But the public feeling, the public indignation against these enormities did not rise to the height of restrictive legislation. The policy of a portion both of the English and the American press was that of suppression, upon the plea that a knowledge of these crimes would be injurious to the morals of society. Suppression was also the aim of the “royal princes, dukes, nobles, and leading men,” who were the principal patrons and supporters of this nefarious system. Suppression is the strongest opposing weapon against reform. To compel change needs light and discussion. “It is only when wrongs find a tongue that they become righted.” Woman, legally powerless in the doing away with abuses, or the punishment of crime, must depend upon publicity for the creation of a public sentiment in her favor.

One of the most remarkable facts connected with disclosures of this crime against womankind was the extent to which men of all ages and character were found identified with it. The world of business and that of politics were equally as well known in the haunts of vice as in the outside world, but they were judged by a different standard and their relative importance was altogether changed.[78] It was a literal day of judgment, in which evil character, deftly hidden during public life, was there unveiled.

The most horribly striking fact connected with this investigation was the extreme youth of these victims. The report of the committee of the House of Lords, 1882, declared the evidence proved beyond doubt that juvenile vice from an almost incredibly early age was increasing at an appalling extent in England, and especially in London; ten thousand girls, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years of age, had been drawn into this vice, an English paper declaring the ignorance of these girls to be almost incredible. The condition of these girl-children is far more horrible than that of the victims of infant marriage in Syria, Egypt, India; the infant victims of christian lands are more fully destroyed, soon becoming mental, physical and moral wrecks; alternate imbecility and wild screaming being common among these child victims of vice.[79]

Christianity created the modern brothel, which as closely follows in the wake of evangelical work of the Moody and Sankey style, as did public women the ancient church councils.[80] While in the past the legal wrongs of woman in the marriage relation, in which she is robbed of name, personality, earnings, children, had a tendency to drive her to live with man outside of the authority of church or state, the occupations recently opened to her whereby she can gain a reputable livelihood by her own exertions, has greatly increased the ranks of single women.[81] No longer compelled to marry for a home or position, the number of young girls who voluntarily refrain from marriage, by choice living single, increases each year. No longer driven to immorality for bread, a great diminution has taken place in the ranks of “public women.”[82] No longer forced by want into this life, the lessening number of such women not meeting the requirements of patrons of vice, resulted in the organization of a regular system for the abduction, imprisonment, sale, and exportation of young girls; England and Germany most largely controlling this business, although Belgium, Holland and France, Switzerland, several countries of South America, Canada, and the United States are to some extent also engaged in this most infamous traffic.[83]

Foreign traffic in young English girls was known to exist long before the revelation of the Pall Mall Gazette made English people aware of the extent of the same system under the home government. It was this widely extended and thoroughly organized commerce in girl-children which roused a few people to earnest effort against it, and secured the formation of a society called “Prevention of Traffic in English Girls.” To the chairman of this society, Mr. Benjamin Scott, was the first official suggestion due that terminated in that investigation by Editor Stead, which for a moment shook the civilized world, and held christian England to light as a center of the vilest, most odious, most criminal slave traffic the world ever knew.

London, the great metropolis of christian England, the largest city of ancient or modern times, is acknowledged by statisticians and sociologists to be the point where crime, vice, despair, and misery are found in their deepest depth and greatest diversity. Not Babylon of old, whose name is the synonym of all that is vile; not Rome, “Mother of Harlots,” not Corinth, in whose temple a thousand women were kept for prostitution in service of the god, not the most savage lands in all their barbarity have ever shown a thousandth part of the human woe to be found in the city of London, that culmination of modern christian civilization. The nameless crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, the vileness of ancient Greece, which garnered its most heroic men, its most profound philosophers, are but amusements among young men of the highest rank in England; West End, the home of rank and wealth, of university education, being the central hell of this extended radius of vice. The destruction of girl-children by old men is paralleled by the self-destruction of boys and youth through vices that society hesitates to name. Yet each is the result of that system of teaching which declares a woman a being divinely created for the use and sensual gratification of man.

