CHAPTER VI.

Having now pointed out the principal illegalities and oppressions which are the necessary results of a principle so evil as that which is embodied in the Acts to which we object, I shall point out two great evils, which are not yet fully appreciated, even by the most earnest opponents of the Acts.

It may be stated generally, that the very existence of these laws in any portion of the country gradually educates the nation to political incapacity and to moral obliquity, evils so vast and so insidious, as, by spreading like a plague-spot through the whole nation, to involve it eventually in national downfall.

I. It is already plainly perceived by many that the educational influence of these Acts is subversive of individual purity and private morality. It has not been so plainly perceived, however, that that influence is equally subversive of the balance of the social system, of the power of self-government, and of the due relations to each other of the different parts of the body politic, which hitherto have so largely contributed to the manliness of our national character.

Sir Edward Creasy says,[76] “It has been our happiness in England to combine the system of local distribution of power in matters of local importance with the system of centralization of power in matters of imperial policy. The practice of our nation for centuries establishes the rule that except for matters clearly of direct, general, and imperial interest, centralization is unconstitutional. I dwell on this topic, because during the last few years the principle of local self-government has been menaced, if not impaired, and because hasty and unreflecting observers can hardly have appreciated its national importance.”

“We shall find,” he continues,[77] “in local self-government infinitely more force than centralization ever could produce; we shall find that force to be far more general in its operation; and we shall find it far more enduring and certain, because it springs, not from the accidental idiosyncrasy of an individual ruler, but from the national spirit, and from the ancestral habits of a whole people. We ought to reflect also upon the pernicious indirect effects which centralization produces in a State, and on the advantages which we as a nation derive from being self-trained and locally practised in the discharge of political duties. We should listen to the testimony of intelligent foreigners, of men who have lived under a plausible administrative hierarchy, and who speak feelingly as to its effects.”

The great French statesman De Tocqueville devotes a chapter to the distinction between centralization in matters of imperial government and centralization in administrative matters of local interest; and while he shows the necessity of the first, he demonstrates the pernicious effects of the second, notwithstanding its specious appearances. It is scarcely necessary to remark that the Contagious Diseases Acts belong distinctly to that class of interests the imperial control of which he so strongly reprobates.

Professor Lieber, a German by birth, but an American by adoption, after describing the principles of the American Congress and the English Parliament as free institutions, expressly states, “Yet the self-government of our country, or of England, could be considered by us as little more than oil floating on the surface of the water, did it consist only in Congress and the State Legislatures with us (_i.e._, in America), or in Parliament in England. Self-government, to be of a penetrative character, requires the institutional self-government of the country or district; it requires that everything which, without general inconvenience, can be left to the circle to which it belongs, be thus left to its own management.”

The great German historian Niebuhr also, “before whose eyes the annals and institutions of almost every State, ancient or modern, were made to shed light on the annals and institutions of the rest,”—who was a man of practice and action, had spent part of his manhood in England, and had been employed in arduous undertakings for his own government, in a book on the _Internal Administration of Great Britain_,—edited in order, if possible, to induce his own government to reorganize their State on better principles, maintains that “British liberty depends at least as much on the local self-appliances of local governments, as it does upon Parliament.”

“The self-governing spirit of our English system of internal polity,” says Bowyer,[78] “explains that remarkable willingness to obey and even assist the law, which has sometimes excited the admiration of foreigners in this country.”

M. Le Cour, the Chef-Administratif of the medical Police, who are employed in Paris for carrying out the laws in that city which are similar to the Contagious Diseases Acts, gives it as his opinion that “such Acts will work admirably in England, and will succeed there better than in Paris, owing to the habits of obedience to the law which are so universally diffused among the people of England,” oblivious that the very system he wishes to graft upon this spirit of obedience, is that which contains in itself the seeds of the ruin of that spirit of obedience, and which strikes at the foundation of that very habit of local self-government to which this spirit of obedience is so universally referred. Such is the political blindness of those who legislate for the necessity of prostitution.

In a treatise by the French statesman Count Montalembert, “On the Political Future of England,” he forcibly exposes the evils which must ensue if there is any increase of administrative centralization, of what he terms “bureaucratie,” in this country; especially he shows its debasing influence on a nation in another matter, and warns us to reflect on the fact that the multiplication of salaried functionaries creates a population of place-hunters. “An universal thirst,” says he, “after salaried public employments is the worst of social maladies. It infects the whole body politic with a venal and servile humour, which by no means excludes, even amongst those who may be the best paid, the spirit of faction and anarchy. It creates a crowd of hungry suitors, capable of every excess to satisfy their longings, and fit instruments for every base purpose as soon as they are in place.”

