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I WISH it to be understood that the following words are written
on my sole responsibility; the fact of my writing them being unknown to any
Association to which I belong, and even to my most intimate friends.
We are once more,--as in 1869 and the following years, -- face
to face with a powerful body of persons desiring the adoption in our midst
of the regulation of immorality by the State. By the force of
circumstances, or I would rather say, by the Providence of God, my name
(unworthy as it may be) came, after years of arduous work, to be placed at
the front of this special movement on behalf of justice. I have,
therefore, a solemn responsibility pressing upon me at this time. In the
midst of the "strife of tongues" on this question, in the
Press, and in official quarters, and hearing in the midst of that strife
the voices of some of whom we had hoped better things, raised in unison
with those which advocate a "legislation of despair," I feel I
have a word to say, and I must say it.
In doing so, I can with absolute truth declare that I harbour no feeling
of bitterness in my heart against any living being; neither against any who
have turned back from the straight path, nor against our most violent
opponents. I judge with gentleness those of my fellow women who are now
using their influence against the just and holy cause for which I have
spent my life. Our warfare has never been against persons, but against
vicious principles, against widely promulgated falsehoods, while we have
only withstood or done battle with individuals when they became the
exponents or incarnation of the base theories and principles which we
oppose.
But while judging my opponents with gentleness, I will be true to Him
whom I serve. In my opposition to false principles, to official and
society lies (the blackest of all lies), to
the injustice, the brutal egotism, the intrigues, the unworthy tricks, devices, and deceits to which these false principles lend themselves, I will continue to be stern and uncompromising; for my hatred of these vicious principles, these official and society lies continues to be as "strong as death," as "cruel as the grave."
For, while in a war of flesh and blood, mercy may intervene, a truce may
be called, and life may be spared, principles know not the name of
mercy.
In a conflict of principles which are severed from each other as far as
heaven from hell there can be no truce; it is war to the death, until one
side or the other is victorious.
And we know well on which side the victory will be. Though for a time
the advocates of an evil cause--numerous, rich and in high
positions--may seem to be victorious; though we may suffer a temporary
defeat, that will be no means be the end. For "the battle is not
ours; it is the Lord's."
Though for the moment we may be reduced in numbers, an apparently
diminishing host, yet Gideon's three hundred will do what
Gideon's thirty-two thousand and three hundred could not
do.
This confidence of ultimate victory, based on a foundation which cannot
be shaken, enables us to regard with composure the forward advance and
claims of materialism and fleshly indulgence, and to compassionate
those--furious against us to-day--who will be beaten
to-morrow, and who will be forced, before the "great cloud of
witnesses" in heaven and earth, to confess themselves defeated and
deserving of defeat.
A certain great reformer, recording how the Kings and Princes and great
ones of the earth were laying their heads together and marshalling their
forces against truth, said: "Then came the Lord God and asked,
'How many do they reckon me?'" Ah, yes, how
many does God count for? The high officials, military and naval chiefs,
and medical experts have probably not considered this.
The conflict in which we are engaged is only a part of the great
conflict between good and evil which is going on and becoming intensified
throughout the earth, and our part of the conflict is not the least
important part; it is vital, its roots are deep, its influence is as wide
as the world. What more vital, next to our relations with God, than our
relations--men and women--with each other? A direct
compromise with vice on the part of the State or any public authority
strikes at the root of those relationships, at family life, at respect for
womanhood, at all true manliness in man.
As a veteran in the abolitionist war, with an experience of thirty years
of the regulation system in various countries of Europe, I do not hesitate
to call it a masterpiece of Satan. I have looked closely into its working,
in all its phases, and I have witnessed its baneful effects on family life,
on the young, on students, on schoolboys, on women of the poorer classes,
and on the population generally in those cities of Europe where it has been
established for several years.
Julie V. Daubié, authoress of "Le femme pauvre du XIXme
Siècle," wrote to me from Paris in the years when we first
demanded the repeal of the Contagious Disease
Acts:--"Beware of imitating official France in this
matter. This law has so infamous a character as the protector of the
disorders of men, that the contempt which exists among us for the executive
authority can only be attributed to the disgust which every honest man
feels for every police functionary engaged in this business. You have the
inexpressible happiness of having a moral Government, responsible
functionaries, and a Queen who is the model of every virtue of public and
private life. Supplicate that honourable and single-hearted woman
to take in hand the cause of human dignity and of virtue, and obtain from
the wisdom of your Parliament a solemn affirmation of the authority of
reason over subversive passions. Truly, if you cannot withdraw your women
from the power of those police who drive them like cattle in the service of
debauchery, you may abandon all hope for the general elevation of your
women in England."
A correspondent wrote to me about the same time from Milan (the
regulation of vice having been introduced into Italy by Count Cavour),
"The moral effect of this institution on the general population is
fatal. The regulations imposed by the authorities on vice are a legal
sanction, slightly cloaked, in the eyes, not only of the populace but of
educated people. In fact, fathers themselves introduce their
grown-up sons to the State-guaranteed houses of infamy,
looking upon them as safeguards from imprudent marriages. Legal sanction
produces public shamelessness. Not to speak of the bitter hardships, the
violence and slavery to which the miserable women under this State control
are subjected, the young men who come in contact with them lose all
generous feeling, and, corrupted before they are full grown, they acquire
the skepticism which withers the hearts and falsifies the conscience. The
number of State victims to vice grows every day to excess, and
marriage becomes always rarer."
Warnings similar to these have continued for many years past to be
poured in upon us by the most thoughtful and the most experienced men and
women of the Continent, and not least, from medical experts and
high-class police functionaries who have themselves worked the
system and found it a disastrous failure from their own point of view. And
yet there are Englishmen and Englishwomen, well meaning, and one would
suppose, well educated, who are craving that Imperial England should be
permitted to clothe herself with the cast-off rags of a
worn-out and disgusting system which other nations are desiring to
get rid of, but desiring it too late to get rid of the moral corruption and
the falsification of public conscience which it engenders.
In our first campaign, for many years, I was able to speak fearlessly as
the exponent of the mind of women, generally, throughout the world, and I
met with no contradiction in doing so, nor have I up to this moment met
with any open contradiction on the Continent of Europe, to the statement
that speaking generally, women were solidaire
on this question. My own countrywomen have been the first in the world to
set their seal to the infernal doctrine of the necessity of vice, and to
proffer to our Imperial Government before the whole world, what Lady
Frederick Cavendish rightly styles their "counsels of
despair."
The scene has changed indeed; we accept the fact, and look it full in
the face.
For my own part, I do so without alarm of our cause, and scarcely even
with surprise, although my heart is wounded with a sense of shame, and I
mourn for those whose eyes are blinded to the truth.
When the Memorial to Government, in favour of the State organization of
sexual vice, signed by Princesses, Peeresses and others, was first
published, certain of my fellow workers--women --represented to
me that it might be well, on our part, to abstain from any action tending
to make the immense breach so created in the ranks of womanhood more
pro-
nounced or apparent. It was hoped that many of these ladies might come to see their error, and that it would be very sad, by making much of this division among us, to show to the world that women no longer present a united front in a question as vital as this. "Let us not display our wounds more than necessary," it was pleaded.
Appreciating the natural tenderness which prompted this advice, I felt
it to involve a grave error.
There are occasions in which silence is best concerning differences of
opinion in any Association, when those differences turn on mere
personalities, or forms or procedures, and when the wounds are only surface
wounds.
But when, on such a question of life and death as this is before us,
womanhood which before seemed solidaire, is
not merely wounded, but is literally cut in two, so to speak; when an abyss
now separates the one company of women from the other, it is no time for
silence, or for futile attempts to cover up wounds. We cannot, without the
constant living of a lie, pretend that we are now a united womanhood. Our
cause will receive deeper wounds than it has ever received yet if we
attempt to minimize or gloss over the hideous fact that women, ladies of
high estate and honourable names, have publicly petitioned for the
re-establishment in a portion of the British Empire of the
masterpiece of Satan--that "covenant with death and agreement
with hell" which a little knowledge of the human heart, and of the
history of other countries than their own, a little of the Divine light in
the conscience, a little independence of judgment and reliance on their own
better instincts as women, would have shown them is the expression of an
open revolt against the ethics and teaching of Christ.
In my inmost heart, however, I find some excuse for those ladies
individually who have petitioned Government for the re-enactment of
the vice regulations. Probably many of them had no knowledge of the
subject till very recently. In the absence of that knowledge they might
without difficulty be worked upon and talked over by certain high officials
and their own male relatives, who are favourable to the regulations.
Alarming pictures of physical danger to the whole nation, were, no doubt,
presented to them, while the moral aspect of the question was obscured.
Men and women alike in the most exalted social classes frequently
possess extraordinarily little knowledge of the conditions of life among
the poor, and consequently little sympathy with humbler people who are the
most liable to suffer under grievances imposed officially, over and above
the hardships incidental to their condition. High rank itself tends to confuse and obscure the mental vision on a subject concerning which, of all others, we need to know the instincts and convictions of the people, and to make room for the expression of the great heart of toiling and suffering humanity, which still so largely beats true among us, and in all lands.
No doubt there was a bitter regret among us when we first saw the
petition of the Ladies in favour of vice organization. But we have had a
severe discipline through long years past, which, while it has made our
hearts still more tender over the weak, oppressed and misguided, has made
them stronger than the hearts of lions in defence of the truth. We can be
firm in its defence, if need be, against former friends and allies, and
even when put to the test foretold by Christ, when a "man's
foes should be those of his own household."
It is my desire to record in the strongest manner my protest against any
temporizing, against any alliance in action or speech, on this
question, with those women who have openly joined the ranks of the
Regulationists, and against every shadow of compromise, or any weak
complacency which might be pleaded as likely to withdraw some of these
women from their present position, and induce them to repudiate their
utterance.
I do not, and could not, counsel any slackening of the bonds of
friendship, or abandonment of social intercourse with those who have so
fatally erred in judgement. It may be that some them will come to see the
question in its true light. But no weakness, no leaning towards their
present position, no tolerance shown for the false principles they now
defend will help to being about that result. There never was a time when
the necessity was greater than at present, to place personal feelings
second to principle.
The character of Christ is more frequently represented to us by
Christian teachers in its gentleness and meekness, than in its
uncompromising sternness and severity, which is nevertheless the severity
of Love. When one of his disciples in an evil moment uttered a sentiment
which was wholly false, and of the world, the Master turned and uttered
that scathing rebuke:--"Get thee behind me, Satan!"
In the presence of the bystanders and the other disciples, he called Peter
by the name of the Spirit of enmity against God which for the moment
possessed him. It must have cost the Master--the human
Christ--something to rebuke his friend thus; but only by the extreme
severity of his rebuke could the consciousness of the falseness of his
utterance be brought home to that disciple and to those around him. Yet the Master loved that disciple while he rebuked him, and the disciple, repentant, continued to be his faithful follower.
It is not easy to imitate the sternness of Christ in dealing with
friends. But these are days in which we must be stern; otherwise we shall
float away helplessly down the stream of the world's opinion,
accepting the verdict of Society, be it true or false, in all matters, even
the most vital.
The teaching of purity of heart and life is most precious; it is
indispensable. The work of purity teachers is an educational work,
beginning in the nursery, and carried on through the school, the college,
the apprentice life, to mature manhood. This holy, educational work lies
at the very root of our hopes for the future of manhood and womanhood and
for the stability of the commonwealth. May God send us myriads of true
purity workers in this sense, with enlarged strong, true, and enlightened
views of the relations of the sexes and of the requirements of the laws of
God for all alike!
Such purity work then underlies, and is closely allied with, our special
work, but it by no means adequately expresses all that that work is.
It may surprise or shock some who read these lines that I should say
(yet I must say it) Beware of "purity workers" as allies
in our warfare! Beware of "purity societies" which seek
affiliation with our society!
Truth before everything. It behoves me to speak truly, if I am driven
even to speak harshly.
A long experience has confirmed the need of this warning. Interruptions
to our work, difficulties innumerable, even disasters have occurred in our
crusade owing to too great a trustfulness in every one calling himself or
herself a purity worker, and to too great a readiness to admit Societies
calling themselves by that name into close alliance with us. We have
learned that it is not unusual for men and women to discourse eloquently in
public on the subject of personal, domestic, and social purity, of the
home, of conjugal life, of
the dignity of womanhood, of the duties of parents, and yet to be ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of certain classes of their fellow creatures, in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force, and in so doing that you may in some way promote social purity.
We have learned and learning many severe lessons. One of these lessons
is never to covet the adhesion to our cause of distinguished and
influential persons, or persons bearing great names,--never to invite
their co-operation as members of our League until their clearness of
conviction on the central principles we defend has been fully proved, and
gives assurance that they can stand the inevitable, crucial tests of these
latter days. I could cite instances where much time and much power have
been sacrificed to the desire to place the name of some social star or
political leader on the list of our adherents. The French "Society
of Public Morality" desired to place the name on its committee of a
distinguished Senator who makes war in all sincerity against impure
literature, and advocates several reforms in favour of social purity, but
who is found, in spite of that good work of his, to be an ardent and
determined supporter of the most complete form of the State organization of
vice. What follows? Confusion, division and weakness in the Abolitionist
camp.
But "how is it possible," I hear it asked, "that
purity workers should ever range themselves on the side of the State
organization of a hideous vice"?
I wish, with all my heart, that those who ask this question would
continue to ask it, sincerely and with full purpose of heart, until they
have found the answer. For in the answer to that question will be found
the root and the reason for the astonishing lapse of a large section of the
citizens of "free England" into a belief in material and
mechanical remedies for moral evils, and into an acceptance of
inevitably degrading and cruel methods in the application of these
remedies. The discovery of the true answer to the above question might
bring some hope of the recognition of the seriousness of this lapse and of
a return to moral sanity.
this--that our race is suffering from a species of moral atrophy,-- from a fatal paralysis of the sense of justice. Many literally do not know what justice is. The spiritual sense to perceive it is dead. They can no more perceive its presence or absence than a blind man can perceive the presence or absence before him of a house or a tree. The recognition of the principles which have made England what she is, which have given her any claim to be called great, seems to be all but lost.
I have ever maintained that the principles which underlie all just
law--respect for the human person, for the personal rights of all, for
the claim to liberty of all who are not legally judged and condemned as
criminals, for the equality of all--rich and poor, man and
woman--before the law, are principles which have a divine origin.
They are based on the teachings of Christ. Our nation became great among
the nations through respect for these principles and through belief in the
source whence they are derived. When they were violated in the past by
Sovereigns, Parliaments,or Ministers, those violations were followed
sometimes by swift retribution, sometimes they were avenged after prolonged
conflict and suffering even to death of their stern and worthy
upholders.
