NE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF M tf \ A/! J '. U VN IN ID IQJW JO AHVaail IVNOIIVN 3 N I 3 I d 3 W J O A X V I NE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF ME r-N 3NI3I03W JO A II V K a II IVNOIIVN 3NI3IQ3W JO ADVIian IV* \ w4 RARY OF MEDICINE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE NATIONAI LECTURES MAGDALENISM: ITS NATURE, EXTENT, EFFECTS, GUILT, CAUSES, AND REMEDY. BY REV. RALPH WARDLAW, D. D. / DELIVERED AND PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL REQUEST OP FORTY MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL, AND ELEVEN HUN- DRED FELLOW-CHRISTIANS. FIRST AMERICAN, FROM.-SF,CQND GLASGOW EDITION. ■' !.!> NEW YtKR-tf: J. S. REDFIELD, CLINTON HALL. BOSTON: SAXTON, PIERCE, & CO. 1843. Ha. W2^L INTRODUCTION. So great has been the progress of magdalenism during the last few years, and so numerous and fearful the crimes to which it has partially or wholly given rise, that the cause of morality and religion, which has been so much advanced by the issue of the following lectures in the Old World, seemed to demand their republication here ; and in presenting the American edition, the propriety of modifying the title and of rendering some of the terms in the book less objectionable, was suggested by several influential ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Wardlaw's lectures were hailed with joy by his Christian brethren abroad, as a book much needed, and one calculated, by the learning, piety, and eloquence of its accomplished author, to be read with profit by that class to whom it is more peculiarly adapted ; and many who are deeply in- terested in the moral and spiritual welfare of the abandoned, have taken the utmost pains to have it circulated and read by them : and with the cheer- ing consolation, the deep and heartfelt satisfaction, 4 INTRODUCTION. of knowing that many have thus been reclaimed from the paths of error and ruin. It differs mate- rially from" the work of Parent-Duchatelet on Prostitution in Paris, the most curious and phi- losophical work on the subject ever issued, and which should be read by every one who wishes to understand the subject thoroughly. The Rev. Dr. Wardlaw has treated of the repul- sive subject of magdalenism with great eloquence, and in such chaste language as to offend no one ; and although the details are by no means agree- able, yet the whole Christian community should be exceeding glad that one who occupies so high a position in the Christian church, and whose life is so pure and spotless, has been willing, in imi- tation of the example set him by his blessed Master, to minister to those whose lives are spent in wickedness, and to spare no efforts to turn the magdalen from her paths of vicious indulgence, and to rescue her as a brand from the burning. We hope and trust sincerely that the efforts of our Christian friends in behalf of this neglected and depraved class of sinning, but immortal souls, may be crowned with success, and that the publi- cation of this little work may be the humble but chosen instrument of opening the eyes of many to the error of their ways; may incline their steps to the paths of rectitude and virtue, and teach INTRODUCTION. 5 their hearts to look from things temporal unto everlasting life : and if but one, who has hitherto been a wanderer from the fold of her Heavenly Father, shall turn from her evil ways, and, after living in the enjoyment of virtue, and religion, and that peace of mind which the world can not take away, shall die with the hope of a glorious resurrection unto eternal life,—the aim of those who have watched over this publication with anxious solicitude, will be fully answered. 1* NOTICES OF THE FIRST EDITION. " We can employ no language sufficiently strong to ex- press our admiration of the manner in which the author has executed his delicate task. We commend the volume as the most masterly production on this very melancholy theme, in our own or in any language; and we sincerely trust that its contents will be seriously and prayerfully pondered by millions of the people. Every young man living, or intending to live, in our cities or large towns, should be supplied with a copy. Parents will incur a fear- ful responsibility if they do not act on this suggestion."— Christian Examiner. " It may be unnecessary to observe, that in Dr. Ward- law's Lectures there is nothing offensive to delicacy, be- yond what is inherent in the subject.—Able, no doubt, these Lectures are."—Spectator. " Good reason have they to be satisfied with their learned and eloquent advocate, whose lectures, now issued from the press, at the earnest request, not only of the requisition- ists, but of the large audiences before whom these were delivered, will, we trust, rouse the same spirit of active philanthropy among the Christian inhabitants of every populous town and city of the British empire; for every- where this foul crime is spreading as a pestilence, and cor- roding the very heart of society. We can assure our read- ers, that these Lectures, if read attentively and in the spirit which their perusal is calculated to awaken, will make them practical reformers, and that they will hence- forth regard the monster iniquity as an enemy to be vigo- rously grappled with, till it is driven from the haunts of virtuous men, and compelled to skulk in the darkest reces- ses, where the reprobate and the lost seek a hiding-place and a refuge."—Atlas. " We have seldom, if ever, read a more valuable publi- cation, in a moral point of view. It is a book which, to be appreciated, must be read; and which ought to be 11 NOTICES. ' read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested.' The Au- thor's refutation of the alleged impurity of the Scriptures is admirable; and his graphic sketch of the nature, extent, and variety of the evil, is equally masterly. All this, as we have already said, is done ably and masterly, in lan- guage remarkably ornate and strikingly eloquent, and without an expression that might offend the most sensitive- ly delicate. We earnestly recommend this volume to all interested in the elevation of degraded humanity, and de- sirous of seeing this vice, the spawn of base cupidity, miti- gated and suppressed. Let the young man, especially, read it, and learn wisdom from its pages; let the philanthropist read it and bestir himself; and let every reader remember, when he says with the old Roman < I am a man,' to sub- join and act upon his practical conclusion, ' whatever con- cerns man concerns me.'"—Scotch Refoimer's Gazette. " We must now take leave of our author, thanking him for the good service he has done his country, and the cause of truth and Christian morality, and earnestly rec- ommend this last, but not least, effort of his pen, to every friend of virtue and of the female character."—Liverpool Mercury. " No higher honor was ever done Dr. W. than when he was requested by the citizens of Glasgow to prepare, preach, and publish these lectures. They ought to be extensively read, especially by young men living in our cities and large towns."—Revivalist. "We can not give utterance to the feelings with which we have finished the perusal of this important volume. Its disclosures have been to us so unexpected and appalling, that we have almost wished we had remained in our former happy state of ignorance. Never did we for a moment sus- pect the existence, to so fearful an extent, of an evil in itself so unutterably debasing, and in its consequences so exten- sively and wofully ruinous, as that which is here brought to view. A mystery of iniquity is in these Lectures un- folded, from which every truly Christian and enlightened mind will shrink with inexpressible loathing; but unfolded in a manner which can not fail to awaken to vigorous ex- NOTICES. Ill ertion. Like every other evil, however, in order to be remedied it must be known, and to make it known in all its repulsiveness, with a due regard at once to fidelity and good taste, required a combination of excellencies, moral and intellectual, which rarely fall to be the portion of one individual. Having searched the various sources of infor- mation, and having selected the best authenticated facts, the result is a performance distinguished by plainness and fidelity, exhibiting a sufficiency of detail without exciting unnecessary disgust, and a moral fortitude which calls things by their proper names without the slightest tendency to foster impure imaginings."—Scottish Congregational Magazine. tt We entreat all our readers who have any means of bringing their influence to bear on this evil, to read care- fully Dr. Wardlaw's lectures. The subject is treated with as much delicacy as is consistent with faithfulness, and as much faithfulness as is consistent with delicacy. We are sure our readers would rise from the perusal of the volume, with a solemn conviction that this is a question that more powerfully affects the well-being of the nation, than nine tenths of the questions that agitate the political world."—Scottish Guardian. " The lecturer has taken great pains to make himself master of the subject in all its parts and bearings, and he has treated it throughout with sound judgment and ex- quisite delicacy. There is much in the scheme which de- mands the attention of the heads of families, and nothing that it is necessary to withhold from the perusal of young persons who are approximating toward maturity."—Bap- tist Magazine. " We are deliberately of opinion, that the volume before us far surpasses, in comprehensiveness and power, any work that has ever seen the light, on the agitating and much-neglected topic to which it refers. One of the most brilliant efforts of a mind whose powers have been devoted for forty years to the benefit of mankind. The most sur- prising and eloquent work in our language on the subject of magdalenism. Could we prevail on every good man and IV NOTICES. woman in this country, to read Dr. W.'s second lecture ' On the Effects of Magdalenism,' we are persuaded we should do more to prepare the way for a vast meliora- tion of this formidable mischief, than has hitherto been effected by all the acts of parliament, and all the laws of police, which have been brought to bear upon this sin which maketh desolate. We say, earnestly, to all who fear God, and who admit that sin is the cause of all national judgments—read this lecture—read it carefully— and then say if it be not your duty to attempt something to stay the horrible plague which obtains in the midst of us.'*—Evangelical Magazine. " He has accomplished his difficult task with equal judg- ment and tact, without veiling the deep horrors of the widely ramified evils he laments, or falling into an error— not always avoided by those treating this subject—of min- istering to a prurient curiosity, by too great minuteness of detail. Dr. W.'s statistical statements are founded on in- formation as accurate as is likely to be obtained on so dark and complicated a subject. These lectures are for the silent, thoughtful, and conscientious reflections of women as well as of men—but we stop here, earnestly recommend- ing the lectures to the public attention, but especially to that of Christian women—to matrons—and single women of ma- ture age."—Tait's Magazine. ADVERTISEMENT. The Requisition, or Memorial, referred to in the title-page, runs in the following terms:— " To the Rev. Ralph Wardlaw, D. D., by Members of various religious denominations in Glasgow : " Reverend Sir : We, your memorialists, beg to represent, that we view with unfeigned alarm and regret the vast amount and constant increase of magdalenism within the precincts of our own city, with all its deplorable and widely-ramified evils, affecting the most valuable interests of the community, both for time and for eternity. " Your memorialists are also impressed with a conviction that the means employed for the sup- pression of female profligacy are wholly inade- quate thereto, by reason of their fewness and limitation. Further, your memorialists feel as- sured that the public mind requires to be more awakened to a just sense of that wickedness which is so great a stain both on our common1 Chris- tianity and our boasted civilization. 8 advertisement. " On these grounds, reverend sir, your memo- rialists are induced to make an earnest request P that you would deliver a lecture, or lectures, on a subject so truly important: anticipating, from your honored labors heretofore, the most beneficial and gratifying results ; which, accompanied by the divine blessing, would, we believe, contribute to bring the public mind into a right position respect- ing the great evil your memorialists deprecate— and which might ultimately unite all truly patriotic and Christian men, and lead to active and strenu- ous co-operation for the prevention and cure of the prevailing immorality, and so advance the cause of Christ's kingdom." To this memorial there was subjoined a recom- mendation of its object, to which were affixed the signatures of thirty-eight ministers of the gospel; and I should feel that I failed in justice to the cause which I was thus invited to plead, were I to withhold from that cause the weight of influence which those signatures, individually and collect- ively, carry with them. The list will, at the same time, show how thoroughly free of the slightest tinge of sectarian predilection the whole move- ment has been. As the specific designations of church, and chapel, and locality, are appended in only a few instances, it will be sufficient to give the names ; and I shall insert them as they stand advertisement. 9 in the document, according to the order in which they appear to have been obtained :— " We, the undersigned, have much pleasure in expressing our entire satisfaction with the above memorial. The subject is, confessedly, of great importance : and should Dr. Wardlaw accede to the request of the memorialists, we can not doubt of public attention being concentrated upon the evil in question, and trust that it may be subse- quently followed by ulterior and more specific measures, of high value to the best interests of the community. Thomas Brown, D. D. John Graham, Thomas Pullar William Kidston, D. D. John Macfarlane, LL.D. Norman M'Leod, D. D. Gavin Struthers, John Mitchell, D.D. Nathaniel Paterson, D. D. William Symington, D. D. Peter Currie, William Brash, James Gibson, •Jonathan R. Anderson, Alexander S. Patterson, J. S. Taylor, Alexander Turner, Peter Napier, Robert Brodie, John Forbes, D.D., LL.D. Lewis Rose, Duncan Macfarlan, D.D. Alex. 0. Beattie, M.D. William Lindsay, John Edwards, George Jeffrey, Michael Willis, D.D, William Arnott, John Robson, Alex. W. Somerville, Archibald Nisbet Stewart Bates, D.D. Mathew Murray, John Eadie, John Smyth, D.D. Hamilton M. Macgill, Alexander Hill, D. D. John M. Mackenzie, A.M." Then there follow the signatures, commencing 10 advertisement. with the committee by whom the memorial was projected and framed, of about eleven hundred fel- low-citizens, of all religious persuasions. Such a memorial, thus recommended, and thus signed, was at once commanding, encouraging, and intimidating : commanding, for, though couched in terms of request, it carried an authority which there was no resisting ; encouraging, for, under the shelter of such a host of approving names, I could satisfactorily ward off the charge of presumption ; yet intimidating—the very weight and number of the names engendering a sensitive dread of failure in the execution of so onerous and responsible a duty. The result, however, is now laid before the public : the request for the publication of the lec- tures having followed that for their delivery, and the committee of memorialists having been sup- ported in that request by the concurrent voice of a large assembly of hearers. | The lectures, at first three in number, were de* livered in Glasgow, on the evenings of the 30th and 31st days of May, and 1st of June, to an ex- clusively male auditory, to which the admission^ was by tickets : the Hon. Sir Jameo Campbell, Lord Pfcvost, William Gilmour, Esq., and James Thomson, Esq., one of the Bailies of Gorbals, occupying the chair on the successive evenings. 'And in compliance with a request made to the lecturer by the committee of the " Edinburgh So- advertisement. 11 ciety for the Protection of Young Females," they were re-delivered, under the same regulations, in Edinburgh, on the evenings of the 5th and three < subsequent days of July (the first lecture having been divided into two), on all which occasions the chair was filled by Richard Huie, Esq., M. D., President of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ed- inburgh. In both places, the meetings were opened with prayer by ministers of different reli- gious denominations. Between the time of their delivery in Glasgow, and their re-delivery in Edinburgh, the lectures were carefully revised, and in each of them vari- ous portions, larger and smaller, of additional matter, were introduced. R. W. Barlanerk, August 10, 1842 , ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. No production of the author's pen was ever given to the world with a more oppressive solici- tude as to the propriety of its publication, and the reception it might meet with, than were the fol- lowing lectures. The nature of the subject, and the difficulty of treating it in such a manner as to combine due fidelity and plainness with the avoid- ance of whatever might be offensive to delicacy, and might thus impede rather than promote the end in view, and render prejudicial what was meant for good—will suffice, with every mind of sense and sensibility, to account for this peculiar apprehensiveness. In proportion to the degree of this oppressive feeling, has been the gratifica- tion imparted by the amount of approbation which has been conveyed to him, both by the periodical press, and by letters of private and highly es- teemed correspondents. The testimony borne on the point of his chief anxiety—the degree of suc- cess with which the combination alluded to had been effected—has been peculiarly satisfactory. advertisement. 13 There ate not a few (and I know not how to blame them, for the feeling springs from principles in themselves so commendable) who are averse to ^ having the subject so much as mooted among those whose purity and virtue are the objects of their concern. The very title of such a book they would, if it were in their power, keep from meet- ing the eye of any member of their domestic circle. Such attempts at entire concealment, however, can, in few instances, in a world and a city like ours, prove successful; and in some cases, there is reason to fear, where there is most the appearance of success, the failure is really the greatest: the very eagerness to conceal on the one side, giving rise to the greater reserve and secrecy on the other. I say this for the purpose, not of repres- sing prudent vigilance, but of modifying that over- strained and morbid apprehensiveness, which, in- stead of accomplishing the desired ignorance, may hinder the restraints of a salutary knowledge. By a culpable inadvertency, the author, in the preface to the first edition, omitted to insert the names of the committee by whom the requisition was projected, and the signatures to it obtained ; and to whom, therefore, the public are indebted for having had their attention called to the subject, for whatever interest may be awakened, and for whatever results may follow. I now, with much 2 14 advertisement. pleasure, do this rather tardy justice to our towns- men—Messrs. Alex. Smith, Daniel Lindsay, A. M'Coll, Jr., John Hay, and John Ross. The lecturer has been assailed by remonstrances from the socialists, as having, by the representa- tion given of their principles on the subject of sexual intercourse, done them and their founder injustice. His answer to these remonstrances was, in substance, a promise to reconsider this point, and, if he should see occasion to retract or to modify any of his statements, to do so in a second edition. The result will be found in the additional note, at page 28. To say more is needless. It would be only to repeat what is already said in the beginning and close of the lectures themselves. I commend the little work to the blessing of God : and to the same blessing whatever efforts may follow for the accomplishment of the benevolent object to which it solicits the public attention, and is designed to conciliate the public favor. R. W. Barlanerk, January 10, 1843. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF MAGDALENISM......1 LECTURE II. ON THE EFFECTS OF MAGDALENISM.....................51 LECTURE III. ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES OF MAGDALENISM .. 