“This extreme attention to appearances is, in fact, one of the principal attractions of a residence in Paris. The city is not only maintained free of inanimate filth, but of animate filth as well; at least, you are not forced to see it if you do not wish to. In London no lady dare walk out unattended after 8 o’clock in the evening, and after 11 o’clock she will have her eyes and ears insulted, no matter how well attended, while in Paris she may remain in the streets to any hour of the night, and neither have her eyes offended nor her ears insulted.
“How is this happy result accomplished? In 1851 the official register of the police of Paris showed 4300 public girls on its books; the number now may be stated at 5000. These girls and the houses in which they live are subjected to a series of stringent laws which renders them innoxious and inoffensive to the community, the police adopting the principle that since it is impossible to suppress the evil, it should be rendered as inoffensive to the public eye and to the public salubrity as possible. All these houses are obliged to be closed at 11 o’clock precisely. The girls are obliged to remain in the house, and the windows are always covered with blinds, night and day. A few girls are permitted, here and there, to walk up and down, in front of their door, from 7 to 11 o’clock precisely, but it is against the law to accost the passers-by. The houses are visited once a week by a medical and an ordinary inspector—real inspectors, appointed by government, and not humbugging ward politicians.
“Another class of girls, and much the larger class, are those who frequent the public balls, concerts, and theatres—girls who live alone in public lodging-houses, and who, for the most part, are not enrolled on the police-books nor submitted to the ordinary sanitary regulations. But this class are no more permitted than the rest, either in the street or at their favorite evening resorts, to accost people for purposes of commerce. The streets and the public balls are full of policemen in citizen’s dress, whose business it is to detect such girls as violate the law in regard to addressing people, and to put their names on the police-books, thus requiring them to take out a license, and to submit to all the police regulations on the new class to which they have entered. As a girl regards herself as forever lost when her name is once placed on the police-book, and as she never knows when an officer’s eye may be upon her, she takes good care to violate as rarely as possible this law prohibiting solicitations in public. This class are always elegantly dressed; it is notorious even that they are the first to initiate and to propagate those very fashions which make the tour of the world as the latest Paris modes. Many of them are reserved and elegant in their manners, and require a punctiliousness of etiquette which would not be out of place in the most aristocratic saloon. But one of the great aids to the Paris police in the maintenance of public decency in this class, is the fact that they do not use strong drinks; a drunken public woman is never seen. As liquor is the greatest debaser of mankind, this one fact strikes out a marked line of distinction between this class here and in England and the United States. The great majority do not lose their self-respect, and they take good care of their health, hoping later on to reform and get married. This is here the rule, whereas in England and the United States they throw themselves away as rapidly as possible.
“It is thus that the fashionable promenades of Paris, the public balls, and the gardens even, may be frequented by ladies and children at all hours of the evening and night without once seeing any of those offensive movements of public women so common in the streets of English and American cities. Contrast this state of things with that of London. Let the reader, if he has ever lived there, recall to mind the Strand, the Haymarket, Piccadilly, Leicester Square, and Regent Street—the fashionable business quarters of the city. One hesitates to enter upon a description of such a scene. It refreshes his historical recollections of the decadence of Rome; his name should be Plato to look upon such sights. The streets swarm with drunken and foul-spoken young girls—often mere children; and when I say swarm, I mean that you have to push your way to get through them. Is it then strange that the citizens of London should feel scandalized at this state of things, or that its journals or its church-wardens should seek to find a remedy for the nuisance? They will think of every thing else before they arrive at the simple, effective, and beautifully working Paris system, because they are a Protestant people and must not compromise with a sin. It must be left to find its own level. Honorable citizens must consent to allow their sons, often their families, to come in contact with these demoralizing, stony-hearted horrors of the streets; they must suffer individually and as a community from the vile tendencies of street prostitution, because they hesitate to legalize it and to give it over to the care of the police. To see the finest evening promenades of a Protestant and Christian city given up exclusively to the unutterable shames and horrors of street-prostitution is a problem in the catalogue of inconsistencies which Catholic and infidel France can not fathom. In France the law acts on the principle that for a public woman to be seen in the street is an insult to public taste, and hence, when it is necessary for these girls to be conveyed to prison, to the Hospital, or to the dispensary of the Prefecture of Police, they are mounted in close carriages constructed for the purpose; or when by hazard they are obliged to take a public fiacre they are required to keep the blinds down. You may say what you please about the surface-morality of the French, but their respect for the public eye does honor to their civilization, and their law on this evil would be well adopted elsewhere. There is no truer principle in civil government than that the moral sores of society should be hidden as much as possible from the public view, for it is now too late in the day to combat the maxim long ago put in print by Pope, that vice is propagated by a familiarity with it. The French law may be culpable in permitting masked balls and the keeping of concubines, but these are affairs that belong to the interior, which the public need not see if they do not wish to; the important distinction is, that the French law does not compel an honest father of a family, in returning from church or theatre, to push his way through mobs of drunken lewd women, who salute his children’s ears with language they ought never to hear.
“In one of its last articles on the general subject of prostitution, the London Times makes some judicious remarks which are completely verified in the same class in Paris. Thus the Times declares that the proper method of diminishing the number of these unfortunates (for to think of eradicating the evil is an illusion) is not by missionary efforts directed to them, but rather to their poor parents; for these poor girls were raised in sin, and never made a fall. The same thing holds good here. Ninety-five hundredths of all the public women of Paris are born and raised in filthiness of mind and body; at the age of ten, twelve, and fourteen years they are already prostitutes and thieves, and when they get their first silk dress, their first fine toilet, earned in their shameful profession, they take a step higher in the scale of morality; for then they cease to steal, they acquire a certain degree of pride in their conduct, they are more respectful and decently behaved. So that, paradoxical as it may seem, the immense majority of the public women of Paris, instead of making a fall, have actually been promoted in the scale of morality. But all these women know nothing else than the life in which they have been raised; they are fit for nothing else, they are incorrigibly averse to all the moral suasion that can be addressed to them, and the real remedy is an enlightenment of the parents of such children, a general improvement in the moral tone of the lowest classes. In fine, if it is an evil which can not be eradicated, if the children of beggars, and rag-pickers, and concièrges will fall into evil-doing, it is right to protect society at least from the public demonstration of their vile occupation by the passage of effective police laws.”
As an indication that the sentiments advanced in this chapter are entertained by others of the medical profession, and as endorsing our views to a considerable extent, the reader’s attention is requested to the annexed report adopted at a special meeting of the Medical Board of Bellevue Hospital, New York, in reply to interrogatories addressed to them by Isaac Townsend, Esq., President of the Board of Governors of the Alms-house (by whose direction they are embodied in this work); and also to a report from H. N. Whittelsey, M.D., Resident Physician of the Nursery Hospital, Randall’s Island, on the same subject.
“Report of the Medical Board of Bellevue Hospital in reply to Interrogatories of Isaac Townsend, Esq., President of the Board of Governors of the Alms-house, upon Constitutional Syphilis.
“Office of the Governors of the Alms-house, Rotunda, Park,
“New York, August 24, 1855.
“To the Medical Board, Bellevue Hospital: