What were the peculiar political excitements which enabled Lady Packington to return two members of Parliament, we are not told; but it is quite certain that women of twenty-one, duly qualified, cannot and do not vote for members of Parliament by virtue of that decision. In rural districts, where personal influence weighed a good deal, such a vote might be courteously winked at. A woman of property and standing, in Nova Scotia, has in this manner, for more than forty years, cast her annual vote, without rebuke or interruption; but, should any number of women act on this precedent, a legal restraint would doubtless be laid.
No single woman, having been seduced, has any remedy at common law; neither has her mother nor next friend. If her father can prove service rendered, he may sue for loss of service.
In what "bosom of divinitye" does this law rest? Here is a remedy for the loss of a few hours, but no penalty held up in terrorem, to warn man that he may not trifle with honor, womanly purity, and childish ignorance or innocence.
In the eye of this law, female chastity is only valuable for the work it can do. It must not be thought, however, that the English common law stands alone in this moral deformity. Under the French law, female chastity does not seem of any worth, even in consideration of the work it can do. In honest indignation, Legouvé exclaims,—
"Let a man, who has seduced a child of fifteen years by a promise of marriage, be brought before a magistrate. He has under the law a right to say, 'There is my signature, it is true; but I deny it. A debt of the heart is void before the law.'"
Thus everywhere, in practice and theory, in society and in law, for rich and poor, is public purity abandoned,—the bridle thrown upon the neck of all restive and depraved natures.
Manufacturers seduce their work-people; the heads of workshops refuse to employ girls who will not sell themselves, soul and body, to them; masters corrupt their servants. Out of 5,083 lost women counted by Duchâtelet at Paris in 1830, there were 285 domestic servants seduced, and afterwards dismissed by their employers. Commission-merchants, officers, students, deceive the poor girls from the province or the country, drag them to Paris, and leave them to perish. At all the great centres of industry, as at Rheims and at Lille, are societies organized to recruit the houses of sin in Paris.
This is well known to be true of all the large English towns; yet the law is powerless, and philanthropy interferes with no other result than that of driving these societies from one post to another.
Can women be expected to believe that the law would be powerless, if there were a sound public opinion behind it to sustain the law; if there were any desire on the part of the majority of men that it should be sustained? "Punish the young girl, if you will," continued Legouvé; "but punish also the man who has ruined her. She is already punished,—punished by desertion, punished by dishonor, punished by remorse, punished by nine months of suffering, punished by the charge of a child to be reared. Let him, then, be struck in his turn. If not, it is no longer public modesty that you defend: it is the 'lord paramount,' the vilest of the rights of the 'seigneur.'"
In the laws which regard single women, we object, then,—