Under English christian law it has never been a crime to morally destroy a girl of thirteen, because under that law she is held responsible for her own undoing. Girls of this tender age, infants, in all that pertains to the control of property, incapable of making a legal contract, because of immaturity of understanding, are yet held by that law as of age to protect themselves from a seducer; held to possess sufficient judgment to thwart all the wiles of men old in years and crime—of men protected in their iniquities by laws of their own making—men shielded by the legislation of their own sex—men who escape all punishment because men alone enact the laws. It is not alone the waifs of society who fall a prey to the seducer, but the children of reputable parents and good homes are waylaid on their way to and from school and lured to ruin.[77] To the modern ghoul it is of no moment upon whom he preys, provided his victim be but young and innocent. Lecky has portrayed the standard of morals of the present day as far higher than in pagan Rome, but we must be allowed to doubt this. Immoral sentiment is more deftly hidden, and law more dependent upon public opinion. As soon as the general consensus of public opinion rises in opposition to girl destruction, the law will regulate itself in accordance with this standard.
Lord Shaftesbury, upon this point, said:
The Pall Mall Gazette has published to the world disclosures of a most horrible, and many would think of an incredible character. Not even the questionings of peace or war or most intricate foreign policy, ought to interfere with energetic measures to suppress these evils. But before we can make any great advance, there must be a considerable move of public opinion. It must be vigorous and determined, and I will tell you why. You may depend upon it that no government undertakes a question of a really important and social character until it has been forced upon it by the voice of public opinion. Consequently it is our duty to bring the voice of that public opinion to bear on this question. Law can be evaded in every possible way. The only thing that defies evasion is a wide spread and universally extended public opinion. I hope that we shall be able to create such a public opinion throughout the country that persons will be induced to come forward voluntarily and give evidence. The plague spot is too deep, too wide, and there are too many persons interested in the continuance of it, to enable us easily to wipe it out. Uncommon energy will be necessary; and I hope we shall raise such an amount of popular indignation that the effect will be irresistable.
But the public feeling, the public indignation against these enormities did not rise to the height of restrictive legislation. The policy of a portion both of the English and the American press was that of suppression, upon the plea that a knowledge of these crimes would be injurious to the morals of society. Suppression was also the aim of the “royal princes, dukes, nobles, and leading men,” who were the principal patrons and supporters of this nefarious system. Suppression is the strongest opposing weapon against reform. To compel change needs light and discussion. “It is only when wrongs find a tongue that they become righted.” Woman, legally powerless in the doing away with abuses, or the punishment of crime, must depend upon publicity for the creation of a public sentiment in her favor.
One of the most remarkable facts connected with disclosures of this crime against womankind was the extent to which men of all ages and character were found identified with it. The world of business and that of politics were equally as well known in the haunts of vice as in the outside world, but they were judged by a different standard and their relative importance was altogether changed.[78] It was a literal day of judgment, in which evil character, deftly hidden during public life, was there unveiled.
The most horribly striking fact connected with this investigation was the extreme youth of these victims. The report of the committee of the House of Lords, 1882, declared the evidence proved beyond doubt that juvenile vice from an almost incredibly early age was increasing at an appalling extent in England, and especially in London; ten thousand girls, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years of age, had been drawn into this vice, an English paper declaring the ignorance of these girls to be almost incredible. The condition of these girl-children is far more horrible than that of the victims of infant marriage in Syria, Egypt, India; the infant victims of christian lands are more fully destroyed, soon becoming mental, physical and moral wrecks; alternate imbecility and wild screaming being common among these child victims of vice.[79]
Christianity created the modern brothel, which as closely follows in the wake of evangelical work of the Moody and Sankey style, as did public women the ancient church councils.[80] While in the past the legal wrongs of woman in the marriage relation, in which she is robbed of name, personality, earnings, children, had a tendency to drive her to live with man outside of the authority of church or state, the occupations recently opened to her whereby she can gain a reputable livelihood by her own exertions, has greatly increased the ranks of single women.[81] No longer compelled to marry for a home or position, the number of young girls who voluntarily refrain from marriage, by choice living single, increases each year. No longer driven to immorality for bread, a great diminution has taken place in the ranks of “public women.”[82] No longer forced by want into this life, the lessening number of such women not meeting the requirements of patrons of vice, resulted in the organization of a regular system for the abduction, imprisonment, sale, and exportation of young girls; England and Germany most largely controlling this business, although Belgium, Holland and France, Switzerland, several countries of South America, Canada, and the United States are to some extent also engaged in this most infamous traffic.[83]
Foreign traffic in young English girls was known to exist long before the revelation of the Pall Mall Gazette made English people aware of the extent of the same system under the home government. It was this widely extended and thoroughly organized commerce in girl-children which roused a few people to earnest effort against it, and secured the formation of a society called “Prevention of Traffic in English Girls.” To the chairman of this society, Mr. Benjamin Scott, was the first official suggestion due that terminated in that investigation by Editor Stead, which for a moment shook the civilized world, and held christian England to light as a center of the vilest, most odious, most criminal slave traffic the world ever knew.
London, the great metropolis of christian England, the largest city of ancient or modern times, is acknowledged by statisticians and sociologists to be the point where crime, vice, despair, and misery are found in their deepest depth and greatest diversity. Not Babylon of old, whose name is the synonym of all that is vile; not Rome, “Mother of Harlots,” not Corinth, in whose temple a thousand women were kept for prostitution in service of the god, not the most savage lands in all their barbarity have ever shown a thousandth part of the human woe to be found in the city of London, that culmination of modern christian civilization. The nameless crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, the vileness of ancient Greece, which garnered its most heroic men, its most profound philosophers, are but amusements among young men of the highest rank in England; West End, the home of rank and wealth, of university education, being the central hell of this extended radius of vice. The destruction of girl-children by old men is paralleled by the self-destruction of boys and youth through vices that society hesitates to name. Yet each is the result of that system of teaching which declares a woman a being divinely created for the use and sensual gratification of man.
Having for years tacitly consented to the destruction of the girl-children of its poor, at the rate of twenty thousand annually, England was yet greatly shocked to find its boys of tender age and aristocratic lineage sunken in a mire of immorality. Eton, the highest institution of its kind in Great Britain, having in charge the education of boys connected with the most illustrious English families, recently became the source of a scandal which involved a great number of students. An extensive secret inquiry resulted in the suspension of nearly three hundred boys after full confession. Supplied with unlimited pocket money, they had bribed parkkeepers and the police to silence.