“My readers will remark, that all the arguments I have hitherto employed, apply strictly to the present order of things, and the present laws and system of marriage. No one, therefore, need be a moral heretic on this subject to admit and approve them. The marriage laws might all remain for ever as they are; and yet a moral check to population would be beneficent and important.
“But there are other cases, it will be said, where the knowledge of a preventive would be mischievous. If young women, it will be argued, were absolved from the fear of consequences, they would rarely preserve their chastity. Unlegalized connexions would be common and seldom detected. Seduction would be facilitated. Let us dispassionately examine this argument.
“I fully agree with that most amiable of moral heretics, Shelley, that ‘Seduction, which term could have no meaning in a rational society, has now a most tremendous one.’[[32]] It matters not how artificial the penalty which society has chosen to affix to a breach of her capricious decrees. Society has the power in her own hands; and that moral Shylock, Public Opinion, enforces the penalty, even though it cost the life of the victim. The consequences, then, to the poor sufferer, whose offence is, at most, but an error of judgment or a weakness of the heart, are the same as if her imprudence were indeed a crime of the blackest dye. And his conduct who, for a momentary, selfish gratification, will deliberately entail a life of wretchedness on one whose chief fault, perhaps, was her misplaced confidence in a villain, is not one whit excused by the folly and injustice of the sentence.[[33]] Some poet says,
‘The man who lays his hands upon a woman,
Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch
Whom ’twere gross flattery to call a coward.’
What epithet then belongs to him who makes it a trade to win a woman’s gentle affections, betray her generous confidence, and then, when the consequences become apparent, abandon her to dependence, and the scorn of a cold, a self-righteous, and a wicked world; a world which will forgive anything but rebellion against its tyranny, and in whose eyes it seems the greatest of crimes to be unsuspecting and warm-hearted! I will give my hand freely to a galley-slave, and speak to the highway-robber as to an honest man; but there is one character with whom I desire to exchange neither word nor greeting—the cold-hearted, deliberate, practised, and calculating seducer!
“And, let me ask, what is it gives to the arts of seduction their sting, and stamps to the world its victim? Why is it, that the man goes free and enters society again, almost courted and applauded for his treachery, while the woman is a mark for the finger of reproach, and a butt for the tongue of scandal? Because she bears about her the mark of what is called her disgrace. She becomes a mother; and society has something tangible against which to direct its anathemas. Nine-tenths, at least, of the misery and ruin which are caused by seduction, even in the present state of public opinion on the subject, result from cases of pregnancy.
“If the little being lives, the dove in the falcon’s claws is not more certain of death, than we may be, that society will visit, with its bitterest scoffs and reproaches, the bruised spirit of the mother and the unconscious innocence of the child.
“If, then, we cannot do all, shall we neglect a part? If we cannot prevent every misery which man’s selfishness and the world’s cruelty entail on a sex which it ought to be our pride and honor to cherish and defend; let us prevent as many as we can. If we cannot persuade society to revoke its unmanly and unchristian[[34]] persecution of those who are often the best and gentlest of its members—let us, at the least, give to woman what defence we may, against its violence.