Mr. McGregor says, “The provisions of this law appear to me to be pretty generally put in force, for I have nowhere in Austria met with any one under thirty years of age who was not able to read and write, and I have found cheap publications, chiefly religious and moral tracts, almanacks, very much like ‘Poor Richard’s,’ containing, with tables of the month, moon’s age, sun’s rising and setting, the fasts, feasts, holidays, markets, and fairs in the Empire, and opposite to the page of each month appropriate advice relative to husbandry and rural economy, with moral sayings and suitable maxims. The spirit of elementary instruction, if not the most enlightened, inculcates at every step, morality, the advantage of a virtuous life, the evil of vice, and the misery consequent on crime.” Works of art are subjected like books to the censors, who are unremitting in the enforcement of their political, moral, and religious restrictions.
Modern Rome.
Mortification of the flesh is one of the first principles of the Romish faith, and a stranger would expect to find any laxity of morals amongst the inhabitants of the eternal city severely punished; but in point of fact prostitution is tolerated and regulated in Rome, although there does not exist any special act relating to it.
In the Middle Ages many vices stained the fame of Rome; but it is of the present day that we are about to write. The Romish system has produced the following results, according to M. Felix Jacquot, who lived at Rome for four years on purpose to study the morality and the health of Italy.
1st. Not being able to confine prostitution to certain houses, it has spread itself among families.
2nd. Clandestine prostitution, which is most prevalent at Rome, has there produced the evils that it always engenders, houses of accommodation, seduction at home, and the extension of syphilis.
It is extremely probable that, as there are no standing regulations relative to prostitution, perhaps a sort of arbitrary power is vested in the police which opens the door to innumerable evils.
There exist at Rome five forms of clandestine prostitution: let us begin with the street walkers.
Street walker is the only name that can be given to those ignoble creatures that prostitute themselves in the evening and during the night, at the corners of the streets and in the dark angles of the public squares near the cathedral of St. Peter, and under the colonnades of Bernin, where the French soldiery are so often infected. The street walker was not much known at Rome before the revolution of 1849. She is the result of disorder, and the occupation of Rome by the French gives vitality to her existence. Some of these wretches will infect ten or even twenty men in one night, who have recourse to them to satisfy their brutal cravings and bestial desires.
We have to treat, secondly, of houses of ill-fame; but there is little to be said about them; they do not differ in any respect from those to be found in other cities. The dangers of frequenting them are precisely the same. Syphilis acquires new virulence by being fostered by the inmates, who are recruited from amongst innocent and inexperienced girls belonging to families in the city.