81 LECTURE IV. ON THE MEANS OF PREVENTION, MITIGATION, AND REMOVAL...............................................129 « MAGDALENISM: ITS NATURE, EXTENT, EFFECTS, GUILT, CAUSES, AND REMEDY. LECTURE I. on the nature and extent of magdalenism. My Lord Provost, Fellow-Citizens, and Fellow-Christians: The subject, on which I am about to address you, is one of the very last, as you may well suppose, which if left to freedom of my own will, I should have chosen for public discussion. But to this freedom I have not been left. A requisition, signed by about forty minis- ters of the gospel, and eleven hundred fellow- christians and fellow-citizens, left me no power of choice. Inclination said—decline:—but con- science put in her plea, and refused submission. My wishes were in the one direction; but duty was clearly in the other. In spite of the revolt- ing character of the subject, I could not but be sensible that it was one of no ordinary importance, as involving, to a vast extent, at once the present and eternal interests of individuals, and the mor- als, and consequent well-being of the community. 2* 18 ON the nature and extent I shrunk from the task imposed upon me:—but 1 shrunk, still more sensitively, from the possible reflection, which might have loaded my spirit af- terward, of having "left undone" what, how feeble soever its execution, might have contributed, by giving the first impulse to a series of future move- ments, to the accomplishment of those most desir- able results, by the hope of which the respected requisitionists were influenced in presenting their request. If there was presumption in undertaking such a duty, the presumption, I felt, would be still more reprehensible in resisting such an applica- tion. Yet the repulsiveness of the subject, giving force to every plea for setting it in the meanwhile aside, may with truth be added to the existence of various engagements, constant and unavoidable, during the winter months, in accounting for a de- lay, which certainly demands an apology. In these circumstances, then, I appear before you; and cast myself, confidently, upon your candor and indulgence. The subject is one of great delicacy and difficulty. The latter arises, in part, from the former. It is im- possible to speak of it at all, and especially to enter into it with any minuteness of detail, without using phraseology, and bringing forward statements, from which the ear and the feelings of virtuous purity recoil. And the very hearing of these, it may be alleged, is in danger of conveying a taint, especial- ly to the youthful mind, and of introducing asso- ciations there, which might not otherwise find ad- mission, and from which it were better kept free. But there is another view of the case. As the difficulty is almost insurmountable of keeping these subjects from the minds of youth, the question OF MAGDALENISM. 19 comes to be one of surpassing consequence, whe- ther they are to be brought before them by the friends of vice, or by the friends of virtue—whe- ther invested with all their tempting fascinations, or stripped of their allurements, and in their true character of moral loathsomeness, and wretched and damning tendencies. In such discussions, generally speaking, it will be found, that terms which are plain, but not coarse, are at once the least offensive and the least prejudi- cial. In the sacred scriptures, on all subjects of this kind, there is what may be called a divine freedom. I am aware that of some passages the enemies of revelation have laid hold ; have sneered at them; have chuckled over them ; have made obscene uses of them ; and, with sarcastic bitterness, have founded upon them heavy imputations of immoral tendency. As, in these lectures, the authority of scripture must of course be assumed and appealed to, it may be well, in the outset, to wipe away this false aspersion, and take off the impression which, in any mind, might interfere with the efficiency of such appeal. First of all, then, we fearlessly ask, who are the persons, what their character, by whom this charge has been brought 1 Have they themselves been the exemplarily pure, and virtuous, and godly 1— evidently and deeply concerned for the interests of religion and of moral principle ?—shrinking, with a delicate sensitiveness, from all that is opposite to virtue and to piety ?—trembling to touch the un- clean thing themselves, and solicitous to preserve others from the taint ? Has the reason why they do not come to the Bible, why they refuse to study, or even to read or have anything to do with it— 20 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT been really a conscientious apprehension of hav- ing their principles contaminated, their refined moral sensibilities impaired, the warmth of their devotion cooled ? The answers to such questions I leave to the conscience of every one of my hearers, who has ever heard the imputation of lascivious and immoral tendency thrown upon that book which we believe to be the Book of God. Further; in objecting, whether gravely or jeering- ly, to particular portions of the book, have these persons shown any disposition to make the allow- ance, which every well-informed and candid mind ought to make, and will make, for the diversity of customs and manners, of modes of speech, and peculiarities of association, and other similar cir- cumstances, in different countries, and periods, and states of society ? Or, without insisting on these, let me rather ask, in what state of mind, and on what occasions, are such objections usually offer- ed ? Is it in the spirit of seriousness or of light- ness ? of sober earnest or of jest 1 of piety or of profaneness ? of temperance or of social excite- ment ? of ribaldry or of purity ? And let it be further considered, of what a different complexion and tendency are the passages commonly referred to, from the sly inuendoes, the studied refinements, the luscious and enticing pollutions, of voluptuous writings ; where the excitement of the passions is felt to be the writer's end in all that he discloses, and where the very drapery of concealment is so adjusted, as only the more effectually to stimulate the imagination ! Is not the conscience of every one who opens the Bible sensible at once of a pur- pose and a tendency at antipodes to this ?—of an mtention.and aim, in all the passages in question, OF MAGDALENISM. 21 the very reverse of everything of the kind by which these others are characterized ? Instead of alluring to sin, by cherishing any light feeling of its sinfulness, or any favorable impression tow- ard it, is not the invariable design to set forth, in lively colors, and in lines of deep condemnation, its fearful malignity, turpitude, and guilt, the divine detestation of it, and the peril of every one who indulges in it ? Is there, in any one instance, the slightest perceptible symptom of its being the aim of the writer to excite evil passions, or impure conceptions and desires ? Is there not, on the contrary, on all occasions, an infinite distance from everything of the kind, and an obvious, affection- ate, and pervading solicitude to attach shame and reprobation to all that is sinful, and to promote in every heart the sentiments and feelings of spirit- ual purity and heavenly-mindedness ? I ask fur- ther:—if it were otherwise—if the Bible were really a book of impure conceptions and immoral tendency—in whose hands should we naturally ex- pect to find it ? Should it not be in the hands of those who love to have their passions stimulated, their impure desires inflamed, their propensities to evil encouraged 1 Might we not, as a matter of course, look for it on the table of the man of pleas- ure ;—fingered and worn down at favorite pas- sages, as such books ever are, by the sensual, the frivolous, and the profane ? If it really counte- nanced sin, would it not be a favorite with the sin- ner ? If it were a friend rather than a foe to li- centiousness, would it not be liked by the licen- tious ? If it supplied kindling and fuel to lust, might we not expect it to be the secret companion, the vade-mecum and bosom-friend, of the man 22 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT " whose mind and conscience are defiled," whose " eyes are full of adultery, and insatiate of sin . .—should we even be greatly surprised to find it in the parlors and chambers of the brothel ?—Is it, then, so ? Is the Bible the favorite book, with such characters, or in such places 1 I need not answer the question. Whoever took up the Bi- ble for such excitement, for such encouragement 1 Who ever thought of coming to that hallowed fire, to kindle their impure desires ? Is not the Bible the book from which such characters shrink ?— which they can not bear to look into, or so much as to hear named 1—which they are sensible, opposes, and thwarts, and condemns them—and which they are well pleased to keep out of sight and out of mind ? Such men may say what they will; but in reviling the Bible, they bear witness against themselves :—they give evidence how they dis- like its very purity, spirituality, and strictness, and how fain they are to discover, or to devise, any- thing capable of being construed into a plausible apology for disregarding it.----Once more; I make my appeal to facts. Many are the profli- gates, who, by means of the Bible, have been re- claimed from the " paths of folly, sin, and shame ;" —heard you ever of any who by the Bible were led into those paths 1 It has often been known to change enmity against God into love :—was it ever known to change love into enmity ? It has humbled many a proud spirit: did it ever make an humble spirit proud ?—It has softened many a hard heart: did it ever harden a soft one ?—It has turned the stone to flesh : did it ever turn the flesh to stone ?—It has sweetened many a bittei spring, and purified many a polluted one: did il OF MAGDALENISM. 23 ever embitter the sweet, or pollute the pure ?— Many have died in desperate anguish, lamenting the ill-fated hour when first they listened to a skep- tical companion, or opened an infidel book, and closed and laid aside the Bible : heard you ever of any, whose last hours were embittered by the re- flection, of their having listened to the instructions, followed the counsels, and obeyed the precepts, of the Bible ?—No, never. That book, the faith of which has changed and purified the heart, has made it the residence of holy principles, and holy affections, and holy joys, and has thus fitted it for the present and everlasting enjoyment of the God of purity and love, that book has ever proved the rock of the soul's confidence in the dying hour; so that when, in any case, there has been fear, it has arisen, not from any apprehension of the in- sufficiency of what it reveals, but from the self- diffident suspicion of the dying saint, that he had not truly believed it and experienced sufficiently its renovating power! Nothing can be easier, than bandying bible phrases, in the impure sportiveness of wanton libertinism ;—but it is only because light associa- tions with that book are felt to take off from the awfulness of its damnatory denunciations. It is easy to take portions of it out of their connexion, and so to turn them to purposes the very opposite of those they were meant to serve. But what should we think of the man—what of the charac- ter of his heart—what of the fairness of his in- sinuated inference—who should take up Solomon's graphic description of the adulterous harlot, whom he saw from his casement addressing her entice- ments to the simple unguarded youth, and should 24 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT gloat over it, in the prurience of his polluted ima- gination ;—while he paid no regard to the solemn and thrilling close—a close which reads to all, and reads to youth especially, the monitory moral of the whole : "He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks ; till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life. Hearken unto me now, therefore, 0 ye youth, and attend to the words of my mouth. Let not thine heart decline to her ways ; go not astray in her paths. For she hath cast down many wounded : yea, many strong men have been slain by her. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death." Prov. vii. 22-27. But besides the difficulty that arises from the delicacy of the subject, there is one of another kind. The vice is, to a great extent, a secret one. It is to a certain degree only, that it is open and known. Though in a sad multitude of cases un- blushing and unconcealed, inviting notice, courting publicity, yet in an equal, if not a still greater number of instances, it is practised more covertly. The amount of the unknown, it is true, may exist chiefly among those who, happily for themselves, belong not to the number of the initiated in the mysteries of impurity ; and who therefore see and hear comparatively little of it: and they who know better may smile at their ignorance and simplicity. But still it is a matter of no small difficulty to ar- rive at anything like satisfactorily accurate statis- tics. In one department there is a hazard of over, and in another of under statement. In some cases, the statistical calculations are not only different, OF MAGDALENISM. 25 but so very widely different as to render it far from easy to account for the disparity, and, to one who has no means of forming a judgment for himself, but is under the necessity of trusting to the esti- mates of others, hardly to leave any alternative but that of striking a medium between the ex- tremes ; although, in some instances, there may be reason for leaning to the more favorable repre- sentation—in others, to the more unfavorable. In endeavoring to bring the whole subject before you, as far as ability and propriety admit, I purpose to pursue the following order :— I. The nature, varieties, and extent of the evil. II. The effects arising from it. III. The evidence an'd degree of its guilt, or moral turpitude. IV. The causes which contribute to its prevalence. V. The means of prevention, mitigation, and re- moval. I. I invite your attention, in the first place, to the nature, varieties, and extent of the evil. On the nature of it, it is surely very unneces- sary to dwell. The evil is what is usually desig- nated—the illicit intercourse of the sexes. But I have no sooner uttered the designation, than I am reminded by it of a class of persons that has re- cently risen up among us, and whose members have given themselves " a local habitation and a name," whose system of principles disowns the word illicit altogether. In regard to the inter- course of the sexes, they deny the legitimate au- thority of any restriction, admit no rule but that of natural impulse, and would reduce us to the so- cialism of the brutes. They would have us to re- gard all intercourse as equally lawful, according to 26 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT what they falsely affirm (falsely as we may here- after see) to be Nature's law. Among the strange characteristics of the strange times in which we live, it is surely not the least extraordinary, that in the middle of the nineteenth century, in an age and country distinguished by the advance of knowl- edge and improvement, the discovery should have been made and broached, as the foundation of a " new moral world," that religion, property, and marriage, are the real originators of all existing evils—the Pandora's box, from which have issued all the various and countless " ills that flesh is heir to ;" and that no God, no property, and no mar- riage, are the true panacea for the world's vices and the world's woes ! I am not, of course, about to enter into an examination of the general merits or demerits of socialism. I have to do at present with one only of the provisions of the misnamed system; namely, the abrogation of the connubial bond, and the substitution for it of the indiscrimi- nate inter-communion of the sexes, according to all the irregularities of temporary libidinous incli- nation.* And I frankly confess that my own * Even of the language of Mr. Owen's own book,—" The Book of the New Moral World." there is no misunderstanding the meaning; although the anti-marriage principles have been much more openly and unblushingly avowed since. Thus for example, when, in illustrating one of his laws ot nature-the law namely, that " each individual is so organized, as to like that which is pleasant to him, or which, in other words, pro- duces agreeable sensations in him,"-and of course, to " dislike" the contrary, he speaks of the ease with which this earth might be converted into a paradise instead of a pandemonium, "by acting in obedience to the simple and unerring instincts of our organization; an organization, formed purposely to" di- rect man, in the same manner as the general instincts of nature. to those movements, exertions, and feelings, which are neces- sary to his sustenance, health, and enjoyment;"—and then OF MAGDALENISM. 27 loathing of the beastly system is so intense that I am unable to speak of it with patience, or to ap- ply to it any of the terms of a smooth-tongued cour- adds: " This, law of nature is evidently intended to induce, impel, or compel, one portion of organized matter to seek some other portion of matter necessary to its best state of ex- istence ; and this law seems to pervade all nature, except when man, by his absurd artificial laws, opposed to nature's laws, interferes, and says to the Power which animates and organ- izes the universe, < I am more wise and holy than thou, and I will therefore oppose thy laws with all my might, and endea- vor to frustrate thy weak and foolish decrees. I will force into union, according to my notions, bodies and minds, contrary to thy laws, and compel the continuance of the union, however thy laws may repel or loathe the connexion.' " Thus has the ignorance of man, with regard to his own nature, and universal nature, interfered in opposition to his own happiness, and to the happiness of all surrounding nature, as far as his limited powers extend. ... He has decreed, that men and women, whose natural sympathies and affections unite them at one time and repel each other at another, shall speak and act in opposition to these unavoidable feelings; and thus has he produced hypocrisy, crime, and misery, beyond the powers of language to express."—Owen's Book of the New Moral World, &c.—pp. 54,57. And again: " It is in reality, therefore, the greatest crime against nature, to prevent organ- ized beings from uniting with those objects or other organized beings, with which nature has created in them a desire to unite. Nature, when allowed to take its course, through the whole life of organized beings, produces the desire to combine or unite with those objects with which it is the best for them to unite, and to remain united with them as long as it is the most beneficial for their well-being and happiness that they should continue together; and Nature is the only correct judge in de- termining her own laws. It is man alone who has disobeyed this law:—it is man alone who has thus brought sin and misery into the world, and engendered the disunion and hatred which now render the lives of so many human beings wretched. It is to secure the performance of this law, that Nature rewards, with so much satisfaction and pleasure, the union of those or- ganized beings, who often, in despite of man's absurd artificial arrangements to the contrary, contain, between them, the pure elements of union, by being the most perfectly formed to unite together, physically, intellectually, and morally. Man, then, to be perfectly virtuous and happy, from birth to death, must implicitly obey this law of his and of universal nature."—Ibid 28 ON T^E NATURE AND EXTENT tesy. I should conceive myself to be equally in- sulting the understandings, and outraging the feel- ings of any audience but one composed of the in- pp. 57,58. It is needless to enter into explanation ; far less into any exposure of the gross inconsistency of the system, which talks of virtue and morality, and the power which animates and organizes the universe, while it denies all moral responsi- bility and moral government, and the existence of any intelli- gent Creator and Ruler : " The error respecting this" (ano- ther) " law of human nature, lias led man to create a personal ■ Deity, author of all good ; and a personal devil, author of all evil; to invent all the various forms of worship of the former, and, in many instances, of the latter also ; and the modes of propitiating the favor of the one, and avoiding the supposed evil doings of the other. And yet, when the mind can be re- lieved from the early prejudices which have been forced into it on these subjects, it will be discovered that there is not one single fact known by man, after all the experience of the past i generations, to prove that any such personalities exist, or ever , did exist; and, in consequence, all the mythology of the an- j cients, and all the religions of the moderns, are mere fanciful I notions of men whose imaginations have been cultivated to j accord with existing prejudices, and whose judgments have been systematically destroyed from their birth."