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assumed necessary." The bad policy involved in the maintenance of a standing army can be no reason why we should not discuss a question affecting the health of soldiers on its own merits. There are persons who believe it a great misfortune to a nation to have a standing army of clergy, pledged and paid to resist new truths, but these persons would probably not object to examine on its merits such a question, for example, as that of clerical celibacy. Again, supposing the national military system to be a grievous blunder, that can be no good reason why we should resist a humane and otherwise expedient measure for lessening disease. Would cruelty to a horse not be cruelty, and ought it not to be punishable as such, if the horse happened to belong to a cavalry regiment? It can hardly be an answer to those who defend these Acts on the ground that they are beneficial to the brutalised creatures affected by them and to the health of new generations, to say that a standing army is a bad thing. Surely nobody thought it wrong to help to alleviate the sufferings of our troops during the winter campaign in the Crimea, simply because he held the war against Russia to be a criminal blunder.

You assert that these Acts "indirectly admit prostitution to be a necessity." It is truer to say that they recognise it as a fact. There is no more ground for charging the framers and advocates of these Acts with a belief in the necessity of prostitution, than there is for bringing the same charge against the surgeon who treats the diseases incident to it. Whether necessary or not, prostitution does actually confront us, and like any other evil of our social condition, has to be dealt with in one way or another. Do the various Acts for promoting the health of towns, indirectly admit the necessity of uncovered cesspools, over-crowded lodging-houses, and so forth? Prostitution is at present so widespread and deep-rooted that it is practically for our generation just as if it were a necessity.

"This admission," you say finally, "we resist with all the strength of our belief in the sanctity of pure and faithful love, and in the progress of the human race." Surely these sound the very windiest words I have heard for many a day. We others believe in the progress of the human race, too, but only on condition of enlightened and strenuous effort on the part of persons of superior character and opportunity; and though this effort to prevent the redemption of a portion of an unborn generation from a deadly disease may be strenuous, its enlightenment strikes us as questionable. To sacrifice the health and vigour of unborn creatures to the "rights" of harlotry to spread disease without interference, is a doubtful contribution towards the progress of the race. As to the sanctity of pure and faithful love, a time may come when such words will describe the relations of all men and women as truly as they describe those of

a very great many among them now. But can you seriously think that the Satyr is on the very point of parting company with man? Remembering the stupendous tardiness with which each moral transformation in the history of mankind has been brought about, can you seriously think that this passion, most savage and untamable of all, is suddenly in our generation going to accept the yoke once for all, and clothe itself in your robe of pure and faithful love? If you do not mean forthwith, in how long a time? Twenty, thirty, fifty, years? But during all these years one generation after another has been tormented and enfeebled by the vices of its ancestors.

I confess this talk about pure and faithful love seems to me the most shocking mockery, when we remember that these Acts affect the very dregs of the population-the lowest kind of prostitute on the one hand, and on the other the most vicious of the common soldiers. A great proportion of these unfortunate beings, male and female, have found their way out of the agricultural districts, and have undergone the ordeal of our squirearchic system, which, like the mill of God, doth grind exceeding small. If you will read the reports of the condition of the agricultural gangs, or of the serfs on the estates of pious evangelical noblemen and others in Dorsetshire, you will see that the chances of pure and faithful love for the class out of whom so many common soldiers and garrison harlots come, are not considerable. Reluctance to admit that so many human creatures are irreclaimably brutalised in their natures by influences at work from the first moment of susceptibility is natural, but it is a strange reason why we should refuse not only to mitigate the sufferings which the poor wretches, with characters for which they are partially responsible, bring on themselves, but also to stretch out a hand to stay the plague from innocent offspring.

This sentimental persistence in treating permanently brutalised natures as if they still retained infinite capabilities for virtue, is one of the worst faults of some of the best people now living. The salutary punishment of flogging, for example, for the atrocious outrages of men upon the persons of their wives, is earnestly resisted because it would degrade the offender. People insist on shutting their eyes to the existence among us of masses of men and women who are virtually in the condition of barbarians, and whose practices can only be repressed by the same wisely coercive methods which have always been essential to raise a barbarous community into a civilised state. How long are we to go on sacrificing the future with all its hopes to this most cruel tenderness for the worst elements of the present?

