them all night the men
and painted women from Portland-place madden themselves with drink. Yes,
here are the women that should have been British wives and mothers
utterly perverted, and dragging down with them many a heart that might
have emerged into a noble life. Lust and intemperance have slain them.
"Lost, lost, lost for ever!" is the cry that greets us as we look at
them.
An association has been formed in this neighbourhood to wipe away this
plague spot. In their report, the committee state, when the movement
commenced, which issued in the establishment of the association at the
close of 1857, the condition of the districts (All Souls and Trinity),
comprising the streets lying immediately to the eastward of
Portland-place, was perfectly appalling. It was then calculated that in
those streets there were not less than 140 notorious houses of ill-fame,
containing from six to ten fallen women each, which fearful array of
prostitution was swelled by a large number of young women, lodging in the
districts, who were known to be gaining their livelihood nominally by
working for shops, but principally by the means of night prostitution.
One natural result of this dense aggregation of depravity in a narrow
spot was the front of insolent and shameless defiance which vice had put
on. Indecent exhibitions in broad day from the windows of these houses,
utterances the most revolting, that startled and shocked the ear of the
passenger who had unwarily penetrated these haunts of infamy, together
with the outrageous conduct of the unhappy children of shame, who even
before the shades of night had fallen were wont to come forth in hundreds
upon the pavements of Portland-place and Regent-street, seemed to
indicate a determination that no vestige of respectability should be
suffered to linger in a neighbourhood which not thirty years before was
as pure and as much resorted to as any of the most favoured districts of
western London. The keepers of these houses were many of them
foreigners; some were known to the police as determined forgers,
gamblers, and thieves. Others, indeed the principal part, were females
grown old in the path of depravity, in whose bosom every spark of womanly
tenderness had become quenched; who could treat, indeed, with a show of
kindness the unhappy girls they had enticed to their doors, so long as
they were able to satisfy their exorbitant demands, but who did not
hesitate to cast them out into a deeper degradation, or utter
destitution, the moment a decay of their attractions or ill health had
disabled them from paying the extravagant charges for their hired rooms
and dresses. Riotous and brutal outrages were constantly taking place in
these houses, and evidence that crimes of violence and sensuality of the
darkest type had been enacted in them came to light. It was, moreover,
ascertained that among those wretched traders in sin were those who had
embarked in a still more repulsive branch of their guilty trade, and were
making large gains by turning their houses into receptacles for young
unfallen girls imported from abroad, who were sold over from time to time
to the neighbouring brothel keepers. Such was the awful moral pestilence
which, up to that time, was raging unchecked, and year by year it was
rapidly enlarging the area of its ravages.
At the meeting held to receive this report, the Rev. Mr. Garnier stated
that "he visited himself a house in Norton-street, where in one room he
saw a seat placed around so as to hold as many of the poor creatures as
possible on a day that was appointed for brothel keepers, to attend and
bid for their purchase (hear, and much sensation). The unfortunate girls
thus disposed of were brought from abroad, and while connected with the
House of Commons he had the best evidence of this, for noblemen and
members of parliament showed letters they continually received soliciting
them to partake of the depravity (much sensation). The letters spoke of
a beautiful girl just imported from Belgium or France, and the nobleman
or gentleman, whichever he might be, was asked to visit her, as she was
at his service. In one case a letter was received from the rectory
district of that parish (Marylebone), in which it was stated that a girl
at a certain address was ready to be given up to lust to the highest
bidder. These letters were addressed to the Speaker as well as the
members of the House of Commons, and this, together with the spectacle he
(the Rev. gentleman) witnessed in Norton-street, was, he considered, very
good evidence of the abominable traffic that was carried on in this
country.
"The Rev. Mr. Marks said, within the last fifteen months he was called to
visit three Jewesses, painful as the duty was, and this visit was made in
the Rev. Mr. Garnier's district. These three girls had been imported for
the purposes of prostitution (hear, hear). In one case alone he was
enabled to take the poor creature from the abominable vice that
threatened her, and sent her home; and he nearly succeeded with another,
but with regret--aye, deep regret, he said so--he was prevented. A sum
of 200 pounds had been offered to retain the girl, and this sum was
offered by the brother of an M.P."
The discussion of the delicate question, as the _Times_ terms it, has
lately received new light in an unexpected quarter. The victims
themselves have taken to writing. "Another Unfortunate" describes her
parents. They were drunkards--their chief expense was gin--their
children were left to grow up without moral training of any kind. The
writer says:--"We heard nothing of religion. Sometimes when a neighbour
died we went to the burial, and thus got within a few steps of the
church. If a grand funeral chanced to fall in our way we went to see
that, too--the fine black horses and nodding plumes--as we went to see
the soldiers when we could for a lark. No parson ever came near us. The
place where we lived was too dirty for nicely-shod gentlemen. 'The
publicans and sinners' of our circumscribed, but thickly-populated
locality had no 'friend' among them. Our neighbourhood furnished many
subjects to the treadmill, the hulks, and the colonies, and some to the
gallows. We lived with the fear of these things, and not with the fear
of God before our eyes." From such a training could we expect otherwise?
The writer asks what business has society to persecute such as she: a
corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit; the unfortunate is the fruit,
and society is the tree.
It is in vain that we reclaim the women. The only remedy--the only way
to put down the social evil--is to reclaim the men.