Personal reminiscences of a great crusade / by Josephine E. Butler.

  • Josephine Butler
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Personal reminiscences of a great crusade / by Josephine E. Butler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/264 page 10
    and (where this is resisted) imprisonment with hard labour, to which these Acts subject women, are punishments of the most degrading kind. “ 5th.—Because, by such a system, the path of evil is made more easy to our sons, and to the whole of the youth of' England; inasmuch as a moral restraint is withdrawn .the moment the State recognises, and provides convenience for, the practice of a vice which it thereby declares to be neces- sary and venial. u 6th.—Because these measures are cruel to the women who come under their action—violating the feelings of those whose sense of shame is not wholly lost, and further brutalis- ing even the most abandoned. “7th.—Because the disease which these Acts seek to re- move has never been removed by any such legislation. The advocates of the system have utterly failed to show, by statistics or otherwise, that these regulations have in any case, after several years’ trial, and when applied to one sex only, diminished disease, reclaimed the fallen, or improved the general morality of the country. We have, on the con- trary, the strongest evidence to show that in Paris and other Continental cities where women have long been outraged by this system, the public health and morals are worse than at |iome. “8th.—Because the conditions of this disease, in the first instance, are moral, not physical. The moral evil through which the disease makes its way separates the case entirely from that of the plague, or other scourges, which have been placed under police control or sanitary care. We hold that we are bound, before rushing into experiments of legalising a revolting vice, to try to deal with the causes of the evil, and we dare to believe that with wiser teaching and more capable legislation, those causes would not be beyond con- trol.” This Protest was published in the Daily News, and the fact of its appearance was flashed by telegram to the remotest parts of the Kingdom. The local press largely reproduced it.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image