A private Intelligence-office, kept in the superintendent's own house, cannot be interfered with, unless it can be proved a nuisance; and how difficult it is to abate a nuisance I need not tell anybody who has ever tried the experiment.
The keeper of a General or Public Intelligence-office makes application for a license to the city government, sustained by a certain number of respectable vouchers, and pays, I believe, a yearly fee of one dollar.
This looks fair enough; and, if every officer of the city government, from the lowest police-officer to the mayor, were immaculate, it would be so; but we all know what the fact is. It is an open secret, that, in all our largest cities, the marts of vice are stocked from these places, and that they serve the purposes of bad men better than houses of professedly vicious resort. One of the most excellent and respectable women I know, who superintends one of these offices, told me herself that four women made assignations on her premises, and went out of her office to keep them, without her having power to prevent it. She proved the correctness of her suspicions by employing one of her vouchers to watch the result. If this happens under the eyes of the virtuous and vigilant, what may not happen when the head of the establishment is in the pay of interested parties? I do not know in what way this wickedness can be broken up; but, in the words of Dr. Gannett, "what must be done, can be." Is it not a terrible thought, that fashionable women and tender girls should supply themselves with servants from the very brink of that hell they believe they have never touched? Is it not a far more terrible thought, that an innocent stranger cannot seek her daily bread without running the risk of certain perdition? How real these possibilities are, there are those in this city able to testify.
Ought not the ministers at large, of all denominations, and our overseers of the poor, to unite in prompt and efficient action in this regard?
[32] Of course, I do not mean to be understood here as objecting to any temperate and earnest attempt by men or women to amend law.
[33] It will easily be conjectured that I do not feel competent to treat the great subject of Roman legislation for women, in the noble and extended manner which is at once, as it seems to me, necessary and possible. Perhaps I shall never become so.
It seems to me proper, however, that I should indicate my dissatisfaction with existing methods in the clearest manner, and drop a few hints, as I do in the text, as to the difficulties in the way.
Roman sepulchral inscriptions, of the era generally considered the most licentious, bear witness in the fullest manner to the existence of chastity and domestic virtue. A sepulchral inscription, it may be argued, is a poor witness to facts. I would suggest in reply, that a nation ceases to commemorate the virtue which has ceased to exist, or which it has, through a general depravity of manners, ceased to respect.
[34] The great body of all law is of small practical importance, because, in spite of the five points of Calvinism and the long faces of many bearded philosophers, the majority of mankind not only obey the law, but transcend it,—do better than it requires. It is only the few who transgress; and thus many absurdities are never or very rarely dragged into the light of a "decision."
[35] A curious instance of the immoral result of holding marriage sacramental, and indissoluble under all circumstances, comes within my personal experience while I am correcting these pages for the press, Oct. 11, 1861.