The last three figures may well be added up to give us the number of houses where prostitutes resort; the tramps' lodging-houses, according to Mr. Kaye's description of them, (in his Social State of England,) being little better than brothels. The public may now form an intelligent judgment which is the most guilty of misrepresentation, Mr. Bacon or Mr. Chambers, and which most deserves to be branded as a calumniator of his neighbor.
He thus finishes up the unlucky Mr. Chambers:
"The witness is impeached and kicked out of court with a very ugly letter burned too deep in his forehead to be rubbed out. We are glad to acknowledge that The Catholic World is not the guilty author of these impostures, and to express our unfeigned and most willing belief that that every way respectable magazine would be incapable of contriving such tricks."
Alas Mr. Bacon! we fear that in your inconsiderate haste to brand another, the ugly letter will be burned so deep in your own forehead that you will find it very hard to efface it.
4. Having finished up Mr. Chambers in this style, he considers that his refutation of The Catholic World is complete. He says:
"The figures with which The Catholic World attempts to vindicate the superior morality of Romish over Protestant countries, are taken from a discredited and refuted writer in The Church and the World… We have given facts enough now to discredit without any particular refutation whatever else of assertion may be contained in the article on the 'comparative morality of Catholic and Protestant countries' in The Catholic World for April, 1869. We do not need to rebut the testimony of this article point by point."
These facts given relate exclusively to Mr. Chambers and the statistics of prostitution, as we have shown above, and do not affect those relating to the "criterion" of illegitimacy.
The substance—as Mr. Bacon calls it, the gist—of the article of The Catholic World remains as yet intact; it has not even been examined by the critic. Who gave Mr. Bacon the right to say, as he does, that the substance of our article was taken from The Church and the World? There is an unblushing effrontery about this statement which is astonishing. There is nothing in the article to warrant it. Whenever we quoted The Church and the World, the reference is made at the foot of the page, and we distinctly state, there, that our figures on illegitimacy are taken from the Journals of the Statistical Society of London. Our readers can judge of this proceeding for themselves.
But Mr. Bacon criticises us in severe terms for using these Journals, and says: