[112] See Dr. Wrench’s Grammar of Life (Heinemann, 1908), p. 76.
[113] Freud deals with this point in many places in his works. See particularly his Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Vierte Folge (1918), Chapter III (Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose), p. 117.
[114] The harm, however, does not cease with the work of the spinsters themselves. Their influence in this direction has become a national evil. Volumes could be filled with examples of this false and short-sighted humanitarianism, but the following case, taken from The News of the World on Jan. 1, 1922, at a time when rates in almost all parishes in and around London were anything between 17s. and 20s. in the £, is typical of thousands of others. “Rochford Board of Guardians, Essex, are confronted with the problem of dealing with a man who is both a leper and insane. The patient is a native of Mauritius. It was stated at a Board meeting that the man lived for some time in a cottage in a rural parish, and his wife looked after him, but she was unable to do so any longer. Formerly the man was in the Leper Colony at Bicknacre, Essex—an institution carried on by the Society of the Divine Compassion, assisted by the Sisterhood of St. Giles—but his mental state was such that he could not remain there. Asylum authorities who were approached refused to accept the case, and the Board of Control supported them in their attitude. It was also stated that the Ministry of Health would not deal with the matter. Consequently the man had to be cared for by the Guardians. A building was prepared for him, and efforts made to secure three male nurses, though only two have been obtained. The cost of three nurses is twelve guineas a week. Eventually the Board decided to send a deputation to the Ministry of Health.” The influence of the spinster’s frantic and unthinking humanitarianism is recognizable here.
[115] See Mercier, Op. cit., p. 220. The author continues: “They [the feelings in question] take the shape of religious emotion, and expression for them is found in observance of ceremonial and in devotion to a ritual.” The fact that the first initiation into religious fervour of this kind frequently starts by the young girl’s wild adoration for an older woman—her school mistress or her Sunday-school teacher—is not mentioned by Mercier, but it is important.
[116] Large numbers of the women in the Suffrage movement were of this type. Nor is it possible to exonerate such women entirely from a charge of jealousy of the young girl, when their efforts are obviously directed towards making her, like themselves, ill-adapted, discontented and physiologically miserable.
[117] See The Collected Works of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. VIII, p. 349. The author proceeds: “Accordingly it is amongst the young men and women of this body that the most afflicting cases under this eccentric type occur. Even for children, however, the systematic repression of all ebullient feeling must be perilous” ... etc.
[118] For an interesting discourse, uninfluenced by the recent psychoanalytical school, on the connexion between sexual and religious emotion, see Mercier, Op. cit., pp. 220-223.
[119] Thus Dr. E. Jones argues (Op. cit., p. 217), “Civilization has reached, or is on the point of reaching, the limit, beyond which unguided sublimation can no longer be successfully maintained.”
[120] See Byron’s letter to John Murray, Feb. 7, 1821: “The truth is that in these days the grand ‘primum mobile’ of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. This is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say cant because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.” This was written a hundred years ago, and is still true to-day.
[121] Dr. Vintras and Parent Duchatelet both concur in representing English prostitution as about the most degraded and at the same time the most irrevocable.