—Ibid, p. 64. J —Bravo ! " Until that I, Robert Owen, arose !" * * [Both in the text and in the preceding note, I have been charged by the Socialists with misrepresenting the sentiments * of Mr. Owen, and of themselves as his avowed followers. Had any farther examination of their principles, as they appear in the writings, or the accredited public lectures, of their founder, ■> brought me to the conviction that there was truth in this j charge, I should assuredly have felt it an imperative duty to 1 fulfil the promise which I conditionally made, to retract or to modify my statements. But it has turned out otherwise ; and I can not conscientiously do either. I conceived the language of Mr. Owen, in the extracts given in the preceding note from $ his Book of the New Moral World, as quite sufficiently intel- ■ ligible; especially when considered as used by a man who, setting himself forward, not merely as an ordinary author and instructer of the community, but as the framer of a new con- stitution for human society, such as should effect infallibly the renovation of the whole race, was surely entitled to be re- garded as one capable of understanding the meaning and ap- preciating the value of his own words. And upon comparing j the language with that of the more recent " Lectures" of Mr. Owen " on the marriages of the priesthood of the old immoral OF MAGDALENISM. / 29 mates of brothels, were I to set about any grave refutation of it; a system which, by one fell swoop, would annihilate all the bonds of kindred, world," I am far more than confirmed in the conviction of my • having been right m its interpretation. It is true that Mr. Owen did at one time legislate for his socialist communities on the subject of marriage and divorce. But never was anything done by man more inconsistent with his own principles. Mr. Owen's fundamental maxim, on the subject before us, is that Nature can do no wrong ; and that if men would only agree to follow Nature, all would be right. And by nature he does not mean reason. Not at all. It has" been the interference of reason with nature, in the form of restrictions upon her dic- tates, that has originated in this department all the immorality and misery of the " old world." For the exemplification ac- cordingly, of what he means by following nature, he does direct us, and that repeatedly, formally, and pointedly, to the habits of the brute creation, as those which should regulate ours. It were easy to extract from the Lectures passages of the most unblushing and disgusting plainness,—by which if he means anything else, or anything less, than that the intercourse of the sexes, in the human species, should have no other control than the mutual impulses of their animal nature, what he calls, in the extracts of the preceding note, the " instincts of their organization,"—and that tneir temporary unions should be formed and severed according to their temporary likings and dislikings, however short and however shifting,—he should cease to write, till he has learned to write intelligibly. Such passages I might transfer to my pages; but that they might thereby forfeit the character they have so generally obtained, of having treated a subject, in itself so intrinsically nauseous, with some measure at least of creditable delicacy. At the same time I must say, I have hesitated between this decision and the probable salutary operation upon the public mind of an exhibition of this part of the system, in the very terms of its founder, in all its native loathsomeness. In his legislative capacity, Mr. Owen took a fancy for an- nual marriages, as some have done for annual parliaments.—A man and woman were to unite for a year ;—though why for a year, when the " liking," on which alone the junction was to be formed, might, by the uncontrollable influence of organiza- tion, become " dislike and loathing even in a few hours," the man whose principle is that nature should be followed and the impulses of organization implicitly obeyed, has not conde- scended to explain. If, at the end of the year, both parties wished to part, they were to be separated, and at liberty. If 30 ON THS NATURE AND EXTENT all the sweet and blessed charities of domestic life, and all the possibilities of regular government: of which the tendency—as even the present lecture, the wish was expressed by one only of the parties, they were to make a farther trial of six months more ; during which, of course, the party that wished to be off had it fully in his or her power to effect the end, by only (and nothing could be more easy) making the other a little more miserable : and then, as in the former case, there was to be an end of it.—Then we have another beautiful exemplification of his consistent ad- herence to the principle of following nature. That there might be no barrier in the way of as frequent changes as parties might desire, the parental training of children, and the whole system of domestic life—the " one-family system," as he calls it—are to be abolished, and (as being doubtless more according to nature, nothing being more unnatural than the idea of pa- rents taking any oversight of their own offspring !) the charge of all children is to be taken by the community,—and all the specialities of attachment to be done away with, as the inlets, in this our " old immoral world," to all manner of malignity and mischief! Whether this legislation of his, in a matter in which every interference of legislation is, on his principles, a presumptuous and pernicious thwarting of nature, was a kind of intermediate step, preparatory to the more full development of his plans, I will not pretend to say; but certain it is, that in his " Lec- tures" we have nothing of the kind. In them, he seems to feel.it necessary to muster up a special amount of resolution— and he does it with a pompousness of self-eulogy sufficiently ludicrous,—as if he had ground to apprehend that what he was now about to divulge might be too much for even the ini- tiated. And no wonder. The principles of these lectures and his system of legislative restriction, loose as it is, are at per- fect antipodes.—And although he writes strong things against magdalenism, with which a careless reader of the old world might be not a little pleased, the more attentive will observe, that he is, to a great extent, using the word in a sense of his own; _ The vice against which he utters his bitterest anathe- mas, is the magdalenism of existing marriages :—" all married pairs, with a very few exceptions" living, according to him, "in a state of the most degrading magdalenism, enforced upon them by the human laws of marriage -."—magdalenism, in the vocabulary of the new moral world, meaning all continuance in union when liking has ceased ; and the founder of the new moral world being pleased to hold that almost all married men and women do mutually dislike each other, and are therefore OF MAGDALENISM. 31 and still more those that follow, will abundantly evince—is to results the most fearful which it is possible for the imagination to contemplate ; and which, while it professes to follow nature, "under- stands neither what it says, nor whereof it af- • firms," being itself a disgusting contravention of all Nature's legitimate dictates, all her finest feel- ings, all her most hallowed affections ; or rather a contravention, the most presumptuous, of the laws and purposes of that God,—whether intimated through nature or through his word—whose ex- istence, providence, and moral government the sys- tem, with a miserable consistency, denies. I was about to say—but I will not, and I need not say it—pardon my warmth. I should be sorry to think living in magdalenism; while, on the other hand, if not the whole, a large amount at least, of what we are accustomed to stigmatize as magdalenism, is, according to him, the pure and innocent chastity of nature ! I say it honestly—I should have been glad, for Mr. Owen's sake, had I found reason to retract or to modify. But I must say, and I say this honestly too,—that further examination has only confirmed me in the correctness of my statements, and proportionally increased my loathing. Those of Mr. Owen's followers who try to put a less unfavorable interpretation on his words, at once make him out a very unintelligible writer— (which, however, on this subject, he is not)—and exemplify the reason he had for fearing that even those who had em- braced his system so far as they fancied they understood it, were not prepared for the sweeping boldness of its full devel- opment. It is for Mr. Owen, not for me, to retract. It is for Mr. Owen, not for me, to expound his own language, and re- concile his own contradictions. If, as I have been informed, he has expressed himself satisfied with the New Marriage Act, - he will have got even more to do in this way than I was aware of. I have great pleasure in referring the reader, on this partic- ular branch of Socialism, to a lecture by the Rev. R. Ainslie, of London, entitled " An Examination of Socialism," being the last of a series of lectures against that system, delivered under the direction of the London City Mission.] 32 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT there was one now hearing me who did not hold it in the same abhorrence with myself. On all such occasions, my secret comfort is—strangely as the term may sound in some ears—the worse the better. There are schemes of error and of immorality, which are invested with specious plau- sibilities to the understanding, aud captivating se- ductiveness to the heart; but a system such as this gives one's mind the instantaneous and con- fident assurance, that there is a sufficiency of sound sense and of right feeling in the community, when its real nature comes to be fairly before them, stripped of those ad captandum accompaniments by which the inconsiderate may, for the time, be misled, at once to detect its drivelling folly, and to repudiate its unblushing and unbearable vileness. It is a satisfaction to be assured that the system, although (like every other, how perverse soever, which " boasteth great things," and is lavish in its promises) it obtained, to some extent, a baseless and brief popularity, is rapidly sinking into its mer- ited disrepute and oblivion. The evil, then, now to be the subject of our con- sideration, is, I repeat, the illicit intercourse of the sexes. The female who submits to this is guilty of magdalenism. The very first offence is mag- dalenism. I am aware that the propriety of this : use of the word may be questioned. Fornication [ and magdalenism have been distinguished ; the former as meaning the act of illicit intercourse gen- erally, the latter as including the idea of the act being committed for hire. And Johnson defines \ magdalenism " the life of a public strumpet." It is little worth our while to dispute about the precise I shades of difference between different terms. I j OF MAGDALENISM. 33 consider the word magdalenism as, equally with fornication and whoredom, applicable to the woman who, whether for hire or not, voluntarily surren- ders her virtue. But the first offence does not con- stitute her who has been guilty of it a harlot: just as the first act of thievery is theft; but that one act does not make the perpetrator of it a thief. A harlot and a thief are designations of character; and a character can never be formed, nor the des- ignation which expresses it merited, by a solitary act. One lie does not make a liar ; nor one oath a swearer; nor one instance of intoxication a drunkard. Who would call the apostle Paul, a swearer, because, yielding to the fear which " brought a snare," he, in one sad moment, used " oaths and curses" to give effect to the denial of his Master ? And, on the same principle, who would call the woman a harlot who, by whatever temptation seduced, has but once, in a guilty and unguarded moment, surrendered her honor to vio- lation ? In the one case, as in the other, there may follow instantly the relentings and the tears of a true and deep repentance. To form the char- acter, and to justify the designation, there must be the voluntary repetition of the act—the giving up of the person to criminal indulgence. Of these females there are different classes, or descriptions, according to the degree of openness or of secrecy—of undiscriminating commonness or more restrictive appropriation—with which the sin is perpetrated. A harlot is generally understood of one who makes her livelihood by whoredom. This, however, may be done either wholly or in part on- ly ; and it is not, even in any degree, necessary to the character, how general soever as an accom- 34 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT paniment of it. Among the varieties there are, first of all, your kept mistresses;—and these are of very various grades, from the first-rate style of keeping down to the lowest; but, though varying in the scale of—(since I must use the word for want of another to convey the idea, though I dis- like the association of it with so vile a theme)—in the scale of gentility, all alike in that of moral tur- pitude ; unless, perhaps, in some instances, the highest in the former may be the lowest in the lat- ter. There are, again, the inmates of brothels; and of these receptacles of infamy too, there are corresponding varieties ; from the expensive and elegant accommodations of " nice nobility," down to the most wretched styles of filth and loathsome- ness ; yet in their moral loathsomeness all the same, alike vile in the eye of that Supreme Judge with whom there is " no respect of persons," who is " of purer eyes than to behold evil," and who, in his estimate of comparative delinquency,'' judg- eth righteous judgment," regarding superiority in education, rank, and influence, as aggravations, rather than alleviations, of iniquity. There are, still farther, those who, by different statists, are called secret or sly harlots; by whom magdalenism is not followed as their known and avowed course of life and means of maintenance ; but who, pur- suing other occupations, receive more privately the visits of paramours, or frequent what have been termed houses of assignation,—which may justly be regarded as no better than brothels under a dif- ferent name,—haunts of the same pollution, under false colors,—and often, through this very descrip- tion of aliases, only the more dangerous. The females who compose this class, are to be found OF MAGDALENISM. 35 among the multitudes who are engaged in the various descriptions of feminine occupation ; and, if we may depend on the universal and unhes- itating testimony of those who have investigated the facts and drawn up the statistics of the case, no small proportion of them among the domestic servants of the communities of towns and cities. " This description" (la prostitution clandestine), says Duchatelet, in his work De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris, " of which many persons do not so much as suspect the existence, exerts an in- fluence on manners much more seriously perni- cious than public prostitution itself. It is it that corrupts and seduces innocence, and which, assu- ming appearances the most honorable, paralyzes authority, sets it perpetually at defiance, and spreads with impunity the most frightful contagion, and immorality the most flagrant." But further in- to detail, on such a subject, I abstain from enter- ing : it is not at all necessary to the object I have in view. In some countries magdalenism is legalized; that is, its existence is legally recognised and for- mally licensed; it is made the subject of public enactment; and this, not for the purpose of punish- ing and putting it down, not for the purpose of arm- ing the police with powers of summary coercion and repression; but for the purpose of bringing the tolerated system under legitimate regulation. Thus Parent-Duchatelet, in introducing that chap- ter of his work on the magdalenism of Paris, which treats of the different descriptions of houses in which the sin is practised, expresses himself in these terms: " The police, finding it an impos- sible thing to prevent the existence of houses of 36 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT ill fame" (maisons de debauche), " has felt itself under the necessity—not of authorising them (for that it never has done), but of licensing them" (non de les autoriser, mais de les tolerer). And subsequently, in speaking of the most approved designation for such houses, he avows his decided preference for that of " licensed houses" (maisons tolerees), as" " the most judicious and the most con- sistent with good morals (la plus sage et la plus morale), it is possible to employ." And again, after giving a graphic description of the character of a " Dame de Maison," as one who trades on the cor- ruption of public virtue ; who lives upon the libertin- ism and infamy of others ; who haunts the steps of every young female of tempting appearance ; who contrives and lays for such every description of snare ; whose very business it is to seduce youth, and to purvey for profligacy; whose house is an asylum for all who are weary of parental tutelage and restraint, and whose passions long for freedom, and a school for whatever is shameless, where mere children serve their apprenticeship to magdalen- ism : after thus giving a description of a character of which it might seem the first of virtues to rid the world—the conclusion to which he coolly comes is, that the present state of society renders these persons in a manner necessary, and that the public good requires from the government " their special protection !" and even he adds in a subsequent passage, "the augmentation of their numbers." To my mind, I confess, there is in all this something inexpressibly revolting. I have no idea of such lawless laws as go to regulate sin; and to take crime under a kind of state patronage. The idea of licensed brothels!—of a public regis- OF MAGDALENISM. 37 ter of harlots!—of a national or municipal revenue from a tax on recognised vice and profligacy! It is nauseous. It is one, of which I know of no consideration whatever that could persuade me to admit the justifiableness. Were such a procedure designed to stamp on magdalenism the brand of public infamy, it might, perhaps, admit of some- thing like a specious apology. But it is not so. Such registering, and licensing, and taxing, can serve no other purpose than that of taking off from the public mind any desirable impression of the moral turpitude of the legalized pollution, and the enormity of its concomitant and consequent evils. To take vice under legal regulation, is to give it, in the public eye, a species of legal sanction. It can never be right to regulate what it is wrong to do, and wrong to tolerate. To license immorality, is to protect and encourage it. Individuals and houses, which have a place in the public registers, naturally regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as being under the law's guardianship and authority ; not, as they ought to be, under its bann aad proscription. I was glad to observe, after having written this, the sentiment of Paley, (Mor. and Pol. Philosophy,book 3, part 3, ch. 3), in such exact agreement with it: " The avowed toleration, and, in some countries, the licensing, taxing, and regulating of public brothels, has appeared to the people an authorizing of fornication, and has contributed, with other causes, so far to vitiate the public opinion, that there is no practice of which the immorality is so little thought of or acknowl- edged ; although there are few in which it can be more plainly made out." It has, indeed, been al- leged, that, where this mode of treatment prevails, 38 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT ■ the prevalence of the vice itself is, comparatively, less than when it is either let alone, or is made the subject of severe legal restraints. I am slow to believe this; not merely from my dislike of the process, and a wish, thence arising, to find it other- wise,—but from my conviction of its manifest and natural tendency. There are cases, and this seems to be one of them, in which there is sufficient ground in the very nature of things, for more than a suspicion that, whatever the facts be, there is some mistake as to their cause. The tendency of the arrangement in question most manifestly is to diminish, in the public mind, the impression of the guilt and odium of the tolerated, legalized, licensed, regulated vice. Can this have a tendency to lessen its prevalence ? Can that which tends to the laxity of public principle tend to the correctness of pub- lic practice 1 Can that which lessens the reproba- tion of a vice, restrain its indulgence ? I presume it will not be disputed, that in few places does there prevail, through all the grades of society, a greater amount of laxity of principle, on the branch of morals now before us, than in the French capi- tal. I stop not now to inquire into relative propor- tions and causes. I state the generally-admitted fact. And may not one of the causes of the fact, contributing its share toward the aggregate result, be the existence of the very system to which we have been adverting ? Indeed, the low estimate of female virtue there, and the lightness and gayety with which gallantries (called, in the more faithful and homely phrase of the Bible, whoredoms), are regarded, may be partly an effect and partly a cause ; and, in whichsoever view we consider it, the inference is the same. OF MAGDALENISM. 