Having for years tacitly consented to the destruction of the girl-children of its poor, at the rate of twenty thousand annually, England was yet greatly shocked to find its boys of tender age and aristocratic lineage sunken in a mire of immorality. Eton, the highest institution of its kind in Great Britain, having in charge the education of boys connected with the most illustrious English families, recently became the source of a scandal which involved a great number of students. An extensive secret inquiry resulted in the suspension of nearly three hundred boys after full confession. Supplied with unlimited pocket money, they had bribed parkkeepers and the police to silence.

But a few years previous to these disclosures in reference to Eton, the civilized world was horrified at the discovery of the vice which destroyed Sodom, among some of the most wealthy, aristocratic young men of London. And yet with knowledge of the depravity into which this most christian city had sunk, the shocking character of the disclosures of the Pall Mall Gazette in reference to the traffic in young girls, involved details of vice so atrocious as to exceed belief had not the testimony been of the most convincing character. These mere children were lured by the most diabolical vices into traps, where by drugs, force, or cajoling, tens of thousands were brought to moral and physical ruin, innocent victims of a religious theory which through the christian ages has trained men into a belief that woman was but created as a plaything for their passions. That boys of the highest families, in the earliest years of their adolescence, should voluntarily associate with those vicious women who form a class created by the public sentiment of man as necessary to the safety of the feminine element in households, is not surprising to a philosophic observer. It was the direct result of an adequate cause. The wrong to woman passed so silently by, reached its culmination in the destruction of young boys. At Eton, suspension was tenderness, expulsion from that school ruining a boy’s future.

Succeeding the revelation of London vice, came divulgence of similar shameless practices on the part of high government officials and men foremost in public life, in the Canadian Colonies. In Ottawa and other Canadian cities in which upon this side of the Atlantic the wholesale despoliation of young girls but too closely paralleled London and other trans-Atlantic cities. These were closely followed by the revelations in regard to the north-western pineries of the United States, to whose camps women are decoyed, under pretense of good situations and high wages into a life whose horrors are not equaled in any other part of the christian world; where the raw-hide is used to compel drinking and dancing, and high stockades, bull-dogs and pistols prevent escape, until death—happily of quick occurrence—releases the victim. As elsewhere, men of wealth and high position, law-makers, are identified with this infamy.[84]

Among the notable facts due to an investigation of prostitution is that its support largely comes from married men, the “heads of families”; men of mature years, fathers of sons and daughters. To those seemingly least exposed to temptation is the sustaining of this vice due. Men of influence and position no less in this country than in England frequent disreputable houses. In 1878, the body of a woman buried in the principal cemetery of Syracuse, N.Y. was exhumed on suspicion of poison. One of the prominent city dailies said, “she commenced leading an abandoned life and went to Saratoga where she ran a large establishment of that character. Her place was the center for men of influence and position.” A few years since the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage accompanied by high police officials investigated such houses in person. In a sermon based upon knowledge there obtained Mr. Talmage declared those dens of infamy to be supported by married men, chiefly of the better classes.

That one-half of the children born into the world die before maturity, is acknowledged. Physiologists and philanthropists seek for the cause except where most likely to be found. To that mysterious interchange of germs and life principles, whose chemistry is still not understood, must we look for aid in solving this great problem. These questions woman is forced to consider; their investigation belong to her by right, as she and her children are the chief victims. She can no longer close her lips in silence, saying it does not concern me. No longer does the modern woman allow her husband to think for her; she is breaking from church bonds, from the laws of men alone, from all the restrictions the state has pressed upon her; she is no longer looking without, for guidance, but is heeding the commands of her own soul.

