a creature whom law and society combine to treat as subhuman, a thing, not a person.
Much indiscriminate abuse is hurled by sentimentalists at the mistresses of households who discharge a servant leading an immoral or irregular life, and many most worthy mistresses, feeling acutely their responsibilities for young maids, and knowing of many temptations, endeavour, by severe restrictions, to keep the girls straight. Both seem to me mistaken. Employers of male labour do not keep workmen and pay them good wages when they do their work badly. Especially not when their delinquencies are voluntary. And the mistress of a household has not only to consider the amount of work she is getting in return for the wages she pays, she has also the grave responsibility of considering all the other inmates of her house, the fellow-servants and her own family, and the effect upon them of the presence, as a member of the household, of a woman of loose character or conduct. It is almost always the best thing for the woman herself to make a change in her life. But when we come to the efforts of so many mistresses to keep their girls straight by denying them pleasure, or prescribing to them the exact kind of pleasure and refusing them liberty, these efforts appear often pathetically misdirected, and only increase the contrast between the girl’s actual life and what the tempter promises her. It is natural for a girl, whether she be a servant or a young lady, to “have a young man.” The young lady can see her young man as much as she likes, in drawing-rooms and at legitimate entertainments; the servant, too often, can see her young man only by stealth, alone, in the dark roads, on the bench of a park, or in houses where there is little of the control of normal family life. And her interviews with him are full of angry revolt against her mistress’s prohibition, and of plots with him as to how to circumvent the tyrant. The said tyrant is often desperately perplexed and anxious, but worse than helpless, because of her ignorance and her sometimes wilful refusal to admit the facts of human nature. I have known a woman who said, “I don’t allow my girl to go anywhere without me, except to church and to the G.F.S.”; but I had myself met the girl in a variety of other places. Another employer, with two daughters who often went to dances, refused to allow her pretty parlourmaid (who helped to dress the young ladies) to go to a ball which her friends and brothers were attending. The employer thought balls were not good “for that class of person.” Another lady, who was constantly seen at dinner parties, theatres and receptions, said, when asked that her servant should be allowed to join a social club, where there was singing and dancing and acting and billiards, “I don’t believe you can help that class of people except through religion.” Such employers as these, and they are very many, bring into disrepute not only the employment of domestic service, but the whole of the standard of morals which they imagine themselves to be upholding. Young people will have pleasure if they can get it, and to make their lives dreary and lonely is to drive them underground for pleasure and for companionship. The desolate loneliness of many domestic servants, far from home and friends, and with well-meaning, puritanical mistresses, is a cause perhaps quite as effective as service in a disorderly house or with an immoral master. The living-in system is full of difficulties, and I believe it is one of the systems which will have to go; but the only chance of success is either to make the girl a part of the family she serves, or to give her opportunities for a cheerful life of her own.
Another contributory cause, whose effect it is very difficult to estimate, is the low state of public opinion, encouraged by the law, with regard to physical brutality. Science recognises the close connection between the lusts of cruelty and of sex. Public opinion must be brought to support far more truly protective law for women and for little children. We hear much just now of the segregation of feeble-minded women, but we need, just as much, the segregation of men who have become a danger to women and children. When women make public opinion much more than they do now, and if only they will steer clear of retaliatory brutality, we shall move much faster.
Again, consider what endless ripples of effects there will be when once we begin seriously to tackle the housing question. What is the use of talking about decency, when a girl or boy has never known it? When the conditions of their daily life from childhood have been such as to make decency and continence things never experienced?
Alcohol taken in excess loosens all the powers of inhibition, and increases the appetites. When by improvements in the living conditions of the masses we have tackled the disease of alcoholism, we shall find we have made some way in other directions too.
It is a frequent easy generalisation that a “bad” woman is much worse than a “bad” man. It is said that there is always hope for a fallen man and none for a fallen woman. We shall have to be given far more proof of this than we have ever had, before we will believe that it is a property inherent in the sexes. If we must admit that we do not know how much of the virtue of women is due to the severe penalties on vice, we must also admit that we do not know how much of the incurable badness of women is due to these severe penalties; for society makes it next to impossible for a “fallen” woman to rise, whereas society does not trouble itself even to know whether a man is “fallen” or not. When women think these matters out, they will come to the conclusion that where it takes two to commit an offence, the one who escapes scot-free and attempts to leave the other to bear the double penalty, is perhaps the greater criminal of the two. If two boys steal apples together and A escapes, leaving B to be birched, public opinion is apt to think A rather a mean lad. If, instead of receiving one birching, B were flogged daily for the rest of his life because of A’s delinquency, what would public opinion say of A? or of the wisdom of the schoolmaster? Prostitution will diminish when it is made possible for women to recover lost ground; when a silly girl, who has been enticed away by some man watching for her day of weakness, is not treated as a pariah or expected to lead a life of penitential expiation for ever after. The tone which some rescue-workers adopt towards such girls makes one almost despair. It is an unfortunate thing that, owing to the painful and distasteful nature of what is called rescue work, so much of it is in the hands of women of a devoted and often exalted temperament, which has almost no points of contact with that of the girl who has drifted into an irregular life. Rescue work should be done by men and women who realise that the appetite for pleasure is not an unhealthy appetite, and that affection and a normal family life are the most hopeful engines of rescue.
CHAPTER XI
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(5) Commercialised Vice
“And many more Destructions played