But a few years previous to these disclosures in reference to Eton, the civilized world was horrified at the discovery of the vice which destroyed Sodom, among some of the most wealthy, aristocratic young men of London. And yet with knowledge of the depravity into which this most christian city had sunk, the shocking character of the disclosures of the Pall Mall Gazette in reference to the traffic in young girls, involved details of vice so atrocious as to exceed belief had not the testimony been of the most convincing character. These mere children were lured by the most diabolical vices into traps, where by drugs, force, or cajoling, tens of thousands were brought to moral and physical ruin, innocent victims of a religious theory which through the christian ages has trained men into a belief that woman was but created as a plaything for their passions. That boys of the highest families, in the earliest years of their adolescence, should voluntarily associate with those vicious women who form a class created by the public sentiment of man as necessary to the safety of the feminine element in households, is not surprising to a philosophic observer. It was the direct result of an adequate cause. The wrong to woman passed so silently by, reached its culmination in the destruction of young boys. At Eton, suspension was tenderness, expulsion from that school ruining a boy’s future.
Succeeding the revelation of London vice, came divulgence of similar shameless practices on the part of high government officials and men foremost in public life, in the Canadian Colonies. In Ottawa and other Canadian cities in which upon this side of the Atlantic the wholesale despoliation of young girls but too closely paralleled London and other trans-Atlantic cities. These were closely followed by the revelations in regard to the north-western pineries of the United States, to whose camps women are decoyed, under pretense of good situations and high wages into a life whose horrors are not equaled in any other part of the christian world; where the raw-hide is used to compel drinking and dancing, and high stockades, bull-dogs and pistols prevent escape, until death—happily of quick occurrence—releases the victim. As elsewhere, men of wealth and high position, law-makers, are identified with this infamy.[84]
Among the notable facts due to an investigation of prostitution is that its support largely comes from married men, the “heads of families”; men of mature years, fathers of sons and daughters. To those seemingly least exposed to temptation is the sustaining of this vice due. Men of influence and position no less in this country than in England frequent disreputable houses. In 1878, the body of a woman buried in the principal cemetery of Syracuse, N.Y. was exhumed on suspicion of poison. One of the prominent city dailies said, “she commenced leading an abandoned life and went to Saratoga where she ran a large establishment of that character. Her place was the center for men of influence and position.” A few years since the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage accompanied by high police officials investigated such houses in person. In a sermon based upon knowledge there obtained Mr. Talmage declared those dens of infamy to be supported by married men, chiefly of the better classes.
He found them to be judges of courts, distinguished lawyers, officers in churches, political orators that talk on the Republican, Democratic and Greenback platforms about God and good morals till you might almost take them for evangelists expecting a thousand converts in one night. On the night of our exploration I saw their carriages leaving these dignitaries at the shambles of death. Call the roll in the house of dissipation, and if the inmates will answer you will find stock-brokers from Wall street, large importers on Broadway, iron merchants, leather merchants, wholesale grocers and representatives from all the wealthy classes.
But I have something to tell you more astonishing than that the houses of iniquity are supported by wealthy people when I tell you that they are supported by the heads of families—fathers and husbands, with the awful perjury upon them of broken marriage vows; and while many of them keep their families on niggardly portions, with hardly enough to sustain life, have their thousands for the diamonds and the wardrobe and equipage of iniquity. In the name of high heaven I cry out against this popular iniquity. Such men must be cast out from social life and from business relations. If they will not reform, overboard with them from all decent circles. I lift one-half the burden of malediction from the un-pitied head of woman and hurl it upon the blasted pate of offending man. What society wants is a new division of its anathema.
Without the support of the heads of families, in one month the most of the haunts of sin in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, would crumble into ruin.
That one-half of the children born into the world die before maturity, is acknowledged. Physiologists and philanthropists seek for the cause except where most likely to be found. To that mysterious interchange of germs and life principles, whose chemistry is still not understood, must we look for aid in solving this great problem. These questions woman is forced to consider; their investigation belong to her by right, as she and her children are the chief victims. She can no longer close her lips in silence, saying it does not concern me. No longer does the modern woman allow her husband to think for her; she is breaking from church bonds, from the laws of men alone, from all the restrictions the state has pressed upon her; she is no longer looking without, for guidance, but is heeding the commands of her own soul.
With such facts before us, we are not surprised that women are found who prefer the freedom and private respect accorded to a mistress, rather than the restrictions and tyranny of the marital household. Mr. Talmage but followed in the footsteps of Anna Dickinson, who took upon herself an acquaintance with this class of women. Asking one woman living as mistress why she did not marry, the girl contemptuously ejaculated:
Marry! umph! I too well know what my mother suffered in the married state. She was my father’s slave, cruelly treated, subject to all manner of abuse, neglected, halfstarved, all her appeals and protests unheeded. How is it with me? I am free. I have all the money I want to use, a thing my mother never had. I come and go as I please, something my mother could never do. I am well treated, my mother was not. Should I be abused there is no law to hold me, no court to sit upon my right to my own child as there was with my mother. No, no, no, I am infinitely better off as a mistress than as a wife.
And yet so pronounced in difference are the moral codes by which men and women are judged, that while living together in unlegalized marital relations, the man is welcomed into society, is looked upon as fit for marriage with the most innocent young girl, while should he partially condone the wrong done the woman whose life under present condition of society he has ruined, by marriage with her, society for this one reputable act brands him as most unworthy. It is but a few years since a cavalry officer in Washington was court-martialled, found guilty and sentenced to dismissal from the army on charge of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, because of his legally marrying a woman with whom he had been living un-married. What a commentary upon christian civilization! While living an illicit relation with this woman, he was regarded as an officer and a gentleman; when taking upon himself a legal relation he was court-martialled. Lecky says: “Much of our own feeling on this subject is due to laws and moral systems which were founded by men and were in the first instance designed for their own protection.” As far as he has examined this question, Lecky is correct, but he has failed to touch the primal cause of such laws and systems—the church doctrine of woman’s created inferiority to man. View these questions from any stand-point the cause remains the same. To this cause we trace the crime and criminals of society today. To this cause the darkness of an age which has not yet realized that civilization means a recognition of the rights of others at every point of contact.