SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

SOCIAL MOBAL9.

Lectures on Female Prostitution ; its Nature, Extent, Effects, Causes, and Remedy. By Ralph Wardlaw. D.D. Delivered and published by special request. Mackhuse, Glasgow.

BIOOKAPHY,

Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest; with Anecdotes of their Courts, now first published from Official Records and other authentic Docu- meats, private as well as public. By Agnes Strickland. Vol. V ...... • Conners.

EDUCATION,

Lectures and Lessons on Popular Education, including a translation of M. GuizoPs celebrated Letter to the Primary Teachers of France. By Robert Sullivan, Esq

A.M., T.0 D IV.Citrryjailor and Geography Generalized; or an Introduction to the Study of Geography, on the prin- ciples of Classification and Comparison. By Robert Sullivan, Esq.. A. M. T.C.D. W. Curryjsaier mutes. A Dictionary of Derivations, or an Introduction to Etymology; on a new plan. To which is appended, a Classical Spelling-Book. By Robert Sullivan, Esq.. M.A. Third edition, enlarged Huldsworth.

DR. WARDLAW'S LECTURES ON FEMALE PROSTITUTION.

THESE Lectures were delivered by Dr. WARDLAW in pursuance of a memorial addressed to him by about eleven hundred citizens of Glasgow, backed by thirty-eight clergymen of various persuasions ; and they were subsequently repeated in Edinburgh by request. In treating of the nature, guilt, and effects of prostitution, Dr. WARDLAW, as a divine, of course lectures upon its theological sin as well as its social and moral consequences; and in considering its causes and effects, he avails himself of the statistics put forward by several writers on the subject ; but though adopting some of the questionable statements, he avoids the more preposterous indi- vidual cases which are occasionally published. It may be unne- cessary to observe, that in Dr. WARDLAW'S Lectures there is nothing offensive to delicacy, beyond what is inherent in the subject; and there are many passages both of power and feeling in the work, though it wears somewhat the air of a sermon. But we suspect that the growing public interest indicated by such a memorial, from a single city, promises more for a successful attempt at ameliorating one of the greatest opprobriums of civilization than the Lectures themselves. Able, no doubt, they are ; but, in any searching view, they appear to us deficient in originality and practical cha- racter. Dr. WARDLAW has not seen the actual root of the evil, or he avoids grappling with it ; nor does he draw a sufficiently clear distinction between prostitution arising from individual misconduct and that which originates in the circumstances of a class. This distinction, however, is necessary, to have a clear apprehension of the nature and the probable success of any remedy, since preven- tion from public influence seems likely to be more successful as regards classes than individuals.

According to the opinions of those persons who have had oppor- tunity and inclination to examine the subject, the ranks of prosti- tution, like those of the army and navy, are recruited from the lower orders. Individuals originally moving in higher grades may be found there, but, if not the exception, they are not the rule. The same authorities also consider that many cases of pros- titution arise entirely from the pressure of want, and many from the deficient education of the poor ; these two causes indeed ori- ginating the majority of cases of prostitution.

And, closely scanned, this evil, fearful as it is, is merely another example of the instances that meet us on every side, of the slow de- grees by which class-power has been made to consider the misery of those below it ; the deceptions it has winked at, if it has not en- couraged, to maintain " things as they are" ; and its inert unwil- lingness to attend to established evils, that seemed to its partial ken interwoven with the nature of society. The numbers of females who annually perish immaturely after a life of vice and wretched- ness, in obedience to some necessity, fancied or real, startles the mind : but slavery is merely another phase of the same evil ; so is the way in which men are entrapped by the recruiting-service, or forced by the press-gang into the probable loss of life, with the all but certainty of shortening it ; whilst all manufactures dele- terious to health fall under a similar category. Dr. WARDLAW properly comments on the arguments put forth by many, that prostitution is necessary to protect the chastity of the wives and daughters of respectable families, and ergo that the poor must be sacrificed to their advantage : but this ergo obtains very widely. Compute the sacrifices of life and happiness, not in battle, for the officers run the same risk as the men, but from the hard- ships of war, the deaths through disease, and the miserable po- verty to which the soldier is consigned when he has served the turn of the public. Again, what class of employers ever regards the future fate of their workpeople ; or cares a feather for con- sequences when employing them in a business injurious to health; or contemplates the evils which beset their lives, with a view to remove them ? They are used while they are wanted, and then dismissed to their fate. Even where death is as certain as employment, does the master or even society interfere, except to meddle in some distant region? Did the fair lips that lisped the tea-table inquiry "free labour sugar ? " ever raise a voice in favour of the needle-polisher, or any other dangerous trade, where life is " used up" as certainly as in a sugar-plantation, or the streets? The sex, the circumstances and the degradation, make prostitution appear, as perhaps it is, the greatest disgrace of a Christian com- munity; but, examined in its essence, it is only one of many cognate evils. Considering the temporal miseries of prostitution, Dr. WARD" LAN properly remarks upon its downward tendency, in a passage which may also be taken as a sample of his Lectures.