39 On the important point of the extent to which, under its various forms, magdalenism prevails in our own country, and especially in our principal cities and towns, it is an exceedingly difficult mat- ter to arrive at any certainty; or even, judging from the disparity, in some instances, between the representations of different authorities, to make any satisfactory approach to the truth. In proof of this, I shall, first of all, present you with the fol- lowing extract from the review of the work of Parent-Duchatelet on the magdalenism of Paris, in the Foreign Quarterly Review, No. XXXVIIL, July, 1837, pages 340, 341: "The extent of magdalenism is the first subject that engages our attention; and there is scarcely any example more striking of the exaggerations that result from the neglect of statistical accuracy. There have been frequent guesses at the number of unfortunate beings engaged in it, both in Paris and London. In the former capital, it has been publicly stated, that the number exceeded sixty thousand ; and they were accounted very moderate, indeed, who reduced the number to one half that amount: but the registers of police, which have been very ac- curately kept for the last twenty years, prove, that there were never so many as four thousand at one time engaged in this profligate course. Colquhoun's Police of the Metropolis, a work possessing more authority than it has any title to claim, estimates the number of these females in London at fifty thou- sand:—but the investigations instituted by Mr. Mayne led to the conclusion, that there are not more than from eight to ten thousand, and the smaller amount is more probable than the lar- ger. The mistake of the amount of these fe- 40 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT males is so common, and so injurious, that we think it would be useful to indicate the sources of the error. The first of these is, the fluctuating nature of this portion of the population. The superintendents of our metropolitan police have frequently noticed the rapidity and the suddenness with which many of those on whom they have kept a watchful eye disappear from the stage, leav- ing no trace by which their further progress could be followed. The registers of Paris contain ample proofs of the same fact; and, if anything could afford gratification in the view of this melan- choly topic, it would be, that repentance appears to be more frequently the cause of their removal, than disease or death." (Would that we could be- lieve this!) " A second cause of error is, that persons estimate the amount for the entire city from the numbers found in certain localities ; and this was the source of Colquhoun's enormous es- timate. Finally, we have been informed by some intelligent police officers, that the same persons haunt different parts of the metropolis at different hours, and are consequently counted many times over. It must, however, be confessed, that there are no means for estimating the amount of depraved women in London, with anything like accuracy : the nearest approach we can make to it is, that their number is not much more than double that of the same class in Paris." Here, you will observe, we have, with regard to Paris, a range of estimate, from under four thou- sand to above sixty thousand ; and, with regard to London, from eight thousand to fifty thousand. And in the latter case, this is far from beinw the full extent of the differences ; for, while the me- OF MAGDALENISM. 41 tropolitan police reckon the number of harlots at seven thousand, it has been stated by some—Mr. Talbot, Dr. Ryan, Dr. Campbell, and others—so high as eighty thousand ! Respecting this latter statement, which rises so far above even what the reviewer just cited calls Mr. Colquhoun's " enor- mous estimate," the following remarks in the Lon- don City Mission Magazine for November, 1840, may suffice to show its extravagance : " Dr. Ryan has stated, in common with many others, that the number of females already alluded to is 80,000; but he does so chiefly on the authority of Mr. Tal- bot. In a report of the society for the prevention of juvenile magdalenism, and quoted by Dr. Ryan, it is said that ' it has been ascertained that full two thirds of the unfortunate females in our streets are under twenty years of age.' This gives us, out of the 80,000, upward of 53,000 of this tender age. By the population returns of 1821, it appears that fifty out of every hundred of the population are under twenty years of age ; and that one tenth of the whole population is between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Thej whole number of our female population between the ages of fifteen and twenty, according to the last census, is 78,962 ; and can it be true that 53,000 of them are harlots V And again, giving the result under another form : " In the last population returns for London within and without the walls, Southwark, Westminster, the parishes within the bills of mortality, and adja- cent parishes not within the bills (the extent of the metropolis to which such a calculation would be confined), the number of males is given at 684,- 441, and of females at 789,628. By the population returns of 1821, it appears that of every 100 per- 4* 42 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT sons twenty are under seven years of age, twenty between the ages of seven and fifteen, and ten be- tween fifteen and twenty, leaving fifty out of every hundred from the age of twenty and upward. If, therefore, we deduct for female children under fif- teen years of age, and for females above fifty only one half of the female population, we have 394,- 814 females in reference to whom the calculation can be made. If we divide this number by 80,- 000, it gives us nearly five ; and is it true' that one out of every five females in London, between the ages of fifteen and fifty, including the highest, the middling, and the humbler classes, is a harlot? If it be true, the subject should be taken up very dif- ferently from what it has been ; if it be erroneous, it should be corrected, and this foul blot upon the metropolitan female character should be wiped away." But surely the very statement must be its own ample refutation. It is not, it can not be true, nor even an approach to truth. These differences are so very wide, as to be really marvellous. How far the causes of discrep- ancy, enumerated by the Foreign Quarterly Re- viewer, are adequate to account for it in its full extent, I shall not take time to inquire. Any data on which an accurate decision could rest, appear to be far from satisfactory. One thing, however, I must notice, as having forcibly struck me, respecting the smaller esti- mates of the number of unfortunate females in London—the estimates, I mean, which state it so low as seven, eight, or even ten thousand—name- ly, the inconsistency between these estimates and the representations at the same time given of the number of houses of ill-fame in that metropolis. OF MAGDALENISM. 43 According to the returns made by Mr. Mayne, these amount to 3,335 : and this enumeration "does not include the city, in which also brothels abound ;" and " the Rev. Mr. Hughes, of Bedford Chapel, Bloomsbury, states that in a space of ground about 700 yards in circumference (St. Giles' Rookery), there are twenty-four houses of ill-fame, of which the average number of occupants is ten ; making a total of 240 in that limited area."* Of course, we should be running into a grievous miscalculation, were we to adopt the number of such houses in this particular locality as a ratio of estimate for the whole of London, or even the number of in- mates in each of them as the average for all other houses of the same description. Were we to pro- ceed on the latter assumption, the 3,335 brothels would contain a total of 33,350 inmates ; and these would, of course, be exclusive of the vast number of a more secret description : of whom Mr. Taitf makes the number in Edinburgh considerably larger than that of the more common and openly abandoned. This writer, in estimating the num- ber in the Scottish metropolis, makes the " houses of bad fame, including nouses of assignation, li- censed taverns, and eating-houses, where sexual intercourse is tolerated," about 200 ; the average number of girls who board and lodge in these houses he estimates at three to each : in all 600. Mr. Tait's careful inquiries no doubt satisfied him as to the correctness of this average. It does * " Female Virtue: its Enemies and Friends." A Discourse by Rev. Dr. Edgar, of Belfast, &c.; p. 9. f " Magdalenism: An inquiry into the extent, causes, and consequences of prostitution in Edinburgh," by William Tait, Surgeon, &c, &c. A work to which I shall have frequent oc- casion to refer. Second edition, 1842. 44 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT seem, however, a low one. According to police returns for Glasgow, the average to each of the houses of bad fame (not, however, taking in the variety of descriptions of houses included by Mr. Tait) is seven. A respected city missionary (to whose statements future reference may be made) makes the number of houses larger, and the aver- age complement of each less—-four instead of seven. Suppose we should take the average for the houses of bad fame in London at five instead of ten, this will still yield us the aggregate of 16,675 ; and this independently of the city, and independently too of all those classes that are not included among the occupants of brothels, respect- ing whom Mr. Mayne says, that, " in his opinion, there is no means of ascertaining the number of female servants, milliners, and women in the mid- dle and upper classes of society, who might prop- erly be classed with them—or the women who frequent theatres exclusively, barracks, ships, prisons, &c." With such an opinion before me, it would be presumption to venture even a guess at the aggregate of those varieties. But it must at one glance be apparent, that, estimate it as you will, the 7,000, or even the highest of Mr. Mayne's numbers, the 10,000, for the entire amount in Lon- don, must be much below the truth. And really, on looking at the magnitude of these discrepancies in the calculations for London, I have felt no great encouragement, after having begun, to prosecute my endeavors to obtain information from other places. Mr. Tait, who himself estimates the public harlots of Edinburgh at 800, and the private at 1,160, admits, that, even with regard to that city, there has been a range of diversity in statement OF MAGDALENISM. 45 from 300 up to 6,000 ! I might copy, to a great extent, as to different cities and towns, the statis- tics given by others ; but what would it avail, when, from the nature of the case, anything approaching to certain accuracy is so little attainable 1 My hearers would doubtless be startled, as I was myself, by the statement in the closing sentence of the extract cited a little while ago from the For- eign Quarterly Review, in which the reviewer, after mentioning the impossibility of " estimating the number of depraved women in London with anything like accuracy," adds : " The nearest ap- proach we can make tovit is, that their number is not much more than double that of the same class in Paris /"—" What!" we are ready to exclaim— " London more than double Paris !—and all that can be said in mitigation of the statement, that it is ' not much more !' " Even when we bethink ourselves of what at the first moment we are apt to overlook, the disparity between the population of the two cities, we still are not satisfied. We have been accustomed to comfort ourselves with the re- flection that, bad as our own metropolis is, it is not so deeply sunk in pollution as that of France ; to which, were the number of depraved women in it more than double, it would at least approach more nearly,in its " bad eminence," than we had weened. And here we have before us another exemplifica- tion of the extreme uncertainty attending all the estimates on this subject, on both sides of the chan- nel. Hear what Mr. Tait says—bringing before us, not the relative proportions of London and Paris only, but also of our Scottish metropolis, and of what, in point of population and commer- cial importance, may be called the capital of the 46 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT United States of America—the city of New York. Having, by the mode of calculation which he de- scribes, fixed the number of openly depraved wo- men for Edinburgh, whether residents in brothels or in other places, at 800, and mentioned the pro- portion which this number bears to the " adult male population" as being " about one to every eighty," he adds : " In London, there is one for every sixty, and in Paris one for every fifteen. Edinburgh is thus about twenty-five per cent, bet- ter than "London, while the latter is about seventy per cent, better than Paris. And what is to be said of the chief city of the United States of America—of the independent, liberal, religious, enlightened inhabitants of New York? It will scarcely be credited that that city furnishes a har- lot for every six or seven of its adult male popu- lation ! Alas ! for the religion and morality of the country that affords such a demonstration of its depravity ! It was not surpassed even by the me- tropolis of France during the heat and fervor of the revolution, when libertinism reigned triumph- ant, and the laws of God and men were alike set at defiance."—Magdalenism ; 2d ed., pp. 6,7. In a note, Mr. Tait subjoins—showing the ratio by which these relative proportions were estimated. " The manner in which these calculations are made is as follows : The one half of the popula- tion of these cities is supposed to be males ; a third part is subtracted from this number, as being cither too young or too old to exercise their pro- creative functions ; and the remainder is divided by the number of public women in each city. The number supposed to exist in Edinburgh is 800; in London, 8,000 ; in Paris, 18,000 ; and in New OF MAGDALENISM. 47 York, 10,000—which gives the proportions above stated." Still we are in the region of uncertainty; for while Mr. Tait gives the number of depraved women for Paris as 18,000—which, in fairness of estimate, must, like the other numbers, refer to public and known harlots—Mons. Fregier, in his work entitled " Des Classes dangereuses de la popu- lation dans les grandes villes," &c, states the num- ber of the registered as 3,800, and of the unregis- tered as 4,000 : not 8,000 in all! I am inclined to believe that this is either greatly under the truth, or that there must be in Paris a large amount of licentious intercourse that does not come into the ordinary estimates of magdalenism. The reviewer gives the actual number in London as more, though not much more, than double that in Paris: accord- ing to the statement of Mr. Tait, the number in Paris is considerably more than double that in London; while, in relative proportion, the former city is four times worse than the latter ! And the statement of the rate of proportion between Paris and New York is still more startling than that of the reviewer respecting London and Paris.* The Rev. Dr. M'Dowall, after stating the nature of his data, thus writes : " We are satisfied we do not exaggerate, when we repeat that there are now ten thousand girls and women in the city of New York who live by public and promiscuous magda- lenism. Besides these, we have the clearest evi- dence that there are hundreds of private harlots and kept misses, many of whom keep up a show • For a careful estimate of the number of abandoned females in the city of New York, see the Advocate of Moral Reform for June 1, 1842: an extremely valuable weekly journal, con- ducted by a society of ladies, for the suppression of this vice. 48 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT of industry as domestics, seamstresses, nurses, &c, in the most respectable families, and throng the houses of assignation every night. Although we have no means of ascertaining the number of these, yet enough has been learned from the facts already developed, to convince us that the aggre- gate of these is alarmingly great, perhaps little behind the proportion of London, whose police reports assert, on the authority of accurate re- searches, that the number of private harlots in that city is fully equal to the number of public ones. This is a most appalling picture of moral degrada- tion ; and we forbear to dwell on so painful and mortifying conclusions as those to which this view of the subject would compel us. We can not for- get, however, that the Rev. Mr. Stafford, formerly employed as a missionary among the depraved population of our city, published his conviction, after careful investigation of this subject, that there were 15,000 abandoned females in this city (New York); and our population, permanent and transient, was then one third less than it is now." Such statements may well, indeed, be designated " appalling." On the general ground of the un- certainty of all calculations on this subject, as evinced in the facts already laid before you, I would fondly suspect some lurking error. But if such error there be, I have not in possession any means of detecting it. The details, regarding these chief cities of our own and other countries, were too important and interesting to be passed over; else I should have felt that I had been detaining you too long from the city in which and in whose interests we are most immediately concerned, the mercantile and manu- OF MAGDALENISM. 49 facturing capital of Scotland,—Glasgow. Accord- ing to returns made by the intelligent and inde- fatigable superintendent of our police, Mr. Miller, there are in our city 204 houses of bad fame; of which 49 are kept by males, and 155 by fe- males ; and the entire number of females who live in these houses, is 1,475. The city missionary before referred to, estimates the number of houses at 450 ; and, at four to each house, the whole number would be 1,800. From the proportion re- ceived into the Lock hospital, Dr. Hannay (the able surgeon to that institution) says he is " in- duced to believe that 1,600 will bound the number who exclusively and openly abandon themselves to this vicious course of life in the city of Glasgow." This is a medium between the other two. Of the 1,475 in Mr. Miller's estimate, he " is of opinion that considerably more than one half come from the country ;" and for this he naturally enough ac- counts, from " the fact, that, when a girl misbe- haves, or becomes unfortunate, or loses her service, in the country, she generally betakes herself to the nearest large town." " Many are supplied also," he states, " from the large number of High- land and Irish girls, who are constantly coming to Glasgow in search of work." Having estimated the number of females, who are inmates of broth- els, as above, at 1,475, Mr. Miller adds : "I find it impossible to say how many females given to this vice there may be, who do not frequent broth- els ; and on this subject I feel a delicacy in giving even a guess." It would be no mark of either modesty or judgment, in myself or any one else, to venture on a conjecture when an authority so competent declines it. I have before alluded to 4 50 ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT the fact that, in regard to Edinburgh, Mr. Tait conceives the number of those whom he denomi- nates " sly magdalenes," to be considerably greater than that of the openly and notoriously abandoned. The latter, as has been stated, he estimates, on the authority of Captain Stewart of the police estab- lishment, at about 800 ; while he makes the num- ber of the former " 1,160 and upward ;" the aggre- gate being composed of the three following divis- ions,—660 from among the 2,000 females sup- posed to be engaged in sedentary occupations,— 300 servant girls, the lowest calculation in that class which he thinks can be made,—and 200 women, who are either widows or have been de- serted by their husbands. Whether in Glasgow, the aggregate amount of secret bears anything like the same proportion to that of public magdalenism, I will not, for the reason assigned, pretend to say. If it did, it would oblige us to add considerably above 2,000 secret or sly magdalenes to the 1,475 frequenters of the houses of ill fame. Distressing as it would be to believe this, yet, for aught I can tell, it may be true. I feel it unnecessary, as I have already said, on account of their unsatisfactoriness,to multiply state- ments relative to other places ;—nor do I think it could serve any valuable purpose to dwell more in detail on this first branch of my subject.