Will our nation ever recover from this paralysis of the sense of
justice? It may do so, but only "through great
tribulation."
It must be acknowledged that this loss of respect for these high
principles and of moral faith, this belief in and appeal to material forces
for the moralizing of the people prevails chiefly among the more privileged
classes. The poor are reminded of what justice is, too often, by its
absence. I have generally found among the patient, laborious, and
especially the religious poor, a feeling of disgust and weariness
of the injustice and inequality of judgement in the world. Unlearned as
they may be, their actual experience is a species of education which
induces a sentiment which is not one of mere resentment. It is a mournful
impression of the lost moral balance of the world, and a consciousness that
justice is not the all-prevailing principle of action in legislation
or in any of the affairs of this world.
Justice, Justice, is what we, with them, desire. Our hearts cry out for
Justice; our souls are athirst for Justice. Like the Hebrew prophet we are
sometimes constrained to exclaim,"Justice has fallen in the
street." I do not speak of miscarriages of justice in our law
courts; our Judges rank high among administrators of justice. I refer to
the general
tone of Society, among men and women alike, and to a widespread neglect or contempt of principles of equity in regard, to classes of persons whose interests it is easy to set aside.
Therefore, so far from regretting, I hail with hope the present renewal
of the struggle (in the sphere of government superintendence of vice)
between material force and moral. It will prove our Nation. It will sift,
and test what yet remains of moral faith.
From a great number of letters which I have received at different times
from representative and respected men of the working classes, I make the
following quotations. (I have the original letters before me from which the
quotations are taken, and many more which can be seen by anyone who desires
to see them):--
"These gentlemen who make such a noise about the necessity of
prostitution too often forget, I think, that, in order to satisfy that
necessity, the dishonour of the daughters of the people is
indispensable for till now
none of the worshippers of these medical theories have been found ready to declare their willingness that their own daughters should be so sacrificed to satisfy that necessity. Instead of this, we find that gentlemen have employed every method of seduction that the mind of man or devil could invent to drag poor girls of our class into the mud, at an age when, to those who know the art,their corruption was an easy task."
"Tell these gentlemen that we workmen know what is
lawful and what is unlawful, what is moral and what is immoral, better than
they do. We answer them that God and conscience existed before their
science, and that if their knowledge produces such fruit, the sooner they
forget it the better it will be for their own souls and the souls of those
whom they wish to influence. We poor devils who are constrained to labour
twelve, or even fourteen, hours a day, know too well that food is indeed a
necessity; but so long as we have hands to work with, we shall never forget
that it is a duty to satisfy even that necessity
lawfully."
Another writes from Newcastle-on-Tyne:--
"The men who invented these detestable laws have refined upon
the brutality and wickedness that have always been in the world. The
effect of such wholesale violation and degradation of women, for such a
purpose, and with such machinery, and such expenses, can only have the
result of flooding the community with immorality, wherever it is set up.
It appears to me that men in high places now wish to persuade working men
that they ought not to marry and have children, but live in fornication and
selfishness. Woe worth the day when England becomes fully leavened with so
horrible a doctrine."
The following is from a leading working man in Birmingham:--
"I am quite aware that the opinions of my own class in
political matters have not yet received their due weight; but we cannot be
indifferent in matters of this description, so immediately affecting the
liberty, the social relationship of our sisters and daughters, and so
surely, although it may be in an indirect manner, sapping and weakening our
whole social system. We claim a right to speak, to approve or
condemn, according to the light and the reason within us. And if our
protest on the present question should still be disregarded, our faith and
hope that we shall yet be heard and felt as a power in the State, is
sufficiently strong that we do not despair."
The following is from Leeds, the writer having heard of the support
given by a certain number of clergy to the vice-protecting
Acts:--
"Permit me to say (I cannot help saying it), if those rev.
gentlemen who support these vile Acts are going to that 'better
land' of which they preach, my earnest and sincere prayer will ever
be, that I may not go where they are."
A representative working man from Cumberland wrote:--
"I may say, with all due humility, that I have had ample means
of judging of the feelings of the working classes, having risen from a
labouring man to my present position, and I can assure you nothing ever
called forth so powerfully the latent minds of the masses as the
introduction of this law. They abhor it."
From Edinburgh:--
"Both for myself and many other working men I can honestly say
that it is with mingled feelings of indignation and shame I hear that these
Acts are again thought of. To think that the Legislators of this highly
civilized, this enlightened country, should pass laws which make even the
French blush, is too much for the men of the North at any
rate."
I am aware that the sentiments quoted above will be regarded by many
with feelings of contempt. Nevertheless they are representative, and there
is no doubt that men and women of the working classes see more straight to
the heart of certain questions than do military, medical, or Government
experts.
