Moreover, Nature has laid upon woman the more important share in the great work of continuing the race. It is not therefore pity, but justice which requires that reverent and grateful aid should be rendered by men, in the grand duty of creating an ever nobler race.
Trust, freedom, and sympathy form the bases of true relations between men and women, as they are also the moral foundations of political economy.
The depth of that sin against human nature—fornication or purchase—is seen in the results which follow from tempting women away from the paths of honest industry. These effects necessarily extend to the whole position and character of one-half the race, when any portion of women are turned into human merchandise. They are seen, by a careful study of those reckless or hardened ones who have become so direful a problem in all our large towns. How is that growing army of shameless women created who, with their companions, so fearfully avenge all social injustice on our boys and girls and our young men and maidens?
It is well known that there are thousands of ‘fallen women’ in London. What does this general statement in relation to women mean in detail? What is involved in living by the sale of the human body? The woman, however ‘fallen,’ is still a human being with its desperate clinging to life. Let it be realized what is involved in thousands of women living to the age of three-score years and ten, who must feed themselves three times a day, and provide lodging, clothing, and the satisfaction of all human needs by the repeated sale of their bodies—thousands of women, with all the craving and ever active necessities of the human being, bodies and souls to be kept alive by the money of their buyers, and who are compelled to use every art of corruption to find the fresh purchasers through whom they have learned to live—women to whom lust and drink rapidly become a second nature, and sloth and falsehood habitual; women driven on by ceaseless material needs to lower and lower phases of misery and vice, in whom a bitterness is engendered that revenges itself on the weakness and innocence of youth, tempting the lad when the adult ceases to purchase; women who—terrible fact—finally losing their own marketable value, and scourged by their own daily recurring needs, throw away the last remnants of womanly instinct, and drag down young girls into their hell of life.
The grave fact must be borne in mind that each one of these thousands of marketable women—although once an innocent infant—now forms a centre of ever-widening corrupt influence in the varied relations of life. Each one, with father and mother, brothers and sisters, friends and acquaintances, servants and tradespeople, is exercising a fatal influence, desecrating the sanctity of sexual relations, proving the ease with which the rewards of vice are gained, bewildering the conscience of the innocent, and transmitting sensual tendencies to their descendants.
From these bought women come those enemies of social progress, who enslave our young men of the higher classes, our future statesmen, those who should be the leaders of the nation. From Skittles to Cora Pearl, our generation has witnessed the enslaving power of these tyrants of lust. They have dried up the generous enthusiasm of our youth, and destroyed those principles of trust, freedom, and sympathy which should guide our domestic and foreign policy.
Who is guilty of this appalling conversion of women into demons, this contagion of evil which in ever-widening circles is destroying our moral health, and injuring the modesty, freedom, and dignity of all womanhood? The immediate cause is the man, whether prince or peasant, who purchases a woman for the gratification of lust. It is this purchase which draws women into the clutches of a godless, money-making machine, which never loosens its hold of the feeble creature until the essential features of womanhood are crushed out of recognition. The irresponsible polyandry of prostitution, with its logical acceptance and regulation of brothels, has replaced in the West the polygamy of the East. In both, degradation, discouragement of marriage, and injustice to women create a fatal barrier to permanent national progress. But there is a more insidious source of evil than the direct purchaser. The conversion of women into merchandise, whilst it produces a dangerous deterioration of female character, unavoidably reacts upon male character. This evil tends in women to produce the vices of the slave—deceit, falsehood, and servility; in men it tends to foster the vices of the slave-holder—arrogance, selfishness, and cruelty. In both it engenders that deadly sin—hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is the vice which, above all others, our Lord denounces with the most awful condemnation, raising the drunkard and the harlot, with His far-seeing, merciful purity, and thrusting the Scribe and Pharisee—secret fornicators—into their place. ‘He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.’ Hypocrisy is the vice which distinguishes in the most marked degree those nations which dare to call themselves Christian, but who practically deny every principle of Christ’s teaching in the conduct of public and, to a great extent, private affairs. It is under this reign of hypocrisy that a more dangerous condition of sexual evil has grown up amongst us than has ever existed amongst heathen nations. When a savage tribe enslaves its enemies and trades in human flesh it does not trade against its conscience. In its rudimentary condition of slow emergence from brutish ignorance it knows no higher standard than a savage display of muscular force. When a polygamous nation buys both men and women, or endeavours to enforce the physical chastity of women by harem imprisonment, it obeys the highest authority it knows of, its religion, believed in, although erroneous in its teaching. The bitterest hatred and undying hostility felt by Mohammedan as well as savage communities to their Western invaders is due to the violation of their women, and the treatment of those women according to the hypocritical customs of their lustful conquerors. However false the standard of the savage or semi-barbarous peoples may be, they possess one, and strive to realize it. But the corruption which the latest and intensest phase of competitive money values has introduced into the most enlightened nations, is unexampled in the history of the race. The deliberate reasoning out and justification of the conversion of women into things is the abuse of our highest faculties, our power of reason and conscience.
The cruel vice of fornication, protected by hypocrisy, is sowing moral scrofula broadcast, and, like an insidious poison, producing generations of feeble, rickety wills and maniacal monsters. It is the degeneracy of the race. The palliation of this vice is shaking the foundation of our civilization, by destroying the moral basis on which alone progressive society can rest. The purchaser of a woman is directly guilty, but a deeper source of evil influence is the man or the woman who excuses and sanctions the purchase of women, by upholding a double standard of morality for the sexes. In the present age, while the actively licentious are following evil customs like sheep, some of their intellectual and spiritual leaders are throwing a veil of hypocrisy over these customs. The God-given faculties for creating literature, investigating science, and promoting religion are being perverted to the justification or palliation of lust.
Our brothers have hitherto been the rough and active pioneers of human progress, first moulding the material framework of society, then becoming its leaders and teachers—teachers of those fundamental moral relations on which human society rests.