—In next lecture I shall proceed to the second. OF MAGDALENISM. 51 LECTURE II. ON THE EFFECTS OF MAGDALENISM. To such as are already duly impressed with the guilt of this vice, regarded in itself, independently of all consideration of consequences, the state- ments under our first head, laid before you in last lecture, will be sufficiently appalling. If the num- ber of those females be so great, who, in various ways, more secret or more open, give themselves to this course of life ; how much greater must be the number of the other sex who are their regular or occasional paramours, their socii criminis, par- takers in their guilt! The amount of sin, in the eye of Him, of whose law every act of unclean- ness is a violation, and in the eye of every one who has learned to regard that law as " holy, just, and good," is indeed fearful. But still it is neces- sary, even to enable us fully to estimate, in all its kinds, the nature and amount of the guilt, to look a little closely at the attendant and consequent evils connected with this " mystery of iniquity." By such considerations some possibly may be im- pressed, by whom the sin in itself is but lightly condemned. And even of those whose conviction is deepest of its " exceeding sinfulness," the in- dignant sympathies maybe awakened, and the ac- tive energies for its suppression called forth or 52 ON THE EFFECTS stimulated to livelier exertion, by having presented to their minds some of the more prominent and shocking effects of this parent evil; the poisonous and deadly fruits of this Upas tree ; the bitter streams of this bitter fountain. I begin with the effects of it to individuals— to the miserable victims of the sin themselves. This general class of effects includes varieties. They relate to body—to mind—to present outward condition—to prospects for eternity. The corporeal effects themselves are frightful. For myself, I must avow it, that I had no concep- tion of them—and I believe that conception to be very inadequate still—till the facts were, to a cer- tain extent, brought before me by this investigation. I have been specially and oppressively struck with the representations on all hands given, by statists and medical authorities, with regard to the average duration of life among the female victims of this vice. " It may be stated generally," says Mr. Tait (in his Magdalenism), " that in less than one year from the commencement of their wicked career, these females bear evident marks of their approaching decay ; and that in the course of three years, very few can be recognised by their old acquaintances, if they are so fortunate as to survive that period. These remarks apply more especial- ly to those who are above twenty years of age, when they join the ranks of the vicious." Accord- ing to the same authority—and taking the average of Edinburgh as a fair one for other places, " not above one in eleven survives twenty-five years of age ;" and, taking together those who persist in vice, and those who, after having abandoned it, die of diseases which originated from the excesses OF MAGDALENISM. 53 they were addicted to during its continuance, " perhaps not less than a fifth or sixth of all who have embraced this course of life die annually." " Mr. Clark, the late chamberlain to the city of London," says Dr. Ryan (Prostitution in London, p. 185), " calculated the duration of life" (i. e., the average duration of the lives of these females, from the time of their abandoning themselves to their infamous course) " at four years; while others estimate it at seven years." The represent- ation of Captain Miller, with regard to our own city, is in harmony with these : " The average age at which women become abandoned, is from fifteen to twenty :—the average duration of women continuing this vice, is, I think, about five years : —the most common termination of their career is by early death ; and this is to be accounted for by the extremely dissolute life they lead. For the most part they live in a state of great personal filthiness; they have most wretched homes ; they are scarcely ever in bed till far in the morning; they get no wholesome diet; and they are con- stantly drinking the worst descriptions of spirituous liquors. In addition to these evils, they are ex- posed to disease in its very worst forms ; and, from their dissolute habits, when disease overtakes them, a cure is scarcely possible. A few become reformed by being confined in our excellent Bride- well for a sufficient length of time to allow new habits to be formed, or from other accidental causes ; but the number who reform I believe to be very small."* In speaking of the proportion who die annually, it may here be mentioned, that on the same principle which estimates the num- • " Houses of bad fame in the city of Glasgow,"--p. 2. 5* 54 ON THE EFFECTS ber in London at 80,000, the annual amount of death has been reckoned at 8,000 ! Were the for- mer estimate correct, the latter might readily be admitted ; being only at the rate of a tenth of the whole. But of the excessive extravagance of each of the statements there is separate and satis- factory proof. We have seen this as to the former of the two. The following, from the same publi- cation—the London City Mission Magazine—re- lates to the latter: " By the ' Second Annual Re- port of the Registrar-General of births, deaths, and marriages,' we find that the total number of females that died from July 1st, 1838, to June 30th, 1839, both inclusive, was 22,817. Of these, 10,496 were under fifteen years of age, and 6,335 were above fifty :—so that, instead of 8,000 har- lots dying annually in the metropolis, there were only 5,968 females between the ages of fifteen and fifty died last year; and these are the only ages that such a calculation can refer to. If the cal- culation that 8,000 die annually be correct, every one of these 5,986 must have been depraved, and we must take 2,014 from those between fifty and sixty-five years of age to make up the number; and then, not one virtuous woman would have died last year in the metropolis, between the ages of fifteen and sixty." -This is decisive. There sure- ly is no need, on such a subject, for going one hair's- breadth beyond the truth. Everything of the kind indeed is, not only needless, but, in different ways, injurious. The waste of life is, even on the lowest calculations, most distressing. And wretched is the life the poor creatures five, and wretched the death they die. Besides a variety of diseases to which their dissolute habits expose OF MAGDALENISM. 55 them—cutaneous, intestinal, nervous, inflammato- ry—the predisposition to other distempers induced by their vicious course—and the aggravated char- acter too imparted to these by the state of their constitution—of all which the authentic medical statements are sufficiently sickening ; there is the one disease, with its distinctive designation, to which all the rest are represented as, in compari- son, next to nothing. From the dreadful ravages of syphilis there are said to be very few indeed who escape. The cases of such as do are " rare exceptions." " The great majority," says Mr. Tait, " are affected with the disease within a few months after they have forsaken a life of chastity ; and very few escape it during the first year." Dr. Hannay's testimony is to the same effect: " that not one girl in twenty continues a course of vice, without contracting disease within the first three months." I presume, indeed, that in this point all competent authorities are agreed. In multitudes of instances, as already stated from Mr. Miller, the poor suffering wretches have no means of cure: —and even when these means are provided, the malady is ever recurring; shattering, in an in- credibly short period, the soundest constitutions, deforming the fairest and emaciating the stoutest and healthiest frames, bringing on premature ex- haustion, and an early grave. And the disease, when it has fairly pervaded the system, and begins to make this manifest by its external ravages, is absolutely terrific. Its effects are—extensive, se- vere, and loathsome ulcerations ; the destruction of the eyesight, and of the palate and tonsils; the rotting of the flesh from the bones ; the exfo- liation of the bones themselves; till the whole 56 ON THE EFFECTS frame becomes a mass of living corruption, from which the eye, though filled with the tear of pity, turns away in sickening disgust. It is not a theme to dwell upon. But even here, plain truth is use- ful. I wish to sicken you. I wish to horrify you. I wish to fill you with loathing of the loathsome effect, that you may loath with a deeper loathing the more loathsome cause. And for this purpose, assuredly for no other, I risk any character I may have for delicacy, by setting before you one case; —and, although a bad, it is very far from being a solitary one :—it is thus given, in a single sen- tence or two, by Mr. Tait: " There is one case under the author's charge at the present time, where the whole bones of the nose, external and internal—the bones which form the roof of the mouth—the bones of both cheeks—the greater part of the superior maxillary or jaw bones, with the teeth which they contained—besides all the softer fleshy parts connected with or covering them—'have been successively separated from the body. The disease has continued for more than three years, and has set at defiance every remedy which the most celebrated medical practitioners in Edinburgh could suggest. Her face is literally rotten, and presents a large opening, into which an ordinary-sized fist may be thrust without diffi- culty." I might add a great deal from the medi- cal portion of Dr. Ryan's work on the prostitution of London, and the publications of other profes- sional authorities ; but enlargement on such a topic would be as offensive as it is unnecessary. Mark the terms in which the respected and benevolent author from whom I have taken the above citation sums up the section on the subject of the diseases OF MAGDALENISM. 57 to which magdalenism exposes its votaries : " From the effects thus produced it must be obvious, that the suffering which the unfortunate patients have to endure is very great. It is much more severe than that which arises from any other disease; and the period of its duration is also very consid- erable. Weeks, months, and years, pass away, without their experiencing any mitigation of their agonies, or receiving one word of consolation, or assurance from the lips of their medical attendant, that there is at last some hope of being restored to health. The most gloomy forebodings thus con- tinually hover around them, till death relieves them from this scene of sorrow and anguish, and hurries them, often unprepared, into the presence of their great judge." The terms in which Parent-Duchatelet speaks of this malady, are not inferior in strength to these representations: " Of all the contagious distem- pers," says he (vol. ii., pp. 37-39), " which affect mankind, and which work the largest amount of detriment to his social existence, there is not one more serious, more dangerous, more to be dreaded, than syphilis. I may affirm, without fear of con- tradiction, that the calamities of which it is the source, surpass the ravages of all the plagues which, from time to time, have spread consterna- tion through society. ... It pre- vails among ourselves ;—it prevails among our neighbors ;—it prevails everywhere. It does not, it is true, like many other diseases, take off its vic- tims suddenly; but, notwithstanding that, the num- ber of those victims is immense. Its ravages are incessant. It attacks more especially that part of the population which, from its time of life, forms 58 ON THE EFFECTS at once the strength and the "wealth of nations. By the debility which it induces, it incapacitates for the production of a vigorous progeny; and, where it does not occasion sterility, gives birth to an unfortunate and degenerate race, unfit for the due discharge of any functions, whether civil or military, and which becomes an absolute burden on the community. And finally, in our modern so- ciety, there is no security against its assaults, even to the purest innocence. How many hired nurses, how many faithful wives, how many hapless suck- lings, are, from year to year, the subjects of its cruel invasions!" One thing further only would I mention on this most disgusting topic ; more fearful, morally at least if not physically, than anything I have yet men- tioned. I refer to the early age at which, both in boys and girls, this frightful malady has been known to be communicated. In the address to the public issued at the formation of the " London So- ciety for the protection of young females and pre- vention of juvenile magdalenism," we have this statement: " In three of the largest hospitals in London, within the last eight years, there have not been fewer than 2,700 cases of disease, arising from this cause, in children from eleven to sixteen years of age." Of the manner in which such " poor innocents" are decoyed, and exposed to pol- lution, we may take due notice by-and-by. Dr. Ryan records, as physician to different charities in London, how much he has himself been shocked, and how much grayheaded members of his pro- • fession, who came to see his practice, have been amazed, at the precocious depravity apparent, " in seeing beardless boys, or rather children, present- OF MAGDALENISM. 59 ing themselves for advice for venereal diseases." Mr. Tait" adds his testimony to similar facts." Mr. Miller, of our own city, testifies : " At the time of opening the House of Refuge for males, it was particularly noticed that many vagrant boys and girls were prowling about the streets. I have known girls of the tender age of from ten to twelve certified by the office-surgeon as diseased." And the esteemed city missionary already mentioned, writes to me as follows : " I visit the Lock hos- pital on Thursday forenoons ; and I usually find from thirty to thirty-six females. They are gen- erally from fourteen to twenty-two years of age. About ten days ago, I conversed with a girl, in presence of the matron, who was only eight years of age ! ! This girl's mother was also in the hos- pital at the time in a diseased state. The girl was seduced in her mother's house !" It would be an outrage on all right feeling, in speaking of a fact so horrible, to quarrel with a word. It must be obvious, however, that seduction is a term which must be used with a great latitude of meaning, to include the case of such a child:—and who is there who is not ready to join in driving from the society of human beings, with " curses loud and deep," the infamous miscreant who could be guilty of this unnatural violation ?* And in speaking of the ravages of this frightful disease, it would be far wrong to limit our attention to its prevalence among the abandoned themselves. These ravages, as a matter of course, affect both sexes, and are communicated, by a fearful recipro- * In a postscript to a more recent letter, on another subject* the same correspondent mentions as having met with another instance in the hospital of similar juvenile distemper. 60 ON THE EFFECTS cation, from the one to the other ;—a consideration which, along with others of a higher order, may be pressed upon inexperienced youth, as an induce- ment to flee the divinely branded sin, and to " ab- hor that which is evil," lest they " mourn at the last, when their flesh and their body are consumed, and say, ' How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof!' " Among the physical evils arising from this pro- lific source of misery, ought also to be mentioned, the numberless cases of attempts, successful and unsuccessful, at abortion, and the wretched effects thence resulting, whether to mothers, or children, or both. Where feBticide is not effected, and liv- ing children are born, what is many a time their condition 1 Let a competent authority among our- selves declare: "I fear," says Dr. Hannay, "to expose perhaps the blackest part of this already sufficiently disgusting and appalling picture ;—it is the fearful misery to the children of which these wretched creatures often become the mothers, and of the dreadful sacrifice of human life to this de- mon of horrid cruelty. Besides suffering from the diseases which they receive from their parent, and which are wrought into every fibre of their body at its earliest moment of existence, their wretched progeny experience every kind of bad usage, every form of misery, squalor, and neglect, under the tor- tures of which they fall, in no inconsiderable num- bers, victims to this Moloch-like demon. I have not noted down this fearful part of the picture ; but I.give it as my deliberate and solemn conviction, that not one in twenty of the miserable beings to which the harlot gives birth reaches the second OF MAGDALENISM. 61 year of its earthly existence in any tolerable de- gree of health and strength." And this statement is in affecting agreement with that of Duchatelet: " I have found but one opin- ion," says he, " respecting the frightful mortality among the children of harlots. This opinion has been confirmed by all the accounts I have got from the hospital, from the prison, and from every in- dividual who has had opportunity of direct obser- vation. Of eight children born, on an average, in the prison, four die within the first fortnight, and the other four in the course of the first year ; and of ten born during one year in the hospital, five have been dead almost from the moment of birth, and the other five have gone before the full recovery of the mother." I pass to another description of effects, not less deplorable, in one view, indeed, incomparably more so, those which relate to the mind and heart, to the moral principles and sensibilities. " How- ever it be accounted for," observes Dr. Paley (Mor. and Polit. Phil., book 3, part 3, chap. 2), " the criminal commerce of the sexes corrupts and de- praves the mind and moral character, more than any single species of vice whatever. That ready perception of guilt, that prompt and decisive reso- lution against it, which constitute a virtuous char- acter, are seldom found in persons addicted to these indulgences. They prepare an easy admission for every sin that seeks it; and, in low life, are usual- ly the first stage in men's progress to the most des- perate villanies ; and, in high life, to that lament- ed dissoluteness of principle, which manifests it- self *in a profligacy of public conduct, and a con- tempt of the obligations of religion and moral pro- 62 ON THE EFFECTS bity. Add to this, that habits of libertinism inca- pacitate and indispose the mind for all intellectual, moral, and religious pleasures ; which is a great loss to any man's happiness." Lest any one should treat such a testimony with lightness, as that of a severe moralist, from whom, on such a subject, con- demnatory terms hardly within the limits of mode- ration might be expected, (although assuredly there never was a moralist who had less of the cynic about him than Paley), I take leave to add other two testimonies to the same effect, the peculiarly hardening and demoralizing influence, namely, of this vice. The one is from that sentimental volup- tuary of skepticism, Jean Jaques Rousseau; the other, in his own characteristic Scottish style, from the Bard of Caledonia. The former thus ex- presses himself: " I have uniformly observed that young persons, early corrupted, and given up to women and to debauchery, have been hard-hearted and cruel: the vehemence of their temperament has rendered them impatient, revengeful, fierce; their imagination, absorbed by one object, has been indifferent to every other; they have been stran- gers to compassion and tenderness; they would have sacrificed father, mother, the very universe, to the least of their pleasures."