The actual repeal of the laws was retarded, and we began to feel in 1885 that we must make strenuous efforts. There had been on several occasions solemn meetings of a devotional character on the question, notably one which lasted several days, and where all the churches were represented. This was promoted by the Society of Friends. An “All Day of Prayer” was called in February, 1885. A paper was issued in advance, giving the subjects to which each succeeding hour would especially be devoted.
During the year which followed this meeting James Stuart worked with all his heart and might in Parliament for the success of our cause. I believe that the Cabinet were rather surprised when a petition was presented to them by him, signed by two hundred Members of Parliament on both sides of the House, adjuring the Government to give immediate attention to this question, as the patience of the people of England had been sufficiently tried.
At the General Election this year, Josephine Butler issued A Woman’s Appeal to the Electors, some extracts from which are here given.
By whom are we in future to be governed? Women are asking this question on the eve of the approaching elections, even more anxiously, I believe, than men; more anxiously, because they themselves are still denied the right and power of expressing by their votes their opinion of the candidates who are crowding forward asking to be allowed to represent them in Parliament, and to have a share in making the laws by which they and their children, their households, and even their nurseries, are in future to be influenced for good or for evil. As a woman, I am deeply thankful that at last the question of private and personal character is coming to the front in the selection of our representatives. I hope the day is past in which it could be said or believed that it was possible for a man who was corrupt in his private life and character to be a useful, just, or beneficent ruler. Who can reckon up the miseries, the wrongs, the soul murders, and the destruction of young lives which have been going on for years past, owing in a great measure to the shameful state of our laws on questions bearing on morality, that shameful state being obstinately maintained year by year by men in Parliament whose very presence there is a block to all good and pure measures?
I would suggest that each candidate should be asked questions in some such form as the following:—
(1) Will he vote for the total repeal of the C.D. Acts?
(2) Is he prepared to vote for a parliamentary enquiry into the reason why the prosecution of Mrs. Jeffries was dropped, and why Inspector Minahan was dismissed from the police force?
(3) Is he prepared to vote for, or to ask a question in Parliament on the subject of a parliamentary enquiry as to the circumstances which have induced the prosecution by the Treasury of Mr. Stead, Mr. Booth, and their assistants, to whose labours the Criminal Law Amendment Act has been mainly due; while no prosecution has been undertaken by the Treasury against any single one of the real offenders, whose crimes these persons have done so much to expose?
We may, and do hope for a purer Parliament, if the electors will wake up to the tremendous issues now before this country, issues immeasurably greater than those depending on the triumph of this or that political party; but when we shall have secured a purer Parliament, the struggle for a purified nation and a saved people will only be at its beginning. Unless God by the might of His Holy Spirit works powerfully and widely in the hearts of our people—in our own hearts, each one of us—we shall not be saved as a people in the mighty shaking of the nations which is at hand. The diseases of our own hearts and of our social system, if but slightly healed, will break forth again; moral corruption will set in again like a flood-tide; the noble watchwords of to-day will become the rotten and wretched Shibboleths of to-morrow; we shall have “a name to live while we are dead.” For my part, I have not an atom of faith in any reform, moral, social, or political, which has not at its root a real repentance before God, a ruthless banishing from the heart and life by individuals of all that is opposed to justice, purity, and holiness, and a quickening of every power of the soul by the breath of the Spirit of God. Christian politicians, lovers of our country, let us, while we work, also pray—unitedly pray—that God will arise and, taking our nation in hand, will chasten, train, and mould it for the carrying out of His own purposes in the future of the world.