"And now, some of you may naturally ask me, is this fair? Why dwell on scenes of such low and disgusting loathsomeness ? Is this a just average speci- men of the whole system ? Is there nothing superior? nothing more refined ? nothing less revolting? And if there be, why take an ad captandum advan- tage, by giving such prominence to the very lowest and worst grade of the evil? My answer to such questions forms my promised mason for having introduced at all these disgusting details. The answer and the reason are one. It is, the affecting and fearful consideration that to this lowest grade, in all its horrors, the entire system tends. Yes, I repeat it, and press it on your

serious attention, the tendency is all downwards. The case is in this

respect unique. Even in thievery there may be an advance. The boy of the lowest grade who by his inferior practice comes to be a dexterous pickpocket or. a clever abstracter of the contents of a till, may in time rise to the envied though unenviable celebrity of a Barrington. He who first pilfers a penny from a shop, if he gets forward in the art of villany, may find

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his way to the thousands of a bank. But n the present case rising is a thing unknown. It cannot be : it is all descent: the young woman who begins her shameless career in a low brothel, and among the refuse of the other sex, does not rise from the lower to the higher, and push her way upward till she be- come the mistress of a peer. Mark me : let me not be misunderstood; let me not he supposed to say this as if I conceived the guilt would in that case be the less. Far be the thought! It would be the very same in the rising as it is in the sinking scale. I am speaking at present not of the morality but of the misery of the case. And again I say, the tendency is all downward. Gentlemen in high life may think lightly of their gallantries. They do things genteelly. They seduce in style, and they keep in style. They conceive themselves to lay under a kind of obligation the females whom they honour with their preference. And alas the poor females, in the vanity of their hearts, often think so too. But the honour is infamy ; the flattery is ruin. Not only is the sin the same in the highest as in the lowest, but soon the poor victim who has yielded to the temptation comes to know what I mean by the tendency downward. Whether seduced in private or beguiled into one of the superior receptacles of infamy, it is seldom long ere satiety and passion for change throw her off. She is turned mercilessly adrift. Her seducer haa gained his end, and thinks no more of her. Another and another have taken her place. But oh! it is chilling to the heart to think of the downward career of whose beginning that seducer has been the guilty cause. Surely, did his selfish and heartless voluptuousness allow him for a moment to trace it, had he one warm drop of sensibility remaining in his heart's blood, he could not but recoil and sicken at the thought. It is all down, down, rapidly down; down from stage to stage, till it terminates in some such scene of squalid wretchedness as the one just depicted."