* And thus, in a poetical " Epistle to a Young Friend," does the latter impart his sound moral counsel: — " The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love Luxuriantly indulge it: But never tempt th' illicit rove, Though naething should divulge it; I waive the quantum o' the sin, The hazard of concealing: But och ! it hardens a? within, And petrifies the feeling !" * Emile—Liv. iv. OF MAGDALENISM. 63 Poor Burns ! Who can fail to pity him, even however severe, on some grounds, and justly se- vere, may be his condemnation, when, in the clo- sing lines of the same epistle, he sings:— " And may you better reck the rede Than ever did th' adviser !"* To these authorities I may further add that of the great John Milton, who, in his Comus, thus sings :— -....." When lust Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being." And how graphic, yet how revolting, the descrip- tion of his own character, before his conversion, given by Augustine !—are there none beside him- self, that might have sat for the picture 1 " Thus I polluted the very life-blood of affection with the vileness of concupiscence, and its pure sincerity I shrouded in smoke from the hell of my lust; and yet, all the while, foul and dishonorable as I was, I assumed, in the exuberance of my vanity, the mein of gentlemanly urbanity and elegance !" Of the association of this evil, in low life, with other crimes, to which Paley alludes, I shall have occasion to take some notice by-and-by. I only remark at present, that if the debasing and cor- * Pity must not be allowed, however, to soften the moral condemnation. There is too much reason for thinking that few writings have contributed more than those of Burns, by the unhappy power of ludicrous association, both with vice and with its punishment, and by the fascination of the light of ge- nius, like a lamp gleaming amid the rottenness and corruption of a sepulchral vault, to lessen the horror of evil, to promote its reckless indulgence, and to help " fools to make a mock at sin!» 2* 64 ON THE EFFECTS rupting influence of such indulgences on the moral principles be, indeed, as these authorities represent it; if even in the superior walks of life, it is a vice that opens the avenues to other tempta- tions, obliterates the protecting fences of virtue, maintains a process of induration over the sensi- bilities of the heart, and sears to callousness what- ever was tender and susceptible in the conscience ; what must be its effects on those whose under- standings have been uncultivated by knowledge, and their hearts unimbued by the early infusion of right principle ! In cases where there has been this early infusion, and where its restraints have been overpowered by the arts of seduction ; when the miserable victim is cast off by her heartless betrayer, and, in forlorn abandonment and hopeless destitution, gives herself up to a life of voluptuous profligacy, the mental agonies that are endured are many a time unbearable ; these agonies drive, in desperation, to wilder excesses; and, so long as the searing process is but in its commencement, the excesses react, with a horrible power, upon the conscience. And when the short period elapses, during which any powers of personal attraction are retained, and the poor wretch, cast off with pitiless uncon- cern, is left to all the rage of mortified vanity, and the burning of insatiate lust, and the workings of weak-minded but fell revenge, or to the dreadful collapse of exhausted sensuality: what must be the state of the mind, unless it escapes from its own thoughts in the madness or the stupefaction of intemperance, when neither past, present, nor future, has aught but bitterness to yield; the past and the present without pleasure, and the future OF MAGDALENISM. 65 without hope ! The following description brings before us, the blended miseries of body and mind, of personal and social condition, in what may be termed the last stage of " the harlot's progress." It is a frightful, but faithful picture ; and when I have set-it before you, / shall tell you why.—" The effects of sin are not more plainly and fearfully displayed on any class of human beings, than on fallen and decayed harlots. Their character and appearance seemed to be stamped with the indig- nation of Him whose laws they have violated, and whose counsels and reproofs they have despised. Everything which formerly rendered them attrac- tive is completely banished. Every feature ap- pears altered in expression, and gives frightful indication of the writhings of an agonized con- science. The friends with whom they associated only a short time before, are now unable to recog- nise them. The feelings of pride and of vanity, that were so active and powerful in propelling them into a licentious life, seem enervated or ex- hausted ; and they crawl forth from their dens of infamy unwashed and undressed. It is when a number of these wretched beings are congregated in one cellar, that their miserable condition be- comes most conspicuous, distressing, and humil- iating. The bawl and laughter of the drunkard, the oaths of the profane, and the shrieks and cries of the penitent, are inharmoniously mingled toge- ther ; and even the same individual is to be found, at one time laughing, now cursing, and now weeping for her sins. The effects produced upon the mind of the spectator by such evidence of mental disquietude, are greatly heightened by the bodily wretchedness which presents itself to his 66 ON THE EFFECTS view. The apartment in which these creatures live, exhibits the same impoverished aspect which is so deeply impressed on its miserable inhabi- tants. Not a single vestige of furniture which is deserving of the name, is to be seen within its walls. Beds and bed-clothes are out of the ques- tion. They are looked upon as fortunate who have a little dirty straw upon which they can lay themselves down to rest. Many are in possession of no such luxury, and sleep night after night upon the hard boards which form the floor of their uncomfortable dwelling. The dress of the unfortunate females themselves is often not suffi- cient to cover their nakedness, far less to protect them from the cold. Their cluthes, if they have any, are seldom cleaned; and, when the reader is informed that they are never changed, day nor night, for weeks or perhaps months together, he can form his own idea as to their comfort or ap- pearance ; for it would be offensive to the feelings of humanity to attempt to describe them."—Then there follows a statement of what was witnessed by the author himself, in one of the lowest de- scription of brothels, when he was professionally called, on a Saturday night, in December, 1839, to visit one of its inmates, who was dying;—and, as I wish you, for the reason which I shall assign immediately, to have a full impression of the hor- rors of this last stage of the harlot's wretchedness, I must extract it: " On entering into the house, it appeared to be crowded with women almost in a state of nudity, and also two ragged black- guards of men, who had the discretion to retire. The hovel consisted of two apartments, in the inner of which the patient was lying in a corner, OF MAGDALENISM. 67 on a piece of old carpet, without one article con- ducive to her comfort. She was without covering of any description ; and without any kind of dress save an old merino frock, Avhich the author had seen her wearing during the whole of the pre- ceding year. On inquiry, it was learned, that other five females lodged in the same house, the whole of whom and two strangers were pres- ent. Three of them were lying drunk on the floor, unable to stir or to speak. The others had been recently fighting, and the blood was running down their cheeks. One only, out of the seven assembled, seemed to be sober enough to under- stand what was said to her, and all the dress which she possessed was a single petticoat. . . . This house was without bed, chairs, or stools. In one place only there was a little straw. A few large stones were placed round the fireplace, upon which the inmates sat. A whisky-bottle and a wineglass appeared to be the whole stock of crockery. There was not a single particle of food within the door; and none of the women had a fraction of money with which they could pur- chase nourishment for the one who was in dis- tress, which was all that was considered neces- sary for her relief." (Tait's Magdalenism, pp. 216-219.) And now, some of ybu may naturally ask me— is this fair ? Why dwell on scenes of such low and disgusting loathsomeness ? Is this a just average specimen of the whole system ? Is there nothing superior 1—nothing more refined 1—noth- ing less revolting ? And if there be, why take an ad-captandum advantage, by giving such prom- inence to the very lowest and worst grade of the 68 ON THE EFFECTS evil? My answer to such questions forms my promised reason for having introduced at all these disgusting details. The answer and the reason are one. It is—the affecting and fearful consider- ation, 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 downward. The case is, in this respect, unique. Even in thievery there may be an ad- vance. The boy, of the lowest grade, who, by his inferior practice, comes to be a dexterous pick- pocket, or a clever abstracter of the contents of a till, may in time rise to the envied, though un- enviable, celebrity of a Barrington. He who first pilfers a penny from a shop, if he gets forward in the arts of villany, may find his way to the thou- sands of a bank. But in the present case, rising is a thing unknown. It can not be. It is all de- scent. The young woman, who begins her shame- less 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 become the mistress of a peer. Mark me : let me not be misunderstood ; let me not be sup- posed to say this, as if I conceived the guilt would, in that case, be the less. Far be the thought! It would be thefvery same same in the rising as it is in the sinking scale. I am speak- ing at present, not of the morality, but of the misery of the case. And again I say, the ten- dency 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 OF MAGDALENISM. 69 honor with their preference. And alas ! the poor females, in the vanity of their hearts, often think so too. But the honor 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. Wheth- er seduced in private, or beguiled into one of the superior receptacles of infamy, it is seldom long ere satiety and the passion for change throw her off. She is turned mercilessly adrift. Her seducer has gained his end, and thinks no more of her. Another, and another, have taken her place. But O ! 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 de- picted. After what has already been laid before you, it can not be to any of you matter of surprise to learn, that suicide, and attempts at suicide, are frequent among these miserable beings. " About a third or a fourth part of them," says Mr. Tait, " attempt suicide at one time or other: and perhaps about eight per cent, are successful in accomplishing it. It appears to be very contagious ; for if one has been known to have endeavored to take away her . own life, a number of others will soon do so also. Several months will pass over, without anything 70 ON THE EFFECTS of the kind again taking place; and then six or eight cases will occur in the course of one or two weeks. The author knew of four having tried to poison themselves by laudanum in one night; and in the course of next fortnight he heard of other six." " It is believed, that a great number of har- lots deprive themselves of existence, without any person having the least knowledge or suspicion of it, as they suddenly disappear from the midst of their companions, and are never heard of after- ward." " The great majority of harlots," saya the superintendent of our own police, " appear to entertain no sense of religion whatever. Many cases, however, occur, of females brought to the office in a state of insensibility from poison, or from having attempted to drown themselves ; and, on being questioned as to their motive, the uniform answer is—' I am tired of life,—I am very unhap- py,—allow me to die.' Many of these unhappy creatures might be saved, if a refuge were provi- ded to which they could betake themselves. I have seen cases, where the poor creatures labored under the deepest remorse for past misconduct; and they seemed only to require a home to save them from perdition, and render them in time use- ful members of the community. I may add, that the greater part of these females in a short time become so depraved, that they do not appear to know what moral responsibility means. They re- gard themselves as outcasts of society and act up- on that conviction." To the humane and pious mind this is very shocking. We do not wonder to hear, that attempts at self-destruction are most frequent " among those who have recently departed . from the paths of virtue;" the anguish of spirit OF MAGDALENISM. 71 consequent on their fall, from the stings of con- science, and from a keen sense of the loss of hon- or, atid character, and confidence, and every- thing on which future prospects in life depended, sufficiently accounting for the fact:—yet many such cases may well be traced too to the accumu- lation of misery in the unhappy creature's pro- gressive descent, rendering her "tired of life,"— and also to that mental imbecility and insanity, which, by all medical authorities, are numbered among the evils incident to such a course of life. " It is worthy of remark," Dr. Ryan says, " that this frequency of mental alienation, and impair- ments of mind, has been observed in all ages." The love of life is the first and strongest principle in our nature ; and, whether it be hopeless guilt that overcomes it, or hopeless misery, or both to- gether,—what must be the weight of oppression, or the agony of desperation, that drives to such an extremity ! Even although there may be little if any thought or apprehension of an hereafter, yet is the act of self-destruction a sadly convincing proof of the cessation both of enjoyment and of all hope of its return in the present world. And in those cases,—of which, in such a country as this, there are not a few,—where there is the knowledge of God, and Christ, and judgment, and heaven, and hell, what a phrensy of felt and hopeless wretch- edness must that be, which can find no refuge but by plunging, in unrepented guilt and unsanctified pollution,—with curses, it may be, on the past, and a reckless braving of the future,—into the abyss of a dark eternity ! I feel it quite unnecessary for me to enlarge on the misery produced by this vice in the circle of 72 ON THE EFFECTS domestic life. I shall leave, in a great measure, to your own imaginations, the wounded honor, the offended pride, the shame, the indignation, the grief, the pity, the bitterness of disappointment in retracing the pleasing promises of the past, and the dreary, heart-sinking blight of all that was cheering in the anticipations of the future ;—which are the inevitable results, when a daughter, or a sister, has strayed from the paths of purity. 0 the conflict, to parents especially, between duty and affection,—the former seeming to require one course, while the latter pressingly dictates anoth- er ;—alternate convictions, desires, and determina- tions, dividing the judgment against itself, and rend- ing the very heart asunder ; now hope prevailing, and now fear,—but the hope feeble, and the fear strong;—everything suggesting the recollection —(if indeed the remembrance can ever be said to be for a moment suspended)—of their lost child, once their treasure, now their shame ! The very caution with which, in their presence, friends avoid every subject which would call up the bitter asso- ciation, is itself a touching reminiscence; while every day's incidents and rumors are incessantly opening and irritating the sore. And possibly— (the case is neither an imaginary nor a solitary one) —the natural and proud revenge of a brother for a sister's violated honor, may challenge to the meas- ured field of death the perpetrator of the foul deed ; the sister's seducer may become the brother's mur- derer, and the parents may have to weep over the grave of a son, as well as over the ruin of a daugh- ter ! And even should that daughter, forsaking the paths of sin and shame, find her way back to her abandoned and dishonored home, the very pleasure OF MAGDALENISM. 73 of her return is but a " bitter-sweet;" the venom which the barbed arrow carried with it to the heart, can never be thoroughly extracted ; the very smile of parental love is ever after a pensive smile, and is followed by the sigh and the tear of hidden sor- row. And not less distressing are the feelings of every right-principled and right-hearted parent, when a son—the rising hope of the family—has fallen before the temptations of bad companionship and the fascinations of the " strange woman." Alas ! that by any this should be so very much less thought of than the other! Far be it, that I should wish the abhorrence of the other mitigated !—no; I would have it deepened. But I would that we heard less frequently the gentle terms of allevia- tion and half apology, in which, with regard to our own sex, this sin is too often spoken of;—that we heard less of the indiscretions and irregularities of youth ; to which, by some parents, it appears to be almost taken for granted, as a matter of course, that young men should be found, in a greater or a less degree, giving way : " They are only like their neighbors ; where is the youth to be found that is blameless ?" It is very sad, when that which ought to "pierce" the parental heart " through with many sorrows," should, in so many instances, be so lightly felt, and so lightly spoken of. 0 ! of what an amount and variety of domestic misery has this sin in diverse ways—whether committed by sons or by daughters, by husbands or by wives, by fathers or by mothers—been the prolific parent'! How many hearts has it broken! what anguish, what resentment, what jealousy, what alienation, what strife, what blood, has it caused! what scorpions has it thrown into the 7 74 ON THE EFFECTS circle of family concord ! what infuriated and re- vengeful passions has it enkindled ! or what heavy and deep-sunk melancholy has it brought over the broken spirit—melancholy which refuses to be comforted, and looks for rest only to the grave! And from this point I am led, by a natural asso- ciation, to the evils resulting from this vice to the public. The feelings of distress which I have been depicting are far, alas ! from be,ing the feel- ings of all parents, and of all families, in the cir- cumstances supposed. Many parents there are, who seem strangers alike to the dictates of con- science and to those of natural affection. Brought up themselves in licentious habits, they train their children to the same course. Their sole calcula- tion respecting them is, to what profitable account they can be turned ; whether it is by working, or by stealing, that they can make most; and if they can unite the two, so much the better. When their girls grow up, this vice is regarded, both by parents and children (children and children's chil- dren of " the wicked one"), not in its sinfulness and its dishonor, but only as one among other means in their choice of getting a livelihood. They throw themselves upon the town, or they are put out to the trade of infamy by their unnatural fathers and mothers. The habits of vice and licentiousness in which boys and girls together are thus trained, may contribute, with other causes, to account for the notorious fact of the almost invariable connex- ion between magdalenism and different descrip- tions of crime. In all the representations of those public functionaries who have the best opportuni- ties for observation, this fact stands prominently out: " A large proportion," says Mr. Miller, " of OF MAGDALENISM. 75 the robberies from the person, committed in Glas- gow, take place in houses of bad fame; or by har- lots on the streets or elsewhere. The value of property reported to the police as stolen from the person in 1840, within the Royalty, was £2,268, 18.?. ; but it is believed that robberies to a consid- erable amount take place in brothels, or are com- mitted by depraved females elsewhere, that are never heard of, from the unwillingness of the per- sons robbed to expose themselves."