The loss of liberty to the extent to which it exists, implies a degradation of the State, and, if persisted in, can only lead to its dissolution. No person or class of persons must be under the cringing fear of having imputed to them offenses of which they are innocent, and of being taken into custody in consequence of such imputation. They must not be liable to be detained in custody without so much as a prima facie case being made out, such as in the opinion of a responsible judicial officer leaves a presumption of guilt. They must not be liable to be detained for an indefinite time without having the question of their guilt or innocence investigated by the best attainable methods. When the fact comes to be inquired into, the best attainable methods of eliciting the truth must be used. In default of any one of these securities, public liberty must be said to be proportionately at a very low ebb.
Great effort has been made to introduce this system into the United States, and a National Board of Health, created by Congress in 1879, is carefully watched lest its irresponsible powers lead to its encroachment upon the liberties and personal rights of women. A resolution adopted March 5, 1881, at a meeting of the New York committee appointed to thwart the effort to license vice in this country, shows the need of its watchful care.
Resolved, That this committee has learned with much regret and apprehension of the action of the American Public Health Association, at its late annual meeting in New Orleans, in adopting a sensational report commending European governmental regulation of prostitution, and looking to the introduction in this country, with modifications, through the medium of State legislative enactments and municipal ordinances, of a kindred immoral system of State-regulated social vice.
Even the Latin races in their lowest degradation did not put the sanction of law upon the open sale of women to vice, says Mrs. Butler. This remained for the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races, under the highest christian civilization in a class of women licensed by the State, under protection and name of the head of the Anglican Church, as “Queen’s Women,” “Government Women,” both Church and State here uniting in the nefarious business of making women, by law, the slaves of man’s lowest nature. A system which openly declares “the necessity” for woman’s foulest degradation, in order to protect man in his departure from the moral law, a system that annually sends its tens of thousands down to a death from which christian society grants no resurrection. Similar religious beliefs beget similar results. Times change, and with them methods, but as long as the foundation of the christian church of every name, rests upon the belief in woman’s created inferiority to man, and that she brought sin into the world, so long will similar social, industrial, and moral results follow. The Catholic, Greek, and Protestant divisions, all degrade women but under different forms. That the woman of every christian land fears to meet a man in a secluded place by day or by night, is of itself sufficient proof of the low state of christian morality. Several states have at different times attempted the enactment of similar laws through bills introduced into their legislatures; requiring constant watchfulness on part of the friends of social purity lest this great wrong be consummated, a wrong primarily against woman. In certain cities, as St. Louis, where such registration and license was for some time demanded, the foulest injuries were perpetrated upon entirely innocent and reputable women, injuries for which they had no redress.[72] Under the legalized vice system, women are slaves, not possessing even the right of repudiating this kind of life.
A gentleman traveling in France, 1866, relates a most pathetic instance of the attempted escape and the forcible return to the house of infamy, of a young girl whose person there was at the command of every brute who chose to pay the price of her master. The tram car in which this gentleman was riding, crowded with ladies and girls of refined appearance, was suddenly stopped on one of the principal streets of Havre, by a dense crowd swaying back and forth across the track. He said:
I then became aware that two men, tall powerful fellows, were carrying or rather trying to carry, a young woman seemingly between sixteen and eighteen years of age, who occupied herself in violently clutching at everything and anything from a lamp-post to a shop door handle, a railing, and the pavement itself.
As a matter of course, her body swayed between the two men, half dragging on the pavement, her clothing besmeared with mud and blood. For the rough handling had superadded crimson to other stains. This proved the case to be not one of accident, although the screams, shrieks and cries of the poor girl might well have led to the belief of her having been the victim of a run over, and of being in convulsions of acute agony. Her agonizing cries for “pity,” “police,” “protection,” “help,” “murder,” “Oh! oh! oh!” were reiterated incessantly. At one particular moment her contortions, and the violence of her efforts to free herself, or even to bring her head into a more convenient position than hanging face downward, while a yard or so of long, bedraggled hair, all loose, was sweeping up the dirt from the pavement, were so violent that her two carriers had to let her slip from their grasp on to the flagstones.
All this time, unmoved by, and totally indifferent to her piercing cries, stood by, or strolled calmly onward with the crowd, a policeman in uniform and on duty. My enquiry of, “What is all this piece of work about? Is it an accident? Is the woman drunk, or what?” He smilingly answered: “Oh! not drunk, sir, not at all, not at all. It’s only one of those young licensed girls, who has been trying to escape from her house, and that’s her master, who has just caught her again, and is carrying her back to his place. That’s all!”
“I was powerless to help.” In many christian countries a traffic in girls exists under government protection and license.
Criminal vice chiefly finds its feminine prey among the poorest and most helpless class who are the victims of this new commercial business, its customers scattered in every christian land, and accepting their spoil only upon the certificate of some reputable physician as to their innocence and previous uncontamination. Crime, vice, and cruelty, were never before so closely united in one infamous system; the purchase of young innocence by old iniquity under protection of law.[73] A bill was introduced into the English parliament to check this business of girl destruction, accompanied by proof so direct, and proof of the necessity of immediate action so great, that it was not doubted that the bill would pass at once. Yet it encountered secret[74] and powerful opposition, was finally referred to a committee already so overburdened with work and so far behindhand that it was manifest that the bill could not be reached in years. Gilded vice laughed at this result, and the iniquitous business proceeded as before. At that period the Pall Mall Gazette entered into an investigation whose results roused the whole civilized world. Even clergymen, ignoring the fact that christian teaching had brought this vice into being, joined the press in scathing reproof of patrician London iniquity.[75] Societies were formed for the protection of young girls from the vice of men who used the power of wealth and station to corrupt the daughters of the poor.[76]