PREFACE.
Mademoiselle Julie Daubié has published a book in three volumes, entitled La Femme pauvre au dix-neuvième Siècle.[1] This work is the result of many years of careful research, accompanied by self-denying labours among the poor, and the outcasts of society.
The following pages are a translation of those chapters of her book which bear upon the state of the most unhappy of her countrywomen. In granting permission for the publication of these chapters, Mad’lle Daubié writes as follows:—
“Our new Parliament has made an emphatic declaration that it has in view a great moral reform, which fills us with hope. Our eyes are turned towards your Parliament, the wisdom of which is boasted everywhere. It is assuredly not the English Parliament which will make a law to tolerate (that is to say to encourage) prostitution; for such an infamy as this is not yet inscribed in any Code of any civilised or Christian nation. Even in France, prostitution is regulated by an article of the Penal Code, which refers this question to the police. Our Civil Code has not yet had the impudence to proclaim the immunities of profligate men to be a civil right; and the expenses of this department are municipal.
“But if it be true that provocations in the public thoroughfares are so frequent in the towns of England, and that places of ill fame are not watched, &c., your Parliament has left much undone, and has much to do for the repression of vice.
“The principal means for this appear to me to be good laws for the punishment of seduction, measures for making women independent through a sufficiency of wages, the severest prohibition of all provocations in the public way, and the right of the police to enter infamous houses, and to exercise the same powers against the men as against the women who frequent them; (an impartiality exercised in France in gambling houses.)
“But we must abhor and reject all those odious measures which treat woman as an impure being for debauchery to profit by. Scorn all the advice which may be given you, on this subject, by timid or corrupt men, who can see nothing beyond that which actually exists! The progress of prostitution in France is frightful, and the number of public women is said to be doubled even since the Great Exhibition. Every day new houses of infamy are opened, authorised by the Chef, who replies to any one who remonstrates, ‘It is because they are necessary, &c., &c.’
“We shall do well, I think, in our International League, to give ourselves especially to questions of justice and of human dignity in connexion with the relations of the sexes, and to endeavour to bring all the nations of Europe to the adoption of uniformly just laws on this subject—a subject on which it is not permitted to cherish with impunity false sentiments or unjust laws.”
Who shall dare to prophesy for the future of England, if, at such a crisis as the present, when the eyes of France—of Europe, it may be said—are upon us, the Parliament whose wisdom is vaunted on the Continent, should endorse, and not repudiate, the policy of a clique who have succeeded in gaining a footing in our country for a system which elsewhere has been tried and condemned?