The "contrition" which the members of the Association so honourably avow will not, we may trust, be merely official, but will be of a personal and proselytising kind. The state of the question

calls for more than corporate remorse. For my own part, I believe there is no more effective cause of the misconduct of vicious women in this country than the misconduct of virtuous ones. For one thing, English ladies are conspicuous over all the world for the sour, merciless, and indiscriminating austerity with which they repulse the efforts of a woman who has once gone wrong to set herself socially right again. In the second place, English households of the middle and upper classes, and for this the mistresses are mainly responsible, are conspicuous for the barrier of cold, harsh, and emphatically inhuman reserve which cuts off anything like that friendly, considerate, sympathetic intercourse which ought to mark every family relation. The truth is that domestic service is not counted a family relation. We are not ashamed to have human beings in the kitchen on much the same footing as the horse in the stable and the dog in the kennel, only they are as horses and dogs with cooking and other two-handed qualities. If it is demoralising to masters and mistresses, and especially to the young of a house, to have constantly by their side and under the same roof, persons to whom they recognise no obligation beyond those of payment of a small wage and the use, not by any means invariable, of a certain frigid politeness of speech, what can we say of the effect in the mind of the servant-who after all must be a human being or else she would get no wages— of a life which is physically laborious, and in which the labour is relieved by no friendly and gracious recognition ? Has no member of the Association ever seen the stout son of the house lounging over the newspaper, while the housemaid is toiling up two or three flights of stairs with heavy burdens? And the mistress haggling over a couple of pounds increase of a servant's wages one hour, and squandering fifty in personal finery the next? So long as these things are, so long as service is interpreted in this brutal sense, and relegated to a caste, instead of being performed by the members of the family, either born or informally received in some sort into it, so long there will be many women in a dense population who will deliberately prefer prostitution as a trade, without trying domestic service whose conditions they know by hearsay, and many others who will drift into it after trying this service and finding it as cheerless a life as life can be. And how many recruits does this doleful host receive from the great band of seamstresses? For eleven hours close work, often fourteen in spite of dressmakers and of the inspector, a girl well-paid receives eighteenpence, more or less. So long as this goes on, it is morally impossible for prostitution to be other than a necessity. And on the whole, it is perhaps not so very much more degrading and soul-destroying and fundamentally immoral, to wear away a life in pandering to the coarse appetite of one sex than in pandering to

the ignoble and monstrous vanity of the other. You speak of the "practical contempt for womanhood" displayed by the legislature in these Acts. This practical contempt for womanhood may be seen every hour of every day in its supreme form in the leaden inconsiderateness of nine ladies out of ten for their dressmakers, domestic servants, nurses, and dependents generally.

It is for women, for courageous women like those of whom your Association is composed, to spread and realise such an idea of the family and of all forms of service and of the moral obligation against indifference which they instantly erect, that on this most dangerous of all sides the approach to the pit may be fenced off. This, however, and all other action dictated by the contrition of which you speak, so far as it cuts off the roots and sources of the evil, must be prospective. It cannot redeem those who are already fully committed to courses and, what is still more, to a habit of mind, which nothing short of a directly miraculous interposition of divine grace could change. For those who are not thus irretrievably committed, restoration to health is a first condition of any rise from degradation, and the influence of the Acts against which you protest is to promote this sanatory condition of the case. That influence may be nugatory. You are estopped from pleading this, because your opposition would be confessedly as strong, whatever the evidence might lead us to conclude as to the sanatory effect of the Acts. The most competent persons are of opinion that the effect of such regulations is to check disease. If this be so, I am unable to see anything in the moral and political considerations which you adduce, to make one wish well to your action; it involves a continuance of what is the worst kind of cruelty to animals, because the sufferers from that indifference of the legislature which you are agitating for are human beings, and the worst sufferers of all the absolutely innocent.

JOHN MORLEY.

THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. XL. NEW SERIES.-APRIL 1, 1870.

THE IRISH LAND BILL OF 1870.

"Ma disse: Taci e lascia volger gli anni."-Paradiso ix. 4.

IRELAND has waited long for justice and generosity from the English people and Government; but she has not waited in vain, since waiting has brought its reward in a policy far more complete than could have been expected at an earlier period. True, timely compromise would have done something and smoothed the way for more. But the alleviation could have been but transitory, and might have encouraged that shallow philosophy and ignoble tone, even yet apparent, which have proved the bane of English statesmanship towards Ireland. In the Imperial Parliament there is little risk that extreme views on either side shall be adopted; but considerable danger that views, moderate but thorough, may not be carried out to their legitimate consequences, with that unflinching logic which, in great social exigencies, is the only practical wisdom. With some advantages an age of transition, like our own, has one grave peril, an undue leaning towards a deceptive finality. Society can, under some circumstances, afford to wait and accept very faulty measures of reform; under other circumstances to offer such is to perpetuate discontent and to encourage revolutionary schemes. The condition and attitude of the Irish people brings their land-problem under the latter and not the former head, and in the genuine acceptance of this fact by England lies the hope of its real settlement, honourable to herself, and advantageous to Ireland. That settlement can only be real which fully recognises Irish history, Irish principles, and Irish facts. It must, no less, accept the duty of embracing the true interests of all classes, and not one alone, however numerous that may be; and of future generations, as well as of the existing population. The land-law of Ireland has proved so unjust and mischievous, that

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