On the contrary, England wages war against prostitution. Is it with success? No; in this respect her cities are the worst in Europe. In that country 42,000 illegitimate children were born in 1851. It was estimated that within the five years preceding, 212,000 females had strayed from the paths of virtue, and thus taken the first step in prostitution. In 1832, London had a population of 1,000,000, and her known prostitutes numbered 10,000. Within her limits were then 3,300 brothels. At that time, in Liverpool, there were 5,000 fallen women. Of houses of ill-fame Dublin had 355; Edinburgh, 219; Glasgow, 204; Liverpool, 770; Manchester, 308; Birmingham, 797; Hull, 175; Leeds, 179; Norwich, 194. In England, in 1865, there were 500,000 prostitutes. It has been computed that the unfortunates number about 86,000 in the London of to-day. It is not surprising, then, that the constabulary of Great Britain are in despair of their power for good over this evil. “Sooner or later (they realize) the principle of individual liberty must triumph, and prostitution must become, under the shadow of general principles, as unrestricted as any other commerce, moral or immoral.”
In New York City, also, the law has always attempted to repress the “social evil,” but without avail. This has been openly recognized by those in authority. In 1875, 1876, and 1877 licensed prostitution was recommended by a committee of the State Legislature, the Grand Jury of the City and County of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Charities and Correction. The committee assumed “that houses of prostitution must exist;” and its members, therefore, took it upon themselves “to earnestly recommend to the Legislature the regulating, or permitting,” or, as they phrased it, “if the word be not deemed offensive, the licensing of prostitution.” In June, 1876, the Grand Jury of the Court of General Sessions of the same county and state, made an official presentment concerning prostitution, in which they say “that however abhorrent to the views of some, any legislation may be, which appears to legalize so great an evil, still the fact must not be lost sight of that it is an evil impossible to suppress, yet comparatively easy to regulate and circumscribe.” They conclude with a memorial to the Legislature, “to adopt as early as practicable some system of laws calculated to confine houses of prostitution, in the large cities of this state, within certain specified limits, and to subject them at all times to a careful and vigilant supervision of the Boards of Health and Police.”
Punitory laws never have, and never will cure the evils to which society is liable. “Life is sweet,” some one has said, and yet even the death penalty does not prevent murder. If the menace of death is not a deterrent, what can be said for lesser penalties like fines and imprisonment. That capital punishment is not a preventive of crime was (upon investigation) the conviction of Bentham, Beccaria, George Clinton, Lord Brougham, Judge J. W. Edmunds, William H. Seward, Wendell Phillips, Douglas Jerrold, Cassius M. Clay, Dr. Lushington, Edward Livingston, Theodore Parker, Vice-President Dallas, DeWitt Clinton, Victor Hugo, Mittermaier, John Howard, Sir Samuel Romilly, Earl Russell, Lord Houghton, Lord Osborne, John Bright, Lord Hobart, Lord Kelly, Frederick Robertson, Prof. Fawcett, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Canning, Thomas Jefferson, and hundreds of other able, thoughtful and conscientious men. Their position was not only grounded on observation, but fortified by the experience of Tuscany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Bavaria, Belgium, San Marino, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island. “There is no passion in the mind of man,” said Lord Bacon, “so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief fleeth to it; fear occupieth it.” And if “the fear of the great future,” writes Bovee, “when painted with the horrors such as only a Milton or a Pollok could depict, produces no more marked effect on human action; it is hardly reasonable to suppose that the menace of death by human law, will be very effective in the repression of crime.”
The truth is clear to Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham. He declares that neither crime nor vice can be prevented, remedied, or expelled by force of law. “Nature will have her way, if not by one channel, then by another. She will plunge underground, and come up in unexpected spots. Cunning comes to her assistance. She makes alliance with subterfuge and deceit. She is sly, swift, ubiquitous. Disappearing in New York, she turns up in Philadelphia. Expelled from the cities, she takes refuge in the towns; banished from the towns, she finds coverts in the cities; hiding in the dens and slums, creeping into the lanes, mingling with the crowd of harmless things, sheltering herself behind law. She is a Proteus, able to take on every possible shape of innocence. Refuse her brandy, she will take opium, morphine, ether, tobacco, strong coffee, in quantities equivalent to the stimulant desired. You fancy the community becoming temperate in one respect, and find it becoming intemperate in another. Opium eaters multiply as dram-drinkers decrease. The propensity is alive still, and perhaps provoked to activity by the efforts made to suppress it. The natural appetite being reinforced by anger, spite, the spirit of resistance to persecution, which grows dogged and stubborn, fortifying the sense of injustice by the pride of self-will.
“As if impatient at the slowness of the converting process, weary of the task of planting vice out, of choking the weeds of instinct with the flowers of grace, the church undertook, with violent hand, to pull up the weeds by main force. Instead of abolishing the hydra by a beautiful law of evolution, which should create a series of nobler growths; it undertook to cut off the poisonous heads, one by one. It took boys and girls, at the tenderest age, out of the world, confined them in religious houses, refused them the joy of the flesh, and the joy of the eyes, and the pride of life, barred the gates of every terrestrial garden, mortified their desires, kept them occupied with prayers and contemplations, and so tried to starve nature to death.
“Christianity, was as consistent, tried to repress the disposition to unbelief, in its opinion the most fruitful source of vice. The disposition to unbelief was regarded as the deadliest symptom of the natural, unconverted heart. To counteract it by an opposite disposition to belief was tedious and difficult, and the method of repression was resorted to. The civic power was enlisted in the work of exterminating pernicious error. Tribunals were created, laws were passed, judges and executioners were appointed, penalties were devised, heretical schools were broken up, heretical books were burned, heretical teachers were banished, silenced, incarcerated, consigned to the flames. Whole provinces were devastated, towns were destroyed, populations turned adrift to perish; the entire field of unorthodox thought was ploughed over and sown with salt. And what was the result of the method, carried out on this vast scale, with full ecclesiastical and civil powers—the sacred and the secular authorities combining, the sympathy of the Christian world aiding, no public opinion opposing, the resources of wealth conspiring with the resources of fanaticism, to make the policy of suppression effective? The issue is familiar to all who care to know the truth, from the reports of historians, who have made it their business to ascertain and tell the facts. They certainly do not bear out the conclusion that the method of suppression is wise, or even practical. On the contrary, they suggest the opinion that it is impractical as it is unwise. The failure of the method was so disastrous that it quite defeated the ends.
“If one thing is demonstrated by human history, it is this:—the attempt to suppress human nature, under any form, so it be nature that is suppressed, is futile. The old proverbs, which say, ‘Drive nature out at the door, and she comes in at the window;’ ‘You cannot expel nature with a fork;’ hold out a truth that is for all time.... Deeply rooted propensities, habits which have become a second nature, cannot be thus dealt with. No Hercules’ club will avail to kill the vital principle that grows venomous heads faster than they can be bruised. The effort to suppress nature by violent measures, is always followed, always produces a reaction, that is exactly proportioned in strength to the effort, and fairly balances it. Healthy progress is slow, gradual, measured, according to the sure conditions of cause and effect. It consists of a long line of close sequences, knit together, not mechanically, like a chain, but organically, like a muscle or a nerve. Every inch of growth implies a preceding inch of growth; there is no such thing as jump or leap from point to point. You do not make the elastic band longer by stretching it; you but loosen the cohesion of its parts; the strain being relaxed, the band resumes its first condition; the strain being continued, the band looses its elasticity and breaks. There is no more power than there is.”
M. Guizot, statesman and historian, thought it a gross delusion to believe in the sovereign power of political machinery. Every day discloses a failure, every day there reappears the belief that it needs but an act of some legislative body and a corps of officials to effect any purpose. The faith of mankind is nowhere better seen. Disappointment has been preached from the first: “Put not thy trust in legislation.” Yet the trust in legislation seems scarcely diminished. Is it not time to reject the law as a social panacea? We should now realize that measures are usually quite different in effect from what has been expected. It would be difficult to estimate the number of legislative disappointments in English and American history; “or the amount of harm which has been inflicted on society by abortive attempts at statesmanship.” History demonstrates the incapacity of law-givers. Says Mr. Jensen, “From the statute of Merton (20 Henry III.) to the end of 1872, there had been passed 18,110 public acts, of which he estimated that four-fifths had been partially or wholly repealed.” And Herbert Spencer estimated a few years ago that “in the last three sessions of the English parliament, there have been totally repealed 650 acts, belonging to the present reign alone.”
Buckle said, in this connection, every great reform has consisted “not in doing something new, but in undoing something old. The most valuable additions made to legislation have been enactments destructive of preceding legislation, and the best laws which have been passed have been those by which some former laws were repealed.... We owe no thanks to law-givers as a class; for, since the most valuable improvements in legislation are those which subvert preceding legislation, it is clear that the balance of good cannot be on their side. It is clear that the progress of civilization cannot be due to those who, on the most important subjects, have done so much harm that their successors are considered benefactors, simply because they reverse their policy, and thus restored affairs to the state in which they would have remained, if politicians had allowed them to run on in the course which the wants of society required.”
In the name of “liberty and equality,” a brave battle has been fought for individuality. Unjust and unwise interference by the state has been ably resisted. It is demanded that private judgment be released from the embrace of authority. The truth is, one man has no natural right to make laws for another. True, he may repel another, when his own rights are infringed, but he has no right to govern him. The individual is sovereign merely over himself, and not over his fellow-man.