A word of warning is not out of season here to you, gentlemen and
ladies, who fear the growing ascendancy of the people. You dread
Socialism; but what can be more calculated to stimulate the revolted
feelings of the masses than a persistence on your part in promoting
measures which are oppressive to their own class? What more dreadful form
of anarchy can there be than that which devotes numbers of the daughters of
the poor to a system of enslavement and degradation for the basest service
of the Imperial troops? It is a ghastly caricature of the Socialism you
dread.
The scheme of Restif de la Bretonne has been republished this year
(1897), the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, in the Times of
April 21st, under the signature of a distinguished
___________________* Evidence before the Royal
Commission, 1871 (Q. 15, 129).
Page 13
lady, whose advice on the subject appears to have been sought by members of the Government. I prefer, however, to speak of it as the work of Restif de la Bretonne, and to drop the name of the distinguished lady in connection with these cynical propositions made during the dark times of the French Revolution. The following is the text of the condensed English version of Restif de la Bretonne, which appeared in the Times:--
Is it possible that anyone with any knowledge of human nature can
imagine that men (leaving out of account women who being weaker are more
easily coerced and enslaved) will ever be got to render obedience to a
regulation so indecent as this? For my part, I can scarcely imagine anyone
to have so low an opinion of human beings as the promoters of such a system
must have. I have seen something of the worst side of humanity. I have
encountered men who were more demons than men. I have been forced to
fathom the depths of human corruption; yet, I thank God, my faith is strong
as ever in the recoverability of the most abject of human beings, and in
the spark of divine light which lingers even in those who are generally
believed to be helpless. I refuse to believe that our poor young soldiers
in India at the age of from 18 to 25 have reached such a depth of
degradation as to accept or to cease to revolt against such rules as the
above, and that it will ever be possible to drill them in debauchery so
perfectly as to induce them to practice it with the order and precision
with which they might attend a concert or a lecture, having their names
entered, with the date, the circumstances, the number of the room
visited,etc.. None but the coarsest, the most stupidly
animal and shameless of the men would consent to perform their acts of impurity thus openly, under the eyes of the military police and the whole camp. But there would not be less vice, for the very publicity and shamelessness thus prescribed and enforced would themselves reproduce, in a great degree than ever before, that terror, that Giant Despair of all regulationists--"illicit prostitution," the "consorting with unlicensed women," which defeats all the sanitary efforts of the organizers of vice.
This result in the past is confirmed by many official papers. The
latest among those written while the Cantonment Regulations were in full
force, confirms the fact that the soldiers preferred to consort with women
who evaded the regulations. "The Thirteenth Annual
Report of the working of the Lock Hospitals of the North-West
Provinces and Oudh, for the year ending 31st December, 1886,"
contains reports from 14 districts or cantonments. Twelve complain of the
men's consorting with unlicensed prostitutes, while the report
indirectly places the difficulty in the strongest light by pointing out the
necessity of insuring that"attractive women are kept in the
regimental chakla" or brothel. The
following is an extract from the Report from Fyzabad, which more fully
supports the same view. "The police are said to be constantly on the
alert to apprehend any unlicensed prostitute found within five miles of
cantonments, and the regimental police patrol the city to prevent soldiers
straying into the houses of unregistered city prostitutes. Yet unlicensed
prostitution goes on as before." From this it is evident that the
policy afterwards adopted by the Indian Government of seeking to provide
"younger and better-looking women" was only the natural
attempt to remedy the defect, in this drastic system, which was at once a
cause and a proof of its failure. For the officials in these reports all
uniformly attribute the increase of disease to the men's consorting
with "unlicensed"women.
This refusal on the part of men to accept the thing provided for them by
Government (the thing superintended, medicated, its womanhood
stamped out of it, no longer a woman, but a chattel), is in fact a
redeeming feature in the character of the wretched, immoral soldier; it
indicates a spark of something above the mere animal. It is a protest
against being classed as wholly dehumanized and brutal. It is a
secret rebellion of the human will in favour of some liberty of choice, a
desire for the semblance, miserable as that semblance may be, of a little
romance or adventure, a little of the seeking, courting
and winning, which in the eyes of the young man is more agreeable and less degrading than the mechanically ordered practice of fornication prescribed by military officials and the State. To persons whose moral sense is not wholly blighted by complicity in this degrading system, it is touching to note (even in this particular) how poor human nature continually "struggles against its own final destruction,and for the retention of some remnant or rag of human dignity."
Yet while evasion of regulation on the part of men and women alike will
continue, as it has ever done, to defeat the hopes of the promoters of this
accursed system on the hygienic side, the State by assuming this guilty
attitude towards vice, exercises a fatal and far-reaching influence
on the public conscience. While on the one hand men will evade the State
rules, they will yet see the State daily inviting them, by its organized
machinery for vice, to unrestrained indulgence. There stands within the
Indian Cantonment, together with the place of worship to which the troops
are marched once a week, the Chakla, the
maison tolerée of France, the
Lupanar of the Romans, the house of
debauchery, the place which is called in Scripture "an open
sepulchre, resting upon the tomb";"and you wish," says M.
