The influence of legislation on public morals / Friends' Association for Abolishing the State Regulation of Vice.

Date:
[1873?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of legislation on public morals / Friends' Association for Abolishing the State Regulation of Vice. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    13/16 (page 13)
    [See Report of Royal Commission, p. 16., par. 3. in allusion to 'previous Ads.] It is said that by the provisions of the Acts, women have been frightened into propriety. But until they are captured, this is the very thing the captors strive to avoid; for the men are dressed in plaiii clothes, like ordinary citizens, so as to conceal their character as police. After capture, they are frightened intentionally, not truly towards reformation, but towards the examination room, there, after passing its degrading ordeal, to be registered among the unreformed. I merely want the [captured] woman to know, said Surgeon Sloggett before the Commons' Committee, that she is obliged to submit herself: I fear that without that terror the women would not come. Some women, for fear of being captured, are no doubt made more circumspect, not more virtuous; and some flee from one district to another. The Government officials extract virtue from both these facts. In one case outivard decorum is called reform ; and in the other, if fewer loose characters are found in one district, it is proof of a general improvement! But whether many escape to other districts, or whether by greater circumspection, and by more cunning and skill, they baffle the police, it certainly is not evidence of moral reform. Again, the Acts have saved young girls from a career of vice, because a good-natured policeman has kindly warned them of their danger. But the Acts neither authorise nor contemplate any such kindness; and to credit them with that which is not their own, but an incidental excess of duty on the part of a Government officer, borders on the absurd. Compulsory examination, said a speaker in the House of Commons, degrades women into brute beasts. What then is the position of the Government Surgeons ? In voluntary contact with such pollution, if educated men do not suffer either in self-respect or public esteem, what can more clearly point to that slough of corruption to which society is hastening ? The steady progress of the materialistic leaven may be