Statistics of Prostitution.
Clandestine Prostitution.
Every great capital believes that some other great capital is the most vicious in the world. London accords that distinction to Paris, Paris to Vienna, but these accusations are vague, and it is impossible to know the truth. The evidence in the Divorce Courts reveals a little of it now and then, and is good evidence so far as it extends, but it is never published in France. Statistics of prostitution are also admissible as evidence, but it is difficult to found any comparative argument upon them; because, in great cities, there is so much clandestine prostitution, so much eking out of miserable incomes by that means. The decent, modestly-dressed girl, the sad-looking young widow whom nobody suspects, may have yielded to the pressure of want.
The Author’s Unwillingness to believe Evil on Insufficient Evidence.
I am unable to follow the English habit of taking French novels as evidence of the general corruption of French life, and will give good reasons for this rejection. Before doing so let me observe that I am equally unwilling to believe evil, on insufficient evidence, of the English. For example, I have never attached the slightest weight to what were called the “revelations of the Pall Mall Gazette,” which all the viler French newspapers affected to believe merely because they would have been, if true, such precious facts for the enemy.
The English Arguments from French Fiction.
The English argument usually assumes one of two forms:—
1. Novelists draw from life; consequently, as adultery is almost universal in French novels it must be equally common in French life.
2. French people purchase novels about adultery in great numbers; consequently, the readers of these books must commit adultery themselves.
Frequency of Crime in Imaginative Literature.