Ed. de Pressensé, "that the State should hold the key to that
chamber of death, that the State should be the door-keeper to admit
to it our youthful citizens"! The same weighty writer says:
"your measures of protection are useless. How could it be otherwise?
You wish to regulate vice, but it is of the essence of vice to refuse to be
regulated. It is itself an irregularity. It violates all moral laws, you
may expect it to transgress human rules. It is like a torrent which has
overflowed its banks. It mocks all your regulations. You will never
succeed in making disorderly passions well ordered in their
gratification."
And the Ladies' Memorial speaks of this system as promoting the
redemption of the women who are subjected to it. Would that they had once
witnessed its effect on these poor slaves, or that they had the imagination
to realize it!
The promoters and the opponents of this system of moral torture alike
testify to its destructive effects on the helpless women. Of the former,
is M. Alphonse Equiros, who says that when once the woman has entered the
State regulated house of vice"she bid adieu to heaven, to liberty, to
honour, and to the power to repent." Dr. Hippolyte Mireur, of
Marseilles, himself a worker in it, describes the "system which
regularizes the sorrowful industry of the prostitute" as "the
sinister stroke by which the woman is
cut off from society, after which, she ceases to belong to herself and becomes the mere thing (chose) of the administration."
M. Ed. De Pressensé, a strong opponent of legalised vice speaks
thus: "Let us look at the situation of the woman whom the
Governments have submitted to a regulations which is a complete and abject
slavery. She deserves nothing but contempt, you say! She is invariably as
morally perverse as you assert that she is! What is your part in the
matter? You engulf her further; you thrust her down lower; you throw on
her the last shovelful of earth to hurl her to the abyss; you roll upon her
the stone which cannot be removed except by superhuman effort. 'Oh!
you have fallen, unfortunate creature, you say; well, we will complete the
work, we will consummate your degradation; that which is already soiled
shall be made still more vile.' This is logic, but it is the
logic of demons!" And this is the system which you, honourable
ladies, Princesses and Peeresses, approve and demand!
This accusation is wholly false. Those who make it can scarcely have
taken the trouble to read the many memorials, pamphlets and addresses which
have emanated continually from our offices. We have pressed our positive
suggestions upon successive Governments, but with little avail. Let me
advise those who echo this taunt to obtain and read some of our latest
utterances.
"The Soldier and his Masters" may be had at our office, 17,
Tothill Street, Westminster, and it is full of positive suggestions, which,
if adopted, could not fail to produce, in time, a marked change for the
better in the morality and consequently in the hygiene of our soldiers.
The following is extracted from a Memorandum published by the
Abolitionists, and widely circulated in April last:--
"We demand that there should be no reversion to an immoral and
discredited system, but that practical steps should be taken
which, while supplying adequate means for the voluntary treatment of
disease, should be based on--
In relation to this we would remark:
The following words are the concluding portion of a Memorial which the
Abolitionist Society lately presented to Lord George Hamilton:--
"We note with regret your dispatch places disease in the
forefront and gives a very subordinate place to moral considerations. Even
the one paragraph (14) referring to moral efforts introduces them only in
relation
to mitigating or checking the spread of disease. We believe this attitude (which has been that of the Indian Government for many decades) is the main cause of the present condition of the Indian Army, and that without a total change in this respect that condition will become more and more disastrous.
"We earnestly plead with you to look beyond the
horrible statistics of disease to the still more terrible facts of which it
is at once the index and the inevitable outcome. The figures reveal the
startling facts that we have in India an army of 70,000 men all but given
up to reckless debauchery, and that these return to this country at the
rate of 13,000 annually, bringing with them the debasing sentiments and
habits acquired during their Indian training, and infecting our industrial
communities with a moral pestilence, more destructive of the national
stamina than the disease on which you have concentrated your
attention.
"We submit that the only statesmanlike
attitude--the only one that offers a hope of permanently lessening the
deplorable physical effects of debauchery --is that of making
well-devised, continuous, and resolute efforts to remove temptations
to that debauchery, to apply disciplinary provisions and restraints to
check disease and discourage vice, and to place the soldier in an
environment tending to develop his best physical, moral, intellectual and
religious faculties. We have recently issued a Memorandum, of which
we hand you a copy, containing practical suggestions in this
direction, which we commend to your most earnest consideration. And in
view of the gravity of the situation, we again repeat our request that a
Select Committee be appointed to enquire as to what remedies may most
wisely be adopted."
It cannot be said, in the face of such urgent counsels which have been
put forward by us at different times, that our action is negative or merely
destructive, without positive suggestion of any remedy.
The fact is that our age is a very impatient age. Few people nowadays
have patience to wait for the gradual, but sure action of moral influences.
The true remedies for all this vice and disease cannot possibly be
immediate and rapid in their operation.
A panic has seized our public on this subject, as if the plague were at
our doors, and they cry out for prompt sanitary protection.