—" Robbery," says Mr. Tait, " is another consequence of mag- dalenism. While the latter is openly tolerated and encouraged, the former will also continue to exist. The extent to which this crime is carried on is very great. No man who goes into the company of harlots is certain that he will effect his escape without being robbed. Scarcely a week passes, without such cases being recorded in the public papers. Let the records of the justiciary courts be consulted, and it will be found that nearly one third of those who are convicted of robberies and larcenies belong to the class of harlots ; and it is almost needless to say, that nearly as many are acquitted for want of evidence, and thrice as many more against whom no charge is brought, as the conviction of the one party must necessarily dis- close the guilt of the other. The amount of the sum stolen is often very considerable." A num- ber of instances are introduced in the work for illustration and proof. It may not be perfectly correct, perhaps, to speak of this as simply " a consequence of magdalenism." In very many cases the crimes of theft and robbery must have preceded harlotry, and the habits of dexterity in their perpe- tration have been previously acquired—this vice 76 ON THE EFFECTS only opening a new field for the successful exer- cise of this dexterity. True it is, however, that in low brothels, the receptacles of vileness and vice, there is a concentration of the arts of fraud and the practices of plunder. Their female in- mates are the thieves ; the " fancy-men," or " bul- lies," of these inmates—their professed protectors, though often their greatest abusers—receive their share of the spoil; and their keepers are, to a great extent, the resetters of the stolen property. Theft and robbery are reduced to a system. And this, among other reasons, renders such houses fair objects for the interference and coercive suppres- sion of the legislative and municipal authorities. But this is not the only way in which harlotry promotes dishonesty and crime. It is not merely that these abandoned females pilfer in the brothels from those who frequent them, and extend their nefarious practices to the streets and lanes of the city: there is a species of robbery traceable to this source, which is of a description even more lamentable. I refer to the temptation which it holds out—and often too successfully—to young men, to defraud and rob their employers, in order to provide themselves with the necessary means of pursuing their dissolute courses. A course of licentiousness can not be followed without expense. When a young man has once given way before temptation, and has come to the fatal resolution of making his own inclinations his rule, he feels the sin to be sweet: he is by this means tempted to its repetition ; every repetition relaxes the hold which virtue had of his conscience, and wreathes the chain of vice more closely round his deluded heart. He has got among those whose sole ob- OF MAGDALENISM. 77 ject, though carefully concealed, is to fleece him. They ply him with all their arts of obscenity, flat- tery, and banter ; coaxing him with honeyed words, or stinging his pride with the taunts of ribald sar- casm. And if his male associates in licentiousness chance to be such as possess means of gratifica- tion more abundant than his own, the snare be- comes more than doubly perilous. Money he must have. He can not be behind his companions. With a throbbing heart and a trembling hand, he makes his first petty embezzlement. He succeeds in concealing it. Another follows. The success is equal. He gets emboldened. Fraud succeeds fraud. Suspicion arises. Vigilance is awakened. Detection ensues. Character, and confidence, and situation, are forfeited. And the fate of the infatu- ated youth is either a prison and transportation, or a total abandonment to low vice and villany, ter- minating in premature exhaustion, disease, deser- tion, misery, and death. Every one who wishes well to the rising youth of our own and other cities and towns, must deeply lament the increasing number of female seducers. Many of them may themselves have been the sub- jects of seduction by the other sex. But they become seducers in their turn ; and, whether from the first entering spontaneously on a life of mag- dalenism, or throwing themselves on the town when cast off by the heartless despoilers of their virtue, they become, emphatically, moral pests of the community. In our days, as in Solomon's, the harlot. " lieth in wait as for a prey ; and in- creaseth the transgressors among men."—" Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at eve:y corner."—" Her lips drop as a 7* 78 ON THE EFFECTS honey-comb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two- edged sword: her feet go down to death ; her steps take hold on hell: lest thou shouldst ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst, not know them." But, in spite of the warn- ing which follows, coming with the united author- ity and kindness of Heaven—" Remove thy way far from her ; come not nigh the door of her house" —how many of our young men, the inexperienced and thoughtless, the unsuspicious, light-hearted, and gay, are thus haplessly led astray ! The vice, in certain circles—circles, alas ! of no narrow limits—is one of those in which it is hardly reck- oned consistent with the character and pretensions of a lad of spirit to be uninitiated. Such inexpe- rience—the happy ignorance and virgin purity of youth—exposes him to the sneers, and winks, and shrugs, the banter, and the pity, and the laugh, of his companions. If, when " in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night," he is as- sailed by the artful blandishments of the harlot, any of these companions happen to be with him, and, amid merriment and jeering, set him the ex- ample of what they call manly spirit and indepen- dence, how can he withstand the united assault ? the fascinations of fem; le gallantry, working on passions which are in all the strength of youth, while the principles of restraint are in all youth's weakness—aided by the raillery, the cajoling, the persuasion, the all but absolute force, of associates, who tell him, while they exchange glances of pro- voking scorn and pity, he may go home, if he will, to his mammy and to his Bible, and to the leading- strings of the nursery ; that he may take his wry, and leave them to take theirs; insinuating, perhaps, OF MAGDALENISM. 79 at the same time, that " deep waters flow stilly;" that they know full well what way his inclination lies, if he had but spirit enough to dare to follow it; and that, after all, he is not, at bottom, a whit better than themselves ! He hesitates ; he turns away; he looks back ; he blushes for his very virtue ; they follow up their advantage ; he yields ; and he is lost. It is to be feared that the number of young men, of whom this, or something like this, is the history, is far from being small. And especially is this the fate of many who come, in boyhood and youth, from the comparative inexpe- rience of the country. For these, both abandoned men and abandoned women are on the lookout; who throw their toils around them in such artful ways, that to escape from their meshes would be a kind of moral miracle. And thus the number multiplies of those whom the necessary expenses of one sin drives to the commission of others ; whom incontinence tempts to dishonesty; who from the shop or the warehouse abstract the hire and the presents of the kept mistress or the brothel; who from the cash drawn during the day provide for the sensual pleasures of the night; or who, if pursuing those pleasures in a higher grade, practise their swindlings on a larger scale; and perhaps at length, getting desperate, draw fictitious bills, and, with the proceeds, flee their country. And while thus, in such a variety of ways, the prevalence of this vice cherishes, as in a hot-bed, theft, and fraud, and embezzlement, and lying, and forgery; it spreads, wide and more wide, the gen- eral debasement of moral principle, and hebetude of religious sensibilities, manifested in profane swearing, in filthy conversation, in the ridicule of all that bears the semblance of piety, in sabbath- 80 ON THE EFFECTS breaking, in rivalry at framing the most tremendous oaths, uttering the grossest obscenities, or accom- plishing the most dexterous or most daring acts of wickedness, and in that contempt of goodness, and obliteration of right feeling, which, to the extent wherein it prevails, cuts up by the roots " the righteousness which exalteth a nation," and to the seriously thoughtful mind holds out so fearful a prognostic for the time to come ; " sin" being, under the administration of Him who is " of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," not the " reproach" only, but the peril of a community, the prominent and appalling attraction to the lightnings of his vengeance. Men may, indeed, think lightly of it; but they only think lightly because they think igno- rantly, inconsiderately, or selfishly. By all his- torically-recorded experience we are borne out in the assertion, that the prevalence of this vice tends, in a variety of ways, to the deterioration of nation- al character, and to the consequent exposure of the nations among whom it abounds to weakness, de- cline, and fall. I believe it will be found, that an average of the general state of morals, in different countries might be pretty fairly struck, by simply ascertaining the degree in which this particular vice prevails; the average of national virtue aug- menting as this diminishes, and diminishing as this augments. In this view, the suppression of it, by every legitimate means, becomes a matter of interest to patriotism as well as to piety and benevo- lence ; to the friends of public as well as of private character; of national as well as of personal well- being ; to the soundly-principled and conscientious magistrate, as well as to the minister of Christ. The means thernselves of such suppression will hereafter be considered. OF MAGDALENISM. 81 LECTURE III. ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES OF MAGDALENISM. In order the more strongly to impress upon your minds the duty and the necessity of bringing all accessible means, that are right in principle and capable of beneficial application, to bear upon the great practical end mentioned in the conclusion of our sec'ond lecture, I now proceed to consider— III. THE EVIDENCE AND DEGREE OF THE guilt, or moral turpitude, of the sin under discussion. This has all along been assumed ; but has not been sufficiently brought out by illustration or argument. I speak of the guilt, not of the vice itself alone, but of every kind and measure of countenance or encouragement, positive or nega- tive, that is given to it. I have already more than hinted my concern, that the estimate, prevalent in general society, of the moral evil of the vice in question, should be so very low. Among the reasons accounting for this, may be mentioned the fact, that, with one of the sexes, the indulgence of it extends at once so far up and so far downin the social scale ; whence arises the further fact, that there is no one in the catalogue of reputed evils, for which there exists, on the part of that sex, so strong and so general a propen- sity to discover or invent excuses and alleviations. 82 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES One of these is so common, that it presents itself for notice at the very threshold of this department of our subject. There can be no very deadly harm in it, it has been alleged ; seeing it is only follow- ing nature ; for why has nature given us appetites, but to be indulged ? Now this may sound plausibly: but a very brief examination is sufficient to show, that even its plausibility is derived from its har- monizing with inclination. It is only one out of numberless examples, which go to show, how readily the human mind satisfies itself with any- thing that bears the semblance of an argument, when it is on the side of the heart's tendencies. Nature, rightly read, teaches no such lesson; but gives, on the contrary, indications the most palpable and decisive, of its being a violation of her will. I trust I need not say that, when I thus adopt for a moment a common phraseology, I would be un- derstood as meaning by nature nature's God. His lessons are to be found in the two volumes of na- ture and of revelation ; and on the present, as on all other points, the lessons of both are in perfect coincidence. It is true that we have natural ap- petites. It is true, that with the exercise of those appetites the God of nature, the divine author of the constitution of our frame, has been pleased to associate sensations of enjoyment. And in this we have a manifestation, not of benevolence alone, but of wisdom. The pleasure was necessary to these appetites answering their ends. The pleas- ure itself was not nature's end, but something sub- servient to its effectual attainment. Many and striking are the marks of this wisdom. In regard to some of the functions of our wonderful animal mechanism, functions which are necessary every OF MAGDALENISM. 83 moment to its continued vitality, the wisdom ap- pears in so constituting the internal structure of our frame, as to make them go regularly on, in- dependently of the volitions of our minds. Such are the functions of respiration, and the circulation of the blood. We should have had much more than enough to do, had we had these processes alone to attend to. In other cases, by the same wisdom, the end is effected in another way, name- ly, by the attaching of sensations of pleasure to the indulgence of the natural and necessary appe- tite. Thus, it is necessary to life, that men should eat and drink ; and eating and drinking are sources of enjoyment. The Author of life has not left its maintenance to depend on what is painful, or even on what is indifferent, but, with a characteristic union of wisdom and kindness, on what is directly pleasurable. On the principle of the plea we are considering, the glutton and the epicure, the men who, instead of eating to live, live to eat, find their plausible ground of self-justification in their re- spective indulgences. Thus, then, it is in the case before us. The sexual intercourse is necessary to a most important end, the very perpetuation of the species. And, with the same union of wisdom and kindness, the Author of our constitution has connected this too, not with pain, but with pleasure. It is evident, that, had the fact been otherwise, the race would not long have subsisted. But it is no less evident, that to seek the mere pleasure, inde- pendently of the end which the pleasure was only meant to subserve, is not to follow nature. It is to abuse nature's kindness, and nature's wisdom; un- gratefully and criminally to abuse them, by follow- ing a course, which, as we shall notice immediate- 84 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES ly, tends to subvert, instead of subserving, nature's purposes. The God of nature has connected the wise and kind arrangement to which we have been referring, with certain restrictions. These restric- tions are marked by nature, as well as by revela- tion : and the mere voluptuary, who sets at naught these restrictions, and follows the libidinous im- pulses of his animal appetite, not for the sake of the end for which it has been implanted, but solely for the sensual pleasure that is incidental to it and conducive to the end, so far from following nature, is only availing himself of nature's beneficent ar- rangements, for the sake of self-gratification of the lowest kind, regardlessly of nature's real and di- vinely characteristic intentions. I have said, that Nature has marked her own restrictions, in regard to the way in which she designed her end to be attained; and to follow nature, is to seek the attainment of the end in that way and under those restrictions. Various and impressive facts concur in evincing, that, for in- suring the preservation and increase of the race, nature's way is not the way of indiscriminate promiscuous indulgence, but that of peculiar con- jugal appropriation ; in one word, that the law of nature is, on this point, the same with the law of revelation, " that every man have his own wife, and every woman her own husband." Of these facts I may just mention, without dwelling upon them, the average equality of the sexes; and the general barrenness and unproductiveness of the sys- tem of magdalenism ; the latter distinctly proclaim- ing its unnaturalness, by its contrariety to nature's admitted end and primary law in the creation of a male and a female—a law which, expressed in the OF MAGDALENISM. 85 terms of holy writ, is—" Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." That the system of conjugal appropriation is, beyond comparison, the most steadily efficient for the maintenance and nu- merical increase of the race, experience has placed out of the range of doubt. The barrenness of magdalenism is proverbial; and against the prevalence of the vice, were there no marriage, there could be no security. " The number of abandoned women," says Captain Miller, " who become pregnant, or at least whose offspring come to maturity, is very small—probably not one in fifty:—but on this subject I can not speak with any certainty." Certainty or precision is not ne- cessary :—the general fact is enough. And the fact stands confirmed by the best authorities. " On a review," says Parent-Duchatelet, " of all the returns made to my inquiries, together with what I have found in various ancient and modern books, the conclusion forced upon me has been, that a thousand of these women yield scarcely six births in the course of a year." He confirms this by statements from lying-in hospitals, &c.:—and the general result is, that, how frequent soever con- ception may be, the retention and birth of living, and still more of healthy children, is exceedingly rare. And on the contrary he states, that when they relinquish their guilty vocation, and become attached by marriage to one man, the barrenness ceases, pregnancy becomes regular, its course auspicious, and its results happy; the children which are its product being as healthy and lively as those of other wives. But there is still an- other way, in which nature, or rather the God of j nature, has stamped on magdalenism the brand of, 8 86 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES guilt and reprobation. I allude again to that most fearful distemper, which, while never in one in- stance does it visit the " bed undefiled" of conju- gal fidelity, is so intolerable a scourge of inconti- nence. Is there no lesson in this ?—no divine intimation of the right and the wrong, the lawful and the lawless ?—no seal of virtue, and stigma of vice ? That a disease, involving a complica- tion of diseases—of which I have said enough before to satisfy you, that it is one of the most dreadful that can invade the human frame—should to so great an extent be the effect of the one spe- cies of intercourse, and never at all of the other; a disease, which, while it commits such ravages on its immediate subject, is also, many a time (in not a few cases through the innocent and doubly wronged wives of faithless and adulterous hus- bands) communicated to helpless children, so as to make their early death a deliverance and a bless- ing ; and, in some instances, taints the blood, and debilitates the constitutions, of successive genera- tions :—is not this, I ask, fairly interpreted as na- ture's warning voice ;—the voice, it may be, of severity—yet of a just and salutary severity, and of a real kindness;—a voice dissuading from the one course, and recommending the other ;—a voice loudly and sternly repeating Nature's, and the God of nature's, own original law—" Let every man have his own wife, and every woman her own husband." To any who know their bibles I need not say, how perfect is the agreement between all in nature that is indicative of divine condemnation, and the more peremptory and uncompromising sentence of revelation. Here there is no dubiety ;—no ambi- OF MAGDALENISM. 87 guity in the oracles of this shrine. Here, all im- purity is laid under the heaviest of divine anath- emas. It stands branded, deep to the very bone, with the mark of the curse. It is not here a mere failing, an irregularity, an indiscretion, a venial fault. It is numbered among the .sins which ex- clude their unrepenting perpetrators from the king- dom of heaven, and "because of which the wrath of God cometh upon the children of disobedience." " Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not in- herit the kingdom of God 1 Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, norrevilers,nor extortioners, shall inherit the king- dom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." " Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these ; adultery, for- nication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like : of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." And the entire Bible is in the same strain ; full of commands to abstain, of denunciations against transgressors, and of recorded judgments as the execution of such denunciations ; and full too of intimations of a future vengeance unutterably heavier than aught ever inflicted in the present world. Thus the facts of nature and the pages of rev- elation speak the same language. We are left at 88 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUS-a no loss. In the word of God especially, all is plain dealing. " Fornication and all unclcanness" have their place there among the sins for which "the wicked shall be turned into hell." In the face, then, of these lessons of nature and revela- tion—that is surely a very presumptuous and a very perilous position, which by some has been taken up, and which I have myself heard main- tained, that the existence of this class of females is necessary to the preservation of the general virtue of the community. There would otherwise, it has been surmised, be little security for the chastity of our wives and daughters from the wild passions of a lawless libertinism ! A question or two here nat- urally suggest themselves. First of all, I would ask, what special title have the wives and daugh- ters of those who employ this plea to the pro- tection of their virtue, more than other wives and daughters ? Why are theirs to be protected at the expense of the others, and not the others at the expense of theirs ? Who, in the community, are to be the victims—the vice-doomed safeguards of the virtue of the rest—the wretched safety- valves of unprincipled and unbridled passions ? Are we to have a decimation by lot of the virgin- ity of the country 1—or is some inferior class to be sacrificed to the demon of lust, for the benefit of those above them ? That the evil has always existed, is a melancholy truth:—that it must always continue to exist, is the affirmation, made with all the coolness of indifference, of the reason- ers in question ; although it is not quite the faith of the Christian. But what if this were equally true with the other—the future doomed to be coincident in character with the past and the pres- OF MAGDALENISM. 89 ent ? It is still a widely different thing from the position, that vice is essential to the preservation of virtue. That were indeed a hard necessity. Where is the individual—male or female, and in what rank soever of society—whom I am not to dissuade from vice ?—whom it would be wrono- so to dissuade ?—the successful dissuasion of whom would be an injury to the public ?—by prevailing with whom to give up her evil course, I should incur the responsibility of one who shuts a high- pressure safety-valve ?—where the individual, whose body and soul I am bound to leave to death and perdition, lest perchance some others should come to be exposed to temptation ?—If harlotism be sin, I am bound—and so is every one else__ to prevent it, as far as possible, in all. The idea of countenancing, or even winking at it, in some, with a view to its prevention in others, is an out- rage on everything that deserves the name of principle. Who are the men whom you find argu- ing for such a toleration ? Did you ever hear any one use the argument, who had himself a right impression of the sin and guilt of the practice— who was himself a man of religion and virtue ? If any but heartless libertines have ever adopted it, surely it must have been with a strange incon- sideration of their ground. Generally, if not uni- versally, it will be found, that the men who talk thus of the necessity of this vice, are the very men from whom the alleged danger, if it exist at all, originates ; men who have no impression of the evil of doing that themselves from which they are so dutifully solicitous forsooth to preserve others; who are determined on their own indulgence ; and who throw over it this among other flimsy cobweb 8* 90 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES coverings. Away with it! It will not bear a thought; far less an argument. In the depart- ment of morals, the maxim that " of two evils we should choose the least" admits of no application. There is no liberty left us to choose, either the least or the greatest. The idea that any sin re- quires to be tolerated, in order to prevent more, involves an impious reflection on the Divine Being, for which there never has been, there is not, and there never can be, the remotest ground. That which he demands, in regard to " the flesh with its affections and lusts," is—their " crucifixion." Our maxim, as to all that is morally evil—the only safe one for either ourselves or others—is—" de- lenda est:"—and, both in ourselves and in others, we are bound, to the utmost extent of our power, to give the maxim realization. " As to the usual apology for this relaxed discipline," says Dr. Paley (he is speaking of the public toleration of this vice), " the danger of greater enormities, if access to abandoned women were too strictly watched and prohibited ; it will be time enough to look to that, after the laws and the magistrates have done their utmost. The greatest vigilance of both will do no more than oppose some bounds and some difficulties to this intercourse. And after all, these pretended fears are without foundation in experience. The men are in all respects the most virtuous, in countries where the women are most chaste." But I have not yet done with the moral turpi- tude of the offence. I have been regarding it as in itself evil; as a sin, stamped as such by the hand of Nature, and branded still more clearly and deeply as such by the hand of God in revelation. OF MAGDALENISM. 91 But, to have a full view of the case, you must think further of the effects of magdalenism, as they were formerly, though far from fully, set before you,—the various and dreadful results to which, both in this world and in the world to come, it gives rise. Is there no moral evil in being acces- sory to these ?—no violation of the claims of right- eousness and benevolence ?—no offence against the great rule of all equity, and honor, and love, " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them ?" By any man who reflects for one moment on these results, can any answer but one be given to such questions ? And be it remembered, every man is accessory to those results—to one and all of them, in all their horrible multiplicity and extent—who, whether by his personal example or in any other way, contributes to the support and countenance of the system. There are not a few, it is feared, who never think of this; who indulge in their own gallantries, and look no farther, conceiving that they have to answer only for their own,— that with those of others they have nothing to do. But I wish them to think of it. I wish all to think of it. Such men are far mistaken. Their gallantries can not be taken by themselves. They form part of an aggregate ; and the amount of that aggregate they contribute, in various ways, to in- crease. They go to the upholding of an extensive an extending system of sin and misery. And in this tendency, apart from their own intrinsic guilt, they are deeply criminal. The man who by his practice, by his writings, by his conversation, by his company, countenances this vice, stands chargeable with his share of all its attendant and / 92 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES consequent miseries, throughout the entire range of its prevalence ; with his share of all the bodily disease, the torture, and the premature death ; of all the loss of character, respectability, mainten- ance, and comfort; of all the deprivation of moral principle, all the lying, dishonesty, theft, obscen- ity, and profaneness; of all the secret and open crime ; of all the agonies of mind, all the searing of conscience, all the intemperance, all the jeal- ousies, quarrels, battles, and blood ; of all the abortions, infanticides, and suicides; of all the shrinking and shrieking fears, and all the still more appalling hardihood and heaven-defying cal- lousness, of the dying hour ; and of all the untold woes which, in the unseen world, await the guilty soul, that enters it steeped in sin, and fit for no region there but that of- the " worm that dieth not:"—yes ; with his share, larger or smaller as it may be, of all the wretchedness and ruin which, in time and eternity, this prolific parent- sin produces ! O let not the man of inconti- nence measure his guilt exclusively by the num- ber of his own direct personal trespasses against the laws of chastity. These may be many, or they may be few. Every one of them, in itself, involves deep and soul-ruining criminality to the perpetrator, how many other persons soever there may be to whom he Can point, whose gallantries are both more frequent and flagrant than his own. But let him remember, that this is not the limit of his moral delinquency. Let him take a survey of the general evils of the system—than which, when all its varieties are taken in, there is not another " so full of .wo ;" no, not intemperance itself, many and miserable as its evil consequences are; OF MAGDALENISM. 93 it may slay its thousands, but this slays its ten thousands:—and let him shrink, with dread and horror, from the thought of in any way contribu- ting to the continued subsistence and extension of this pandemonium, this hell upon earth, this dismal concentration of pollution, and guilt, and blasphe- my, and wretchedness ! And in speaking of the guilt of the general system, and of all the countenance that is given to it, I know not that I can have a more appro- priate occasion for noticing a class of persons, whom one can not but regard as the very imper- sonations of satanic malignity,—the most loath- some of the emissaries of hell. I refer to those persons—to be found in connexion, I believe, with both the higher and the lower description of brothels, though more especially with the former, —who go under the name of procurers and pro- curesses. The designation is quite sufficient to show their hellish vocation. Such it literally and emphatically is. They are agents of the tempter. They watch for innocence. Night and day, they are on the lookout for such virgin virtue as, by any art of insinuating affability and kindness, and of false representations and alluring promises, they can contrive to decoy to those retreats of impurity, where, in utter ignorance and simple-hearted un- suspiciousness of what awaits them, they are handed over to the company of some wretch, ex- perienced in the wiles of seduction;—a wretch, who gives his orders for virgin innocence, as he does for his haunch of venison or any other dainty article in his bill of fare;—a wretch, to whom it gives not the concern of a moment what it may cost to others, provided he have but his hour of 94 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES choice pleasure ;—a wretch, who has made female nature his study, with no other view than that of detecting its weaker points, and working upon them for its destruction,—and who, by artfully-de- vised conversation, all, though at first impercepti- bly, tending one way, — by flattery, by hollow promises, by enticing blandishments, by wine, by force, or by a combination of them all,—all alike accursed,—effects his nefarious purpose.----O ! one's blood boiis over, to think of the agents of a system so monstrous ! And yet these procurers and procuresses have been known to frequent the very house of God, in pursuit of their diabolical ends,—on the scent for their prey. When we think of the absolute devilishness of the occupa- tion, it becomes, so far as our own city is con- cerned, a satisfaction, to have the testimony of Capt. Miller, that there are comparatively few who are engaged in it. In reply to a query put to him on the subject, his words are: " There are, I believe, a few individuals in Glasgow, who employ themselves as procuresses ; but the num- ber is very small." Since, however, this is a part of the system elsewhere, and is carried to an ex- tent which one would fain discredit, would the evidence but admit of incredulity, I should be un- faithful to my duty, were I not to bring it more fully before you. The following paragraphs, without comment, will give you quite enough of it; and I should be sorry to think that there was one individual within these walls, on whose mind the impression produced by the reading of them was any other than one of unmingled and unmiti- gated detestation, followed by the irrepressible desire, that not private means alone, nor alone the OF MAGDALENISM. 95 united moral efforts of Christian benevolence, but the strong and punitive arm of the law, were made effectively to reach, and thoroughly to put down, a system of such atrocious infamy. Here too I might quote from Duchatelet, by whom the same class of persons is described ; but I have enough, and more than enough, nearer home. The first of my two extracts is from the Sixth Re- port of the London Society for the protection of young females, before alluded to ; it is the entire section entitled—" Punishing of Procurers and Procuresses." " Last year, at the time of the Annual Meeting, the committee reported, ' That they were engaged in prosecuting a woman, named Emma Stone, for decoying a child, eleven years of age, from her parents, into a brothel.' The crime was clearly proved against this woman, and she was sentenced to a twelve-month's imprison- ment, with hard labor. Cases of this kind are al- ways difficult of proof; and this will, in some measure, account for the very few in which the committee have been enabled effectually to inter- fere. They are, nevertheless, exceedingly nume- rous ; to prove this, it need but be stated, that the keepers of brothels at the west end of London, supply their houses with a constant succession of young females, through the agency of the procu- rer. They do not retain any of them more than one or two months, keeping them confined to the house during that time, and then allow them to de- part, or turn them out if necessary. Those who have the moral courage, and are enabled to return to their parents, endeavor to hide the defilement which they have contracted, and for which they could obtain no redress; but being generally of 96 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES that age when the judgment is weak and the sense of shame strong, and finding their characters gone, their means of subsistence taken from them, and being polluted, probably in mind as well as in body, by the criminal intercourse to which they have been daily compelled to submit, they give them- selves up for lost, and continue the course into which they have been entrapped ; the final result of which is, that, shut out, not only from the sym- pathies of their own sex, but from those of man- kind, and treated with the greatest brutality, es- pecially in the latter part of their career, thev event- ually perish, either by suicide or disease; the ef- fects of misery and destitution. A few weeks since another case was brought under the cogni- zance of the committee. A woman had, by some sinister means, become possessed of the person of a young female from the country, the parents of whom were dead, and who had been residing with her uncle, a clergyman. This woman immediately forwarded a letter to a gentleman in the city, sta- ting that she had just received a beautiful young girl from the country, and making an appointment for the gentleman to meet her in the evening at a brothel, in a street near to Charing-cross. Upon the receipt of this letter, the gentleman immedi- ately placed it in the hands of the committee, who adopted such prompt and decisive measures as they believed were calculated to save the girl from pres- ent destruction. In the course of the investigation it was discovered, that this woman had been in the habit of procuring females for the basest purpose for a long period. At the time she offered this young creature, as described, she had possession of another, whom the committee, being aware of j OF MAGDALENISM. 97 the fact too late, were unable to save. An appli- cation was made to the magistrate at Marlborough street police office, for a warrant against her, who regretted that, however diabolical the conduct of the woman had been, the law gave him no power to interfere. Thus she escaped the punishment she so justly merited, and was let loose upon soci- ety to pursue her dreadful trade. These cases might be multiplied, but the committee desire not to extend their report to too great a length; they can not, however, omit to mention the fact, that by such means, many of the houses kept by foreign- ers are'supplied, and who are at considerable ex- pense in obtaining respectable young women from the Continent, by engaging them as nursery-gov- ernesses and for other employments. After their ruin has been accomplished, they are dismissed, and fresh victims imported to supply their places. They trust that ere long this crime will be met by some stringent law, and thus an end be put to this odious and disgusting traffic. They call again up- on every one who values the purity of the domes- tic circle and the welfare of society, to assist in suppressing this detestable crime, and in promoting the interests of virtue and morality." My other extract is from the work of Mr. Tait, to which I have already acknowledged my obliga- tions, and may have to do so again. Speaking of the procuresses, he says : " Having spent a great proportion of their days in scenes of the utmost wickedness, and seen all the vicissitudes of their profession, they are consequently versant in all the particulars relating to it, and prove useful as- sistants and admonitors of those who have newly opened an establishment on their own account. 98 ON THE GUILT AND THE CAUSES Most of the genteel brothels have one of these de- based characters attached to them ; and by her in- structions the keeper is in a great measure guided. Besides acting as house-keepers, part of their busi- ness is to seek out nice-looking girls as lodgers; and, in order to do this successfully,they have generally a number of agents in different parts ot the town employed to ferret out such servants, sewers, or unprotected females, as they imagine will answer their purpose. Those thus engaged are small shopkeepers, green-wives, washing and mangle women, and some of those who keep pub- lic lodgings, who have many opportunities of meet- ing with strangers who come to their houses for a night's protection, and of advising them to brothels as servants, &c. But as nothing is so much cal- culated to convey an idea of the extent and enor- mity of this evil, and of the characters of those employed in it, as the following statements of Mr. Talbot from the work of Dr. Ryan, the author will take the liberty of quoting them. He represents them as ' the most abominable wretches in exist- ence, alike reckless of themselves and of those who may become their prey. Some procurers are men moving in the most respectable classes of so- ciety. These are attached, for the most part, to brothels kept by foreigners, and are often sent to different towns and villages on the Continent to engage young girls from their parents, as tambour- workers, dress-makers, &c.; and a quarter's wages are advanced to the parents to lull their suspicions. When these inhuman monsters have obtained a sufficient number, they bring them to London, where their modesty and virtue are sold to some profligate wretch for from £20 to £100. After a OF MAGDALENISM. 99 short period, these children are said to become stale, and are turned into the streets (contaminated or not) to starve.' He again remarks, that 'pro- curesses are employed in this metropolis and else- where to watch stage-coach offices, and to offer advice, aid, and lodging, to girls who come to Lon- don to obtain situations. Others frequent servant's bazars, or rather sinks of iniquity, workhouses, prisons, penitentiaries, for the purpose of luring servants, and decoying innocent and inexperienced girls, by every artifice and cunning which infamy can suggest. I have known procuresses who were sent seventy miles from London, and no expense spared in their horrible traffic. Others prowl about the streets of London day and night, for the purpose of entrapping the unwary; and thus the demand for fresh victims is supplied.' In refer- ence to another kind of procuresses, Mr. Talbot observes-: 'The Sabbath is a favorite day with these wretches ; and they watch young children troinff to Sunday schools, and entice them to their haunts ; nay, I believe children have been actually taken from the schools in the sight of teachers and companions, they having no idea of such a shock- ing system being in operation. As soon as the children are secured, they are sold, and their ruin sealed perhaps by some hoaryheaded debauchee, at an enormous price !' The whole system here depicted, is one of such a horrifying description, that nature shudders at the thought of it. Edin- burgh being comparatively a small city, may not present the evil in the same magnitude or enormity as London ; yet it is much to be feared that an evil of the same kind exists on a small scale. Man