On this passage we may observe, that the downward tendency seems equally the rule among thieves. BARRINGTON himself was eventually transported ; and we can produce two instances of rising in prostitution for Dr. WARDLAW'S one in thievery—NELL GWYNN and Lady HAMILTON. The closing remark has reference to a class of cases which do not, according to all the alleged facts we have ever met with, constitute the bulk of prostitutes. But, keeping the moral evils of poverty distinct from the physical, and looking at the appalling poverty which is said to prevail among the honest poor of many entire districts, it may be questioned whether even the physical part of the sufferings of prostitutes from want does not rather appertain to them as poor than as prostitutes : we say from want, because there are other physical evils, into which this is not the place to enter. The moral degradation of the prostitute, compared with her se- ducer or patron, is another question. Rigorously examined, it would appear to be merely another illustration of the homely maxim, "the weakest goes to the wall "—to originate in the same cause which induces the stronger man to oppress the weaker woman. In the savage state, woman is a laborious slave ; in a half- civilized state, she is equally a slave in another way ; in both cases, death or any other punishment is administered, often at the caprice of her individual master, always by a rule which men as a class have laid down. When society emerges above these conditions of existence, she will still be found to hold an inferior place in the scale of life, and to bear a greater share of its misery ; but advancing with every advance of public opinion, especially with every advance towards a loftier morality—for mere refinement often only conduces to an outward improvement in the condition of the sex, and is more seeming than real, the greatest roues frequently displaying external respect in the greatest perfection. Under the moral head, there is a further distinction to be taken between the prostitution which results from general circum- stances and from individual misconduct. "Necessity of present life "—the recklessness induced by gross and brutish ignorance— the moral obtuseness arising from early association with debased companions — the indecencies obtaining among large masses of the poor, partly owing to habit, partly to want of house-room- these are the evils of a class. They only admit of remedy by an extension of education and an increase in the means of the poor ; and that remedy would be effectual as regards the class, but not as regards individuals in it. The prostitution caused by seduction as between persons in some equality of station, (for it may be doubted if seduction, properly speaking, can take place where a woman and her connexions speculate on entrapping a man of the same years but of much higher station than herself into a marriage which will alienate his friends, lower him in social estimation, and perhaps materially injure him,) can only be checked by public opinion ; an opinion that shall operate not merely in censuring people behind their backs, but in- volving in the lower classes loss of employment, and in those above them a cool reception, or expulsion from society ; rules which, compared with social practice a century ago, are probably making way, however slowly. As regards individual indiscretion or levity, it appears to us that there is no social remedy beyond this check upon men, whilst with women there can be no other result than ex- pulsion from society and loss of caste, whatever censure opinion may also decree against the seducer. Nor is punishment of this

kind really peculiar to the sex. Cowardice, negligence, and other weaknesses not legally censurable in men, and to which mere natural instinct would incline them, are often punished by loss of status,. and, if extreme, reduce a man to the condition of an outcast. There is something, too, of a rough kind ofjustice in the practice of the world ; and it is probable that where the circumstances of the class and not the weakness or the fault of the individual have caused prostitution, the suffering from degradation or loss of caste is trivial; and though the physical evils from want are undoubtedly great, they are not exceedingly greater than other poor of the same grade.

There is indeed another class of prostitutes, the most to be pitied. of all, and who form, it is to be feared, the bulk of the victims to the Moloch of genteel "gallantry." Under this head may be ranked the orphan daughters of respectable persons left without sufficient or without any provision ; and that numerous class, with education beyond their means, who are thrown upon the world to gain their bread very hardly, and generally without much protection against the temptations to which they are exposed. Strictly, indeed, poverty is a great cause of the fall of such women, though no statist would rank them as poor ; as in a logical sense it may be attributed to their misconduct, since they have education enough to know what is morally wrong, if their youth scarcely allows them to trace the full consequences of their conduct. To deal with this class of pitiable unfortunates is the most difficult task of all. Those upon whom want is actually pressing are proper objects for a Magdalen prevention society ; and we believe the only objects which such societies can relieve with a certain beneficial result. Those who are in actual employment can only be protected by opinion—by elevating the moral tone of education, impressing every one with a due sense of the rights of others, attaching greater discredit, and the loss which discredit brings with it, to gallants, and inducing or rather compelling masters and mistresses of every class to watch more carefully over the protection of their dependents than many masters and mistresses now do.

The result of all this seems to be, that any remedy (beyond a re- ligious one, which is peculiarly the province of the divine, and there- fore very properly handled at some length by Dr. WARDLAW) must be gradual, and the combined effect of popular education, a loftier public opinion, and a material improvement in the condition of the poor. Beyond general remark or religious argument, the only pro- posed remedy of a large nature in Dr. WARDLAW'S Lectures is the appeal to the sex : and a very proper appeal it is ; for whilst the power of women is unquestionably great in matters of so- cial opinion, it cannot be denied that the reputation of " gal- lantry " has not hitherto been any bar to a favourable reception in female society, and that men have had quite as much to do as women in originating any moral check by means of social opinion. The other suggestions of Dr. WAiDLAW—such as the formation of societies, and an alteration in the law, especially as regards juvenile cases—however proper in themselves, will only have a limited effect. Yet their success will be important, not merely where they operate, but as indicating the advance of opinion; and if they had no direct effect at all, they would still have an importance. The erroneous censure of error is better than qui- escence; for it does something towards shaking wrong, though it may contribute nothing towards establishing right.