These general statements will commend themselves to the minds of most English readers. Let them then be fully awake to the dangers which are now undermining these cherished advantages of the system under which we have, up till this time, lived. It is strange that while a strong stand is being made at present for the freer exercise of local self-government, and a practical step in that direction has been taken in the extension of the municipal franchise, a step, and a most fatal step, has been taken in the opposite direction by the Government through the Acts which we condemn; and we have already had exhibited to us as its fruits a sight unwonted in England—the sight of an energetic Corporation completely set aside and overruled within the limits of its own jurisdiction by the creatures of imperial tyranny, the very lowest of the executive. This is the first-fruits in England of the great and fatal effort at centralization begun by these Acts.

Are the people of England willing, not only that personal liberty should be interfered with, but that corporate freedom should be threatened with annihilation by these Acts of Parliament, which unless repealed will no doubt be followed by others equally aggressive in principle, against which we shall then have no argument,—a result which will, as we may learn from the words which we have just quoted, be little less than the destruction of the stability of English political life?

And this centralization, which is so much to be deprecated, is introduced by these Acts with those very concomitants which render its effect most ruinous, namely, the establishment of a system of police espionage, a thing utterly foreign and abhorrent to all the instincts and convictions of Englishmen. On the subject of that constant and minute police interference which these laws have introduced so extensively into England, I may quote the weighty words of Lieber.

“It is necessary,” says he, in his _Political Ethics_, “to have seen nations who have been forced for centuries to submit to constant and minute police interference, in order to have any conception of the degree to which manly action, self-dependence, resoluteness, and inventiveness of proper means can be eradicated from a whole community. On this account systematic interference weakens governments instead of strengthening them; for in times of danger, when popular energy is necessary, when every man must do his duty, or the State is lost, men having forgotten how to act, look listlessly to the Government, not to themselves. The victories of Napoleon over the many States east and south of France were in a great measure owing to this natural course of things.”

These words need no comment. But can we imagine any form of the evil here indicated more fit than that embodied in these Acts to produce the pernicious consequences described, and to lead men back from manhood into babyhood? For by these Acts it is implied that men are so helplessly the slaves of their own lower passions, so little in possession of the gift of self-control, so little fit to manage themselves, that they must needs be protected from the consequences of their own unnecessary vice, and taught to lean upon this great centralizing and protecting authority, in place of on the help of God and a resolute and manly will.

II. The Contagious Diseases Acts have been introduced into England solely on medical grounds. They have been argued for by their supporters solely on medical grounds, and every attempt has been continually made to restrict the question to a medical question. Yet the continual of the opposition on the immoral tendencies of the Acts, and the generally evinced and growing determination of the country at large to treat the question as a moral question, and to regard that question as of primary importance in comparison with the medical question—all this has brought about a very significant change in the position taken up by the supporters of the Acts, who now attempt to make out that their tendencies are highly moral, as perhaps they may endeavour, after reading the arguments advanced in this Essay, to make them out to be highly constitutional. They have openly boasted in and out of Parliament that more has been achieved by their salaried police and medical officers than has ever been accomplished by the unwearying efforts of Christian societies and independent workers, and that their achievements in the matter of spiritual influence and moral conversions have dwarfed all that has ever been recorded in the annals of Christian evangelization in this direction.[79] Similarly they will no doubt by and by show with equal success that the system which they have introduced is a bulwark of our constitutional liberties, in comparison of which Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus Act, and Jury Trial have been lamentable and conspicuous failures.

In the expectation of having this proved to us in numerous pamphlets to the absolute satisfaction of the writers of the same, I cannot avoid this opportunity of investigating a little more closely the so-called moral arguments brought forward in favour of the Acts. In doing so I do not for a moment intend to return to that unprofitable dispute which they prolong regarding certain reclamations which they claim of a percentage of their patients in hospital. But I would call attention to the following fact, that our opponents always, and up to the present moment, in speaking of the “moral view,” include in that expression only that wretchedly limited portion of the question which relates to the annual exodus from this degrading trade of a certain number of public women, an exodus which they who are acquainted with the circumstances of the lives of such women before the Acts ever came into existence, know to have been always going on to a very much greater extent than the upholders of these Acts take cognisance of. Whereas this has, without exception, been the limit of our opponents’ view of the extent of the moral question involved, our view of that question has extended far beyond the moral influence of this legislation on the immediate victims of it, and has embraced its influence on the country at large, and that not only considered in its character as a direct encouragement to license, through the protection offered, but also in its character as a warping and blinding influence on the judgments and consciences of men of all classes who may themselves not be guilty of any personal impurity. It is a most inadequate and narrow view of the morality of which we speak as undermined by the Acts, which is exclusively confined to sexual morality. Injustice is immoral; oppression is immoral; the sacrifice of the interests of the weaker to the stronger is immoral; and all these immoralities embodied in these iniquitous Acts, and continually contemplated, as they must be, by all that portion of the nation who have no direct connection with the working of them, are a demoralizing influence of the most deadly character.

