The moral results of early dissipation are quite as marked as the physical evils. The lower animal nature gains ever-increasing dominion over the moral life of the individual. The limited nature of all animal enjoyments produces its natural effects. First there is the eager search after fresh stimulants, and as the boundaries of physical enjoyment are necessarily reached, come in common sequence, disappointment, disgust, restlessness, dreariness, or bitterness. The character of the mental deterioration differs with the difference of original character in the individual, as in the nation. In some we observe an increasing hardness of character, growing contempt for women, with low material views of life. In others there is a frivolity of mind induced, a constant restlessness and search for new pleasures. The frankness, heartiness, and truthfulness of youth gradually disappear under the withering influence.[28]
The moral influence of vice upon social character has very wide ramifications. This is illustrated by the immense difficulties which women encountered in the rational endeavour to obtain a complete medical education. Licentiousness, with all its attendant results, is the great social cause of these difficulties.
The dominion of lust is necessarily short-sighted, selfish, or cruel. Its action is directly opposed to the qualities of truth, trust, self-command, and sympathy, thus sapping the foundations of personal morality. But apart from the individual evils above referred to, licentiousness inevitably degrades society, firstly, from the disproportion of vital force which is thus thrown into one direction, and, secondly, from the essentially selfish and ungenerous tendency of vice, which, seeking its own limited gratification at the expense of others, is incapable of embracing large views of life or feeling enthusiasm for progress. The direction into which this disproportionate vital force is thrown is a degrading one, always tending to evil results. Thus the noble enthusiasm of youth, its precious tide of fresh life, without which no nation can grow—life whose leisure hours should be given to science and art, to social good, to ennobling recreation—is squandered and worse than wasted in degrading dissipation.
This dissipation, which is ruin to man, is also a curse to woman, for, in judging the effects of licentiousness upon society, it must never be forgotten that this is a vice of two, not a vice of one. Injurious as is its influence upon the young man, that is only one-half of its effect. What is its influence upon the young woman? This question has a direct bearing on the Moral Aim of Education. The preceding details of physical and moral evils resulting to young men from licentiousness will apply with equal force to young women subjected to similar influences. One sex may experience more physical evil, the other more mental degradation, from similar vicious habits; but the evil, if not identical, is entirely parallel, and a loss of truthfulness, honour, and generosity accompanies the loss of purity.
The women more directly involved in this widespread evil of licentiousness are the women of the poorer classes of society. The poorer classes constitute in every country the great majority of the people; they form its solid strength and determine its character. The extreme danger of moral degradation in those classes of young women who constitute such an immense preponderance of the female population is at once evident. These women are everywhere, interlinked with every class of society. They form an important part (often the larger female portion) of every well-to-do household. They are the companions and inevitable teachers of infancy and childhood. They often form the chief or only female influence which meets the young man in early professional, business, or even college life. They meet him in every place of public amusement, in his walks at night, in his travels at home and abroad. By day and by night the young man away from home is brought into free intercourse, not with women of his own class, but with poor working girls and women, who form the numerical bulk of the female population, who are found in every place and ready for every service. Educated girls are watched and guarded. The young man meets them in rare moments only, under supervision, and generally under unnatural restraint; but the poor girl he meets constantly, freely, at any time and place. Any clear-sighted person who will quietly observe the way in which female servants, for instance, regard very young men who are their superiors in station, can easily comprehend the dangers of such association. The injustice of the common practical view of life is only equalled by its folly. This practical view utterly ignores the fact of the social influence and value of this portion of society. The customs of civilized nations practically consider poor women as subjects for a life so dishonourable, that a rich man feels justified in ostracizing wife, sister, or daughter who is guilty of the slightest approach to such life. It is the great mass of poor women who are regarded as (and sometimes brutally stated to be) the subjects to be used for the benefit of the upper classes. Young and innocent men, it is true, fall into vice, or are led into it, or are tempted into it by older women, and are not deliberate betrayers. But the rubicon of chastity once passed, the moral descent is rapid, and the preying upon the poor soon commences. The miserable slaves in houses of prostitution are the outcasts of the poor. The young girls followed at night in the streets are the honest working girl, the young servant seeking a short outdoor relief to her dreary life, as well as the unhappy fallen girl, who has become in her turn the seducer. If fearful of health, the individual leaves the licensed slaves of sin and the chance associations of the streets, it is amongst the poor and unprotected that he seeks his mistress:—the young seamstress, the pretty shop girl, the girl with some honest employment, but poor, undefended, needing relief in her hard-working life. It is always the poor girl that he seeks. She has no pleasures, he offers them; her virtue is weak, he undermines it; he gains her affection and betrays it, changes her for another and another, leaving each mistress worse than he found her, farther on in the downward road, with the guilt of fresh injury from the strong to the weak on his soul. Any reproach of conscience—conscience which will speak when an innocent girl has been betrayed, or one not yet fully corrupted has been led farther on in evil life—is quieted by the frivolous answer: ‘They will soon marry in their own class.’ If, however, this sin be regarded in its inevitable consequences, its effects upon the life of both man and woman in relation to society, the nature of this sophistry will appear in its hideous reality. Is chastity really a virtue, something precious in womanhood? Then, the poor man’s home should be blessed by the presence of a pure woman. Does it improve a woman’s character to be virtuous? Has she more self-respect in consequence? Does she care more for her children, for their respectability and welfare, when she is conscious of her own honest past life? Does she love her husband more, and will she strive to make his home brighter and more attractive to him, exercising patience in the trials of her humble life, being industrious, frugal, sober, with tastes that centre in her home? These are vital questions for the welfare of the great mass of the people, and consequently of society and of the nation.
We know, on the contrary, as a fundamental truth, that unchastity unfits a woman for these natural duties. It fosters her vanity, it makes her slothful or reckless, it gives her tastes at variance with home life, it makes her see nothing in men but their baser passions, and it converts her into a constant tempter of those passions—a corrupter of the young. We know that drunkenness, quarrels, and crimes have their origin in the wretched homes of the poor, and the centre of those unhappy homes is the unchaste woman, who has lost the restraining influence of her own self-respect, her respect for others, and her love of home. When a pretty, vain girl is tempted to sin, a wife and mother is being ruined, discord and misery are being prepared for a poor man’s home, and the circumstances created out of which criminals grow. Nor does the evil stop there. It returns to the upper classes. Nurses, servants, bring back to the respectable home the evil associations of their own lives. The children of the upper classes are thus corrupted, and the path of youth is surrounded at every step with coarse temptations. These consequences may not be foreseen when the individual follows the course of evil customs, but the sequence of events is inevitable, and every man gives birth to a fresh series of vice and misery when he takes a mistress instead of a wife.[29]
The deterioration of character amongst the women of the working classes is known to all employers of labour, to all who visit amongst the poor, to every housekeeper. The increasing difficulty of obtaining trustworthy domestic servants is now the common experience of civilized countries. In England, France, Germany, and the larger towns of America, it is a fact of widespread observation, and has become a source of serious difficulty in the management of family life. The deepest source of this evil lies in the deterioration of womanly character produced by the increasing spread of habits of licentiousness. The action of sex, though taking different directions, is as powerful in the young woman as in the young man; it needs as careful education, direction, and restraint. This important physiological truth, at present quite overlooked, must nevertheless be distinctly recognised. This strong mental instinct, if yielded to in a degrading way (as is so commonly the case in the poorer classes of society), becomes an absorbing influence. Pride and pleasure in work, the desire to excel, loyalty to duty, and the love of truth in its wide significance, are all subordinated, and gradually weakened, by the irresistible mastery of this new faculty. In all large towns the lax tone of companions, the difficulty in finding employment, the horrible cupidity of those who pander to corrupt social sentiment and ensnare the young—all these circumstances combined render vice much easier than virtue—a state of society in which vice must necessarily extend and virtue diminish. We thus find an immense mass of young women gradually corrupted from childhood, rendered coarse and reckless, the modesty of girlhood destroyed, the reserve of maidenhood changed to bold, often indecent, behaviour. No one accustomed to walk freely about our streets, to watch children at play, to observe the amusements and free gatherings of the poorer classes, can fail to see the signs of degraded sex. The testimony of home missionaries, of those experienced in Benevolent Societies and long engaged in various ways in helping women, as well as the Reports of Rescue Societies, all testify to the dangerous increase and lamentable results of unchastity amongst the female population.
We observe in all countries a constant relation also between the prevalence of licentiousness and degradation of female labour; the action and reaction of these two evil facts is invariable. In Paris we see the complete result of these tendencies of modern civilization in relation to the condition of working women—tendencies which are seen in London and Berlin, in Liverpool, Glasgow—i.e., in all large towns. The revelations made by writers and speakers in relation to the condition of the working women of Paris, are of very serious import to England. Such terrible facts as the following, brought to light by those who have carefully investigated the state of this portion of the population, must arrest attention. In relation to vast numbers of women it is stated[30]: ‘In Paris a woman can no longer live by the work of her own hands; the returns of her labour are so small that prostitution is the only resource against slow starvation. The population is bastardized to such an extent that thousands of poor girls know not of any relation that they ever possessed. Orphans and outcasts, their life, if virtuous, is one terrible struggle from the cradle to the grave; but by far the greater number of them are drilled, whilst yet children, in the public service of debauchery.’ The great mass of working women are placed by the present state of society in a position in which there are the strongest temptations to vice, when to lead a virtuous life often requires the possession of moral heroism.
Of the multitude of those who fall into vice, many ultimately marry, and, with injured moral qualities and corrupted tastes, become the creators of poor men’s homes. The rest drift into a permanent life of vice. The injurious effects of unchastity upon womanly character already noted, can be studied step by step, to their complete development in that great class of the population—the recognised prostitutes. Their marked characteristics are recklessness, sloth, and drunkenness. This recklessness and utter disregard of consequences and appearances, a quarrelsome, violent disposition, the dislike to all labour and all regular occupation and life, the necessity for stimulants and drink, with a bold address to the lower passions of men—such are the effects of this life upon the character of women. Unchaste women become a most dangerous class of the community. To these bad qualities is added another, wherever, as in France, this evil life is accepted as a part of society, provided for, organized, or legalized; this last result of confirmed licentiousness is a hardness of character so complete, so resistant of all improving influences, that the wisest and gentlest efforts to restore are often utterly hopeless before the confirmed and hardened prostitute.[31]
The growth of habits of licentiousness amongst us exerts the most direct and injurious influence on the lives of virtuous young women of the middle and upper classes of society. The mode of this influence demands very serious consideration on the part of parents. It is natural that young women should wish to please. They possess the true instinct which would guide them to their noble position in society, as the centres of pure and happy homes. How do our social customs meet this want? All the young women of the middle and upper classes of society, no matter how pure and innocent their natures, are brought by these customs of society into direct competition with prostitutes! The modest grace of pure young womanhood, its simple, refined tastes, its love of home pleasures, its instinctive admiration of true and noble sentiments and actions, although refreshing as a contrast, will not compare for a moment with the force of attraction which sensual indulgence and the excitement of debauch exert upon the youth who is habituated to such intoxications. The virtuous girl exercises a certain amount of attraction for a passing moment, but the intense craving awakened in the youth for something far more exciting than she can offer, leads him ever farther from her, in the direction where this morbid craving can be freely indulged. This result is inevitable if licentiousness is to be accepted as a necessary part of society. Physical passion is not in itself evil; on the contrary, it is an essential part of our nature. It is an endowment which, like every other human faculty, has the power of high growth. It possesses that distinctive human characteristic—receptivity to mental impressions. These impressions blend so completely with itself as to change its whole character and effect, and it thus becomes an ennobling or a degrading agent in our lives. In either case, for good or for evil, sex takes a first place as a motive power in human education. The young man inexperienced in life and necessarily crude in thought, but fallen into vice, is mastered by this downward force, and the good girl loses more and more her power over the strong natural attraction of sex which would otherwise draw him to her. The influence which corrupt young men, on the other hand, exercise upon the young women of their own standing in society, is both strong and often injurious. It being natural that young women should seek to attract and retain them, they unconsciously endeavour to adapt themselves to their taste. These tastes are formed by uneducated girls and by society of which the respectable young woman feels the effects, and of which she has a vague suspicion, although, happily, she cannot measure the depth of the evil. The tastes and desires of her young male acquaintance, moulded by coarse material enjoyments, act directly upon the respectable girl, who gives herself up with natural impulse to the influence of her male companion. We thus witness a widespread and inevitable deterioration in manners, dress, thought, and habits amongst the respectable classes of young women. This result leads eventually, as on the Continent, to the entire separation of young men and women in the middle and upper ranks of life, to the arrangement of marriage as a business affair, and to the union of the young with the old.