Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.

  • Alfred Russel Wallace
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    XII] Increasing Moral Degradation or child, seems very significant. The first may be connected with the increas¬ ing dislike of child-bearing, and unsuc¬ cessful attempts to avoid it. The second indicates some injurious condition of life of the mother, such as working at un¬ healthy or even deadly trades, which has certainly been largely increasing during the same period. Such work for young married women should be impossible in a civilised community. On the vast subject of prostitution, of which the present movement for the sup¬ pression of what is called The White Slave Traffic is but one of the aspects, I do not propose to dwell, because I can find no statistics to show whether it has increased or decreased during the last century. But as the conditions have all been favourable for it, I have little doubt that it has increased in proportion to population. Such conditions are, the enor¬ mous growth of great cities ; an increasing number of unmarried and wealthy young men ; with an enormous number of girls and young women whose wages are insuf¬ ficient to provide them with the rational enjoyments of life. 73
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