And what most people desire is some immediate and constructive
legislation. Now we have come, from a long experience, to have a profound
distrust of constructive legislation in this matter. There is nothing so
delicate as the moral relations of the sexes. Legislation on that subject
cannot be carried into effect by men in government livery, with sticks in
their hands, whom we call policemen; the power of the State must be
exceedingly restricted in this domain. The law can, and ought to reach some
of the sources whence prostitution is constantly supplied and fed, such as
seduction, procuring, trafficking in "white slaves," and the
organization of vice. But how can the State punish
a thing which it declares to be necessary, and while it itself seduces, procures, and organizes?
More than has ever yet been done may be done by associated action. If a
mistake is made in an experiment by voluntary and associated workers, it is
not fatal; we can go back from our error, and profit by the experience
gained even in our mistakes. But laws createconditions,
unexpected and unimagined by us beforehand, which frequently perplex and
embarrass us as much as the original circumstances which occasioned the
outcry for a law. The law is inelastic and rigid, and is sure to be unjust
when dealing with this question.
In the question before us, above all others, the law inevitably becomes,
even though it may not be meant to be so, a class law, of the
grossest kind. If men were included in its penalties, they would only be
men of the poorest class, probably only soldiers who are the servants of
the State in such a degree that they could be brought under any legal
discipline whatever; while the women brought under such a law would only be
the daughters of the poor,--helpless, fallen, friendless, and
despised. Who can imagine military captains, majors, or colonels brought
under such a law, or the protected daughters of the favoured classes? But
nothing less probably will meet the present impatient outcry, than some
constructive legislation of a drastic kind which will fall upon one class
alone, and be followed in time by its own appropriate curse.
Why do not our military authorities adopt some more radical and
reasonable measures in regard to the soldiers? They are all powerful, and
could do it if they wished. Their present methods are but a most wretched
tinkering. We are as desirous as they that discipline--a strict
discipline--should be applied to the boys who go out to India, and who
are quite as amenable to good and restraining as to evil influences.
In the early years of the existence of the Contagious Disease Acts in
England I visited many of the garrison towns subjected to them. At Chatham
I entered one evening a hall attached to one of the
State-superintended houses of ill-fame under strict police
control. There was a crowd of miserable girls--"Queen's
women," as they not unnaturally styled themselves--and a
corresponding crowd of youths, raw recruits, drinking, singing, dancing,
but in a languid, joyless manner. A group of them gathered round me, and
as I spoke kindly to them a young soldier took by the arm another, a
very young
and innocent looking boy, and pushing him forward to me, said, "speak to him, Lady, he is from the country, he has just joined." The boy's face suggested a good home and a loving Christian mother, recently exchanged for this hell, filled with State guaranteed harlots. He came up to me in a confiding manner, and after a few words, he burst into tears, and said,"Oh, Ma'am, they expect us to bad, and we are bad." They--the authorities--"expect us to be bad." That boy expressed the whole truth concerning the effect of this degrading State institution, in those few simple words.
Why should not the authorities give a trial to the plan of
expecting these young soldiers to be good? When
certain officers have earnestly tried that simple and elevating method, it
has been eminently successful; we know instances of its having been truly
blessed in its results. But how many such officers are there, or how few?
Apparently the Government and Military authorities are afraid of allowing
any inquiry whatever on that head.
In the debate in the House of Lords, the Bishop of Southwell suggested
that where regiments had deteriorated in morality, penalties should be
inflicted on the colonels of the regiments personally. If those who were
under him as a head master or a bishop deteriorated it would quite right if
he were removed from his office. He had lived in a garrison town and he
knew how much the character of a regiment depended upon its colonel.
Lord Clarina, as one of the oldest regimental officers in the House, was
amazed to hear it suggested that penal results should fall upon a
commanding officer in whose regiment there was a large amount of disease.
No body of men were more devoted to their duty than the commanding officers
of regiments.
Lord Clarina's remarks were greeted with approving laughter. Noble
Lords were amused at the idea of holding colonels responsible. They will
continue to laugh, so secure are they in the immunity which rank gives them
from the penalties inflicted on humbler people. They are of those of whom
Christ said: "Ye load men with burdens grievous to be borne,
but ye yourselves will not touch them with one of your fingers."
Is it not to be feared that India may one day herself answer her rulers,
and cut through the heart of this problem in her own manner? For the
natives of India, superstitious and ignorant, and for the present
apparently submissive, have yet enough of the man in them not to endure for
ever that the women of their people,--a conquered people,--
should be taken and bound to the service of the vices of the troops of their conquerors. They have their harlot temples and certain impure rites, but they are not all impure, as the British Army authorities themselves attest; the native soldier being in a far more honourable position as to vice and disease than the British soldier; and there are grave signs of a secret revolt in their minds against the supreme contempt for their women expressed in the high handed and degrading measures taken under the Cantonment Acts.
In all parts of Switzerland, except Geneva, the official organisation of
vice has been abolished. Geneva alone clings to it, or rather it clings
like a poisoned mantle to her, so closely that she cannot shake it off. It
dates as one of her recognised institutions since the close of the last
century, when Napoleon entered Geneva with his troops. A strong effort was
made last year by the better part of the citizens to shake it off.
The question was put to the vote. The Regulationists were victorious.
Sunday, March the 22nd, was the voting day. I prefer not to recount again
in detail the horrors of that day and the following night, the orgies, the
blasphemies, the violence of the victorious party, who entered churches
carrying aloft the insignia of their abominable institution, the red lamp
(the Lampe Rouge is by order of the
Government hung over the door of every house where vice is practised under
its protection), singing their obscene songs of praise to the demon,
parodying a hymn sung in the churches to the Holy Spirit, and applying it
to the symbol of their degradation.
At midnight, the furious mob assembled around the house of their leader,
a Member of the Government, who addressed them from his
balcony:--"You can now go home, citizens," he said,
"we have triumphed. We have saved our free institutions.
Christianity (Pietisme, their word for vital Christianity)
is dead in Geneva. We shall no more be troubled with it. We
shall hear no more of that party."
*
___________________* For the verification of these
facts, and others even more terrible, I refer my readers to the
"Signal de Genève" of that date, March 1896.
Page 22
The Genevois, of Geneva, edited by the Regulationist leader
above mentioned, has recently had several jubilant articles on the revival
of the demand in England for the State Organisation of Vice, and in his
issue of the 24th of May last,the Editor declares that the triumph of the
Regulationist is everywhere assured, thanks to the British Government; and
closes his article with the words: "The foolish noise of the
Christians has come to an end even in England."
Many honest and honourable people who do not see the inner meanings of
the question before us uphold this disastrous governmental policy actively
or by silent acquiescence; but one day they will know that deep down, at
the source and origin of the movement, there are beings who know all, and
knowing, say, "Evil be thou my good." No mere question of the
health of the Army, deeply important and pressing as that question is,
would awaken the passion which this question evokes. Mrs. Harriet
Martineau wrote in 1870, when our appeals had begun to arouse the country,
"how appalled the profligates are, and how enraged! I have heard
from very high authority that it is as if the depths of hell were stirred,
so fierce is the passion of certain men at the check in a career which they
supposed would be made more secure. . . . . The extraordinary violence and
ill manners of certain newspaper editors speak volumes; and the audacity
with which falsehoods are told, make it impossible to doubt that such
disturbance arises out of fear. 'Fear hath torment,' and it is
a sort of torment which, in its paroxysms, betrays its origin."
The beings above indicated ar filled with a passionate desire to cast
off the yoke of the moral law, or, to quote the words of one of themselves,
to get rid of "this damnable Puritanism" which is so irksome to
them. Nothing, they know, would so rapidly and forcibly conduce towards
their liberation from this oppressive yoke than that the State should
itself proclaim, and daily flaunt the proclamation before the eyes of all
people, that free fleshly indulgence is necessary for man, and therefore
not be blamed, but rather to be facilitated. No more teaching of the
old-fashioned doctrine that "he that soweth to the flesh,
shall of the flesh reap corruption." Profligacy will breathe freely
under the new régime; let the Churches
prate, and school-children be taught to repeat certain words
supposed to emanate from a Divine source. The lesson taught by the
attitude of the State will be stronger than all!
This is the inner meaning of the struggle. It lies deep, deep, and we
know who is its inspirer on that side; our
battle is not merely against Government proposals, corrupt officialism, and medical theories. It is against legions of "unclean spirits."
We need not pause and wonder over recent events. "Behold, I have
told you before," our Lord said, "Satan has desired to sift you
like wheat." "But I have prayed for you, that your faith will
fail not." Under what a heavy burden may not the human heart of our
Saviour have bent when he uttered that prayer! For it was not uttered for
the men alone to whom he then spoke. He said, "I pray not for these
alone, but for all who shall believe on me through their word."
And now, again, he is asking us,--"Can you drink of the cup
that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized
with?"
Now, among us Abolitionists, death through temporary failure, will be
doing its solemn work, consuming the chaff, refining the silver--and
"you shall be scattered, every one to his own." And so it will
be revealed what is "our own," where our treasure is, and where
our heart is, in how much they have blended themselves with God's
purpose and in God's work.
I pray that all that is not God's in my own heart and the hearts
of others, any be burned up and destroyed. As in the world, so among us,
let there be a sifting, in order that all who can or must fall off
may fall! The selection must take place before we go on
further; and God is operating it
through many tests. Those who in the depths of their hearts have any secret leaning to compromise with an evil principle are proved now to the uttermost, and,--for this warfare,-- are cast aside, or left behind; for God can employ in it only whole-hearted seekers after justice.
Let us boldly yield ourselves and the world to death's solemn
ministry, that what is of death may die!
We know that after Death comes Resurrection, and we seek not "the
Living among the Dead." We do not fear the Refiner's fire, nor
the sifting. We look beyond the "Great Tribulation" to the
victory which is not far off.
Josephine E. Butler.July,
1897.
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