THE SECRET SITTING.
MR CRAUFURD, the Member for Ayr, on Tuesday used IV a constitutional power in the very worst possible way. The subject for debate in the Commons was the Bill brought in nominally by Mr. Fowler and Mr. Mun- della, but really by a very large group of Members of both parties, for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases' Act. The dispute as to the operation of that Act involves a principle of the very highest importance to morals, to society, and to the fighting services ; it has excited a widely diffused and furious agitation—an agitation which in some places has become a terrorism—and unless public opinion becomes informed, the Law cannot be maintained in operation. So serious are the consequences it involves, that English society, almost with one consent, has decided to abandon on this matter its traditional and useful reticence in discussing sexual questions ; that every candidate is now forced to express his opinion on it.from the hustings; that good and modest women have stepped forward to utter, in public and with exces- sive plainness, a beseeching remonstrance, as they believe, on behalf of their whole sex. And then, after a discussion which has embraced every journal in the country and almost every public meeting, which has been conducted in provin- cial papers with almost sickening outspokenness, when the subject at length comes before Parliament, when there is at length a chance that statesmen may be heard, instead of irresponsible lecturers, that a matter which concerns the whole future of the nation may be discussed by men who can be called to account for their utterances, Mr. Craufurd must "see strangers," and so compel the House of Commons to sit in secret conclave, listening to a debate of necessity use- less because ineffectual to affect the opinion which resists the Act. The final appeal is made to the nation, and the nation is by a single member deliberately made deaf. The subject, Mr. Craufurd will say, is indelicate. Very possibly ; but it is certainly not one of those indelicacies the discussion of which by any ordinary group of English gentlemen can possibly in- crease the temptations to immorality. Moreover, though delicacy is an excellent thing, and though we, at least, see with some apprehension the disappearance of that venerable reticence which, if it did not protect chastity, did at least act as a barrier to cynicism, delicacy is not in itself and by itself such a virtue that it should be preserved at the cost either of the national health or of the national morality, both of which are believed, truly or falsely, to be involved in the operation of this Act. For a popular Assembly to propose or repeal an Act on the ground that it is necessary or fatal to the well-being of a nation, and then decline to inform that nation of its reasons, is childishness. Girls have often died rather than tell a physician of their ailments, but girlishness is not an attri- bute to be respected in a legislature. Every Code contains, and must contain, " indecent " clauses, and every Bible too. There are times when frankness beseems a legislature, when it is a duty to guide opinion, and when any sacrifice to pruderybecomes a criminal concession to an evil for the sake of a propriety ; and thew times have surely arrived when a Law deemed needful by the medical profession, but attacked by a large number of electors, cannot be maintained except by the satisfaction of aroused public opinion. But there were ladies in the House ? Very possibly, and they were, we doubt not, in exactly their proper place,—listening in silence and invisible to a discussion
of deeper moment to them than even to their husbands, a dis- cussion which they have raised, and during which they have been treated—we speak as hitherto opponents of their view— with flagrant unfairness and want of chivalry. They have in such a matter all the rights of men, and to accuse them, as the Saturday Review does, of immodesty in pleading their own view, or as the Pall Mall Gazette does, of a desire to visit sexual error with torture, is as unfair as to accuse the many men who entertain similar opinions of similar aberrations. That their mode of agitation is often offensive is true, but the offensiveness does not arise from immodesty, but from their ignorance of the well-understood phrases in which their meaning might be less nakedly or annoyingly conveyed.
The debate was adjourned at the wish of the Administration, and we trust that when it is resumed Mr. Craufurd will have become aware that to legislators, as to physicians, frank speech is occasionally indispensable, and that the debate will end in the acceptance of the proposal made by Government. There must be, as the Home Secretary proposed, a Royal Commis- sion of Inquiry, with instructions to report not only on the sanitary effects, but on the moral consequences of the pre- ventive system. We do not mean the moral consequences in the sense in which the Ladies' Committee use the word, but in another and equally important one. The theory that disease is, in this instance, a divinely-ordained consequence of vice is untenable, inasmuch as the disease is not produced by the vice, but follows the vice only in certain instances, and does not follow it in the worst, where the innocent have been corrupted. To say that Providence has so arranged its law that the deeper the voluptuary descends in vice the safer he is, is to make a cynical accusation against God's justice. There is reason, however, to believe that the Act does tend to degrade women, among whom there are many degrees of degradation ; that it bars the way to reformation ; and that it is felt by those affected as a measure intended to degrade them into a pariah caste outside the pale of oral- nary humanity,—a degradation which, while the men go free of penalty, shocks the commonest instinct of social justice. There is, moreover, an extraordinary conflict of evidence as to the result of the Act, and in the opinion of many surgeons grave reason to believe that the apparent decline in the disease is purchased by an increase in the area of moral pollution. And finally, it is a certainty that the possibility of alternative remedies has never been sufficiently investigated. Officials, and especially military officials, are utter cowards in this matter, assume that a married army is impossible—though one, the Army of Madras, is in existence —and entirely ignore the effect which short enlistments, or enlistments without any period of service, might have upon the statistics of military hospitals. Upon all these points further information is required, before the nation can make up its mind upon a measure which can never be efficiently carried out, even as a garrison measure, without its moral acquiescence. Even if the doubt about the effect of the Act existed only among women—which is not the case, many statesmen declaring themselves unable to form any conclusion —inquiry would be necessary ; and we trust it will be made fair by the addition, if they can be found, of at least two women to the Commission, of sufficient weight of character to remove the otherwise immovable impression that on any such subject a Commission of men is a packed Commission. At all events, a strong Commission, with orders to report fearlessly and speedily, is the next step needed, and will, we trust, be sanctioned by the House, on the distinct ground that neither it nor the nation are as yet sufficiently informed. That Report will not enable statesmen, even if they wish, to extend the Act to the entire country, for it would not overcome the instinctive repugnance to its operation which in many parts of England seems to transcend reason. We doubt if any candidate for an open borough who voted for the Bill would have a chance of election, and are certainly not prepared to force it on the people in the teeth of a repugnance which has its root in a healthy feeling. But the Report may, and we hope will, horrify the nation into a thorough consideration of the evil, and of the question whether remedies may not be found other than those which involve the concession of un- usual and objectionable powers to the police. A curse as heavy, and probably due to the same cause, the taint of leprosy, died out in Europe, and it is weak to assume that science has against one disease reached the limit of its powers.
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