I cannot too much insist upon the weight which we who oppose these Acts attach to the statement which we have so frequently made, that they are calculated to transfer the essential element of guilt from the vice to the infringement of this law. Under the action of this law we maintain that gradually society at large comes to regard as evil and good, not vice and virtue absolutely, but, vice not regulated by this law, and vice regulated by this law. Men’s talk, inferences, actions come to be all based upon a false distinction, the distinction between regulated and unregulated vice, and the true distinction between vice and virtue is lost sight of.

A Report as to the operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts has been recently issued and sanctioned by Government, which contains the following clause:—“The improvement that has taken place in the persons, clothing, and homes of the common women as regards cleanliness and order is most marked. Many of the women formerly looked bloated from drink, whilst others were greatly emaciated and looked haggard through disease. Their language and habits are greatly altered—swearing, drunkenness, and indecency of behaviour have become quite exceptional; the women now look fresh and healthy, and are most respectful in their manner; in fact, these poor creatures feel that they are not altogether outcasts from society, but that there are people who still take an interest in their moral and physical welfare.”

If the Report is to be regarded as a mere statement of fact, we who object to these laws on moral grounds could find no stronger argument than these words to prove the tendency of the law to extend the practice of fornication among men. The tone of satisfaction, however, with which the framer of the Report evidently dwells on this result of the Acts, cannot but be felt to be, to a certain extent, a verification of what I have said about submission to these Acts usurping the place of virtue in public opinion. But the full force of that statement is verified very terribly when we find a supporter[80] of these Acts quoting this sentence, with the words, “the women now look fresh and healthy,” in italics, as the crowning moral benefit conferred on society by the Acts.

I would observe here that the writer of the Report has taken refuge in an expression calculated to mislead hasty readers. He uses the word “the women” in a sense in which our opponents are peculiarly fond of using it. I wish simply to challenge the writer of this Report to show his meaning more clearly by asking him this simple question: To what women do you refer when you boast of their moral and physical improvement? Clearly not to those women who are escaping, or have escaped, from the toils of sin; because the moment they begin thus to escape, they are removed from your supervision and cognisance, they return to virtuous life, or seek the privacy of the Refuge, and henceforward cease to be objects of interest to you in the matter of the clearness of their complexion or the amiability of their manners. Who, then, I ask again, are the women of whose moral and physical improvement you boast? I will answer for you; and now let us read this sentence again with the proper and honest word substituted in the place of “the women:”—

“_The harlots_ now look fresh and healthy, and are most respectful in their manner.”

We find in the report of the Committee of the House of Commons, which sat on these Acts, and recommended their recent extension, the following piece of evidence:—

“592. There was one house into which I went with the inspector of police lately. I heard a woman reading with a loud voice. When we got in the passage I stopped to listen, and I found, to my astonishment, that she was reading from Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_. I went into the room and found no less than seven women sitting round a good-looking female of twenty-five, who was reading from the Pilgrim’s Progress, all paying the greatest attention.

“593. Was the woman reading it in a spirit which showed that she was feeling what she was reading?—Most decidedly; I never saw clergyman or audience in a church look more serious than the reader or the listeners.

“594. Were those prostitutes?—They were.

“595. Were they engaged in the prosecution of their trade?—Most decidedly; I have, I am sorry to say, two or three of them in the hospital now.”

The reader will observe, however, that in this instance the witness whose moral obliquity was such that he could suppose that his evidence evinced a moral improvement in the character of a harlot, was probably an uneducated Government official; but now we find the framers of Government reports, and advocates of this Act in high place, falling into exactly the same confusion, and mistaking obedience to this Act for moral rectitude.

We deeply deplore this deadly confusion, which we maintain that these Acts give rise to, and believe it to be fraught with the most ruinous moral consequences to England, bringing, as it must, in its train moral obliquity and the spread of fornication. We further maintain that that moral obliquity is here introduced at a point in social relationship where its introduction is more calculated than at any other to undermine the whole moral code of the country. Striking at the root of family life by the encouragement of prostitution, it introduces a complete confusion of right and wrong, with respect to a vice more typical than any other, and is calculated to reproduce itself in moral enormities through the whole fabric of social life.

But what moral enormity can surprise us now, when we have found that the Admiralty and the War Office have risen up to be the saviours of the souls of women?

I might address them in the words in which Milton once addressed the Treasury Bench:—“Indeed, my Lords of the Admiralty and the War Office, are ye at last become the gracious guardians of those principles which in your hearts you despise? Or has the Spirit at length beamed in light upon souls where light never shone before? For shame, my Lords! will ye never forsake inconsistance? Demons have trembled and Jews have been converted, but when the cause of religion is echoed from the Admiralty and War Office, perfidy is at hand, and we ought to look about us.”[81]