With such facts before us, we are not surprised that women are found who prefer the freedom and private respect accorded to a mistress, rather than the restrictions and tyranny of the marital household. Mr. Talmage but followed in the footsteps of Anna Dickinson, who took upon herself an acquaintance with this class of women. Asking one woman living as mistress why she did not marry, the girl contemptuously ejaculated:

And yet so pronounced in difference are the moral codes by which men and women are judged, that while living together in unlegalized marital relations, the man is welcomed into society, is looked upon as fit for marriage with the most innocent young girl, while should he partially condone the wrong done the woman whose life under present condition of society he has ruined, by marriage with her, society for this one reputable act brands him as most unworthy. It is but a few years since a cavalry officer in Washington was court-martialled, found guilty and sentenced to dismissal from the army on charge of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, because of his legally marrying a woman with whom he had been living un-married. What a commentary upon christian civilization! While living an illicit relation with this woman, he was regarded as an officer and a gentleman; when taking upon himself a legal relation he was court-martialled. Lecky says: “Much of our own feeling on this subject is due to laws and moral systems which were founded by men and were in the first instance designed for their own protection.” As far as he has examined this question, Lecky is correct, but he has failed to touch the primal cause of such laws and systems—the church doctrine of woman’s created inferiority to man. View these questions from any stand-point the cause remains the same. To this cause we trace the crime and criminals of society today. To this cause the darkness of an age which has not yet realized that civilization means a recognition of the rights of others at every point of contact.

To the honor of the pulpit the sins of men are occasionally made the subject of condemnation. Evangelist Davidson preaching in Syracuse, N.Y. 1887, said:

Like Lecky, Mr. Davidson was correct as far as he went, but he, too, failed to reach the cause of this double code of morals. He did not touch it because in striking that, he would strike a blow at the very foundations of the church.

Christendom is percolated with immorality, large cities and small towns alike giving daily proof. Legislative and police investigations substantiate this statement; woman’s protective agencies and private investigations alike proclaim the same fact. As under the same organic teachings results must continue the same, we find the United States no more free from immorality than European lands; Catholic countries no more vile than Protestant; although feudal law no longer exists, men still rule in church and state. Men’s beliefs, their desires, their passions, create the laws under which the degradation of woman still continues. Evil consequences are not confined to the past, to days of comparative ignorance and tyranny; and in no country has the effect of belief in woman as a mere instrument for men’s pleasure produced more horrible results than in our own. Not to speak of the effort made in Congress a few years since to place all women of the country under suspect law, many cities, among them Washington, Philadelphia, Syracuse,[85] have at different periods taken initial steps towards a prohibition of a woman’s appearing in the street un-accompanied by male escort, during the evening, even its earliest hours. Such ordinances, primarily directed against working girls whose chief time for out of door exercise and recreation is during evening hours, and to that other rapidly increasing class of business women, physicians and others, whose vocation calls them out at all hours of day or night; places the liberty of woman at the option of every policeman, as though she were a criminal or a slave.[86] There is also proof of regularly organized kidnapping schemes and deportation of girls for the vilest purposes not only abroad, but to the pineries and lumber camps of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Bloodhounds kept for this purpose, or hunting down the girls with shotguns, prevents escape when attempted. In January, 1887, representative Breen appeared before the House Judiciary Committee of the Michigan legislature, confirming the charge that a regular trade in young girls existed between Milwaukee, Chicago and the mining regions of the upper peninsula of that state.[87] In case of conviction, the punishment is totally inadequate to the crime of those men; the law giving only one year of imprisonment. The freedom, innocence and lives of such women are of less account in law than the commonest larceny of property. If these girls were robbed of fifty cents the law would punish the theft, but robbed of themselves, enduring such brutal outrages that life continues only from two to twelve months, there have yet no laws of adequate punishment been passed. So little attention have legislators given, that policemen, judges and sheriffs are found aiding and abetting the proprietors of these dens.[88] Their emissaries find young girls between thirteen and sixteen the easiest to kidnap, and when once in power of these men, their hair is cut in order that they may be known. A regular system of transfer of the girls exists between the many hundred such dens, where clubs, whips, and irons are the instruments to hold them in subjection.[89] The New York World sent a representative disguised as a woodman in order to investigate the truth of these statements. He found these houses surrounded by stockades thirty feet in height, the one door guarded night and day by a man with a rifle, while within were a number of chained bull-dogs that were let loose if a girl attempted escape. Certain men even in these forest depths are especially noted for their cruelty to these victims, who are compelled with club and whips to obey the master of the den. Suicide the only door of escape is frequent among these girls, who almost without exception were secured under promise of respectable employment at Green Bay, Duluth, or other points. From forty to seventy-five girls are found at the largest of such pinery dens.

The World reporter saw them strung up by the thumbs, beaten with clubs, kicked by drunken brutes and driven with switches over the snow. He afterwards interviewed a rescued girl who had engaged to work in a lumberman’s hotel, supposing it to be a respectable place, but instead she was taken to a rough building, surrounded by a slab fence nearly twenty feet in height, within which was a cordon of thirteen bull dogs chained to iron stakes driven in the ground. Many of the details given by this girl are too horrible for relation. Three times she tried to escape and three times she was caught and beaten. The visitors by whom she tried to smuggle notes to the outer world would hand them to the proprietor, who liberally paid for such treason. Even county officers visited the place to drink and dance with the girls, who were not permitted to refuse any request of the visitors. A complaint of any kind, even of sickness, meant a whipping, frequently with a rawhide upon the naked body; some times with the butt of a revolver. Many den-keepers wield a powerful influence in the local elections; one of the worst of such after paying the constable twelve dollars for the return of a girl who had tried to escape, beat her with a revolver until tired and was then only prevented by a woodman from turning loose a bull dog upon her; but such was his political influence that he was elected justice of the peace the following spring.

Under the head of “White Slaves in Michigan” the New York World of January 24, 1887, published a special dispatch from Detroit, Mich., in regard to the case of a rescued girl.

The traffic in girls from one part of the American continent to another is under a well organized plan that seldom meets discovery, although a trader of this character is now serving a sentence in Sing Sing prison, N.Y., for sending girls to Panama. Three decoyed young girls found in Jamaica, were happily returned uninjured, to their parents.[90] From Canada, girls are imported to the large cities of the United States. The prices paid to agents depend upon a girl’s youth and beauty, varying from $20 to $200 each.[91] The traffic at Ottawa resembled that of London in that prominent citizens, leading politicians, and members of the government were implicated.[92]

The number of women and girls constantly reported “missing” is startling in its great extent. Stepping out on some household errand for a moment they vanish as though swallowed by the earth. A few years ago the Chicago Herald sent one of its reporters into the pineries of Wisconsin, to trace a little girl living on State street of that city who went one evening to get a pitcher of milk and did not return. Not a month, scarcely a week passes, that the disappearance of some woman, girl, or child, is not chronicled through the press, besides the infinitely greater numbers of whom the world never hears. As it was abroad, so in our own country, no energetic steps are taken to put an end to these foul wrongs. Woman herself is needed in the seats of justice; woman must become a responsible factor in government in order to the enactment of laws which shall protect her own sex. The spring of 1892, the Chicago Herald called attention to the continuance of this condition of things.

Man’s assertion that he protects woman is false. Under laws solely enacted by men young girls in christian countries are held as assenting to their own degradation at an age so tender that their evidence would not be received in courts of law. Nor are these the laws of a remote age come down to the present time. As late as 1889, the Kansas State Senate voted 25 to 9 that a girl of twelve years was of sufficiently responsible age “to consent” to take the first step in immorality; the same senate afterwards unanimously voting that a boy of sixteen years was not old enough to decide for himself in regard to smoking cigarettes.[93] It should be remembered that youth is the most impressible season of life as well as the most inexperienced. Young girls from thirteen to sixteen, mere children, are most easily decoyed, their youth and innocence causing them to fall the readiest prey; and scarcely a large city but proves the existence of men of mature years whose aim is the destruction of such young girls.[94] The state of Delaware yet more infamous, still retaining seven years as the “age of consent.” Seven short years of baby life in that state is legally held to transform a girl-infant into a being with capacity to consent to an act of which she neither knows the name nor the consequences, her “consent” freeing from responsibility or punishment, the villain, youthful or aged, who chooses to assault such baby victim of man-made laws.[95] While the doors of irresponsible vice are legally thrown open to men of all ages with girl victims as their prey, the restrictions against marriage with a minor without the parents’ consent are in most states very severe. That the girl-wife herself has consented to the marriage ceremony is of no weight. Where a legitimate union is under consideration she is held as possessing no power to form a contract and can be arrested under a writ of habeas corpus, and kept from her husband at her father’s pleasure. Instances have also occurred where the wife has been punished by him for thus daring to marry.[96] Both the husband and the officiating clergyman are also held amenable, the former under charge of abduction, the latter as an accessory in performing the marriage ceremony.

A significant fact is the rapid increase of child criminals throughout christendom; Germany, France and England showing one hundred per cent within ten years, while in the United States more than one-half the inmates of state prisons are under thirty years of age. From criminals it is necessary to look back to crime-making men sitting in earth’s loftiest places, and note the fact that crime germs are not alone generated with the child, but that through the gestative period the mother, a religious and legal slave, struggles between a newly awakened sense of that responsibility which within the last four decades has come to woman, and the crushing influence of religious, political and family despotism which still overshadows her. Moralists have long striven for the suppression of immorality by efforts directed to the reformation of corrupt women alone; for two reasons they have been unsuccessful.

First: the majority of women entering this life are found to have done so under the pressure of abject poverty, and as long as the conditions of society continue to foster poverty for woman it was impossible to create a marked change in morals.

Second: all efforts were directed towards the smallest and least culpable class, as it has been proven that ten men of immoral life are required for the support of one woman of like character. In London alone with its population of five millions, 100,000 women, one-fiftieth of its population are thus enumerated, requiring 1,000,000 men, one-fifth of its population, for their support. Recognizing the fact that men, not women, were most sunken in vice, the number leading vicious lives very much larger, the degradation of these men very much greater, an Italian lady, Madam Venturi, at the International Conference of the British Continental and General Federation for the abolition of governmental regulation of prostitution, while making a brief eloquent address upon the general subject of rescue work, referred to the great importance of reclaiming men as the fundamental work upon which others should be built up. Teach men, she said, to understand that he who degrades a fellow creature, commits a crime, the crime of high treason against humanity. In quick response to those fitly-spoken words, the women of many countries combined in the work of man’s reformation in an organization known as the “White Cross Society” founded in 1886, by Miss Ellice Hopkins of England, and now possessing branches in every part of the civilized world.[97] To this society, men alone belong; its work is of a still broader character than mere reformation of the vicious; it seeks to train young men and boys to a proper respect for woman and for themselves.

As the world is indebted to Christine of Pisa for the first public protest against the immorality of christendom, so to Mrs. Josephine Butler,[98] Madam Venturi, and Miss Ellice Hopkins are due the inauguration of a new moral standard for man whose results must be of incalculable value to the world. The “White Cross” is a simply organized society without an admission fee, but requiring adherence to a five-fold obligation binding its members to purity of thought and action,[99] and maintaining that the law of chastity is equally binding on men and women. The International Federation, a union existing in several European countries, its chief object, work against state protection of vice, roused public thought in this direction as never before. People began to comprehend that a large vicious class was common to every community, a class whose reclamation had never been systematically attempted, never thought necessary or even deemed possible, because of the religious and social training that taught indulgence in vice to be a necessity of man’s nature; and the co-ordinate statement, that protection to the majority of women was to be secured only through the debasement and moral degradation of the minority. For many hundreds of years this has been man’s treatment of the question of vice in Christian lands.

But as soon as advancing civilization permitted woman’s thought to be publicly heard, vice in man was declared to be upon the same basis as vice in woman. Had not man been trained by his religion into a belief that woman was created for him, had not the church for 1800 and more years preached woman’s moral debasement, the long course of legislation for them as slaves would never have taken place, nor the obstacles in way of change been so numerous and so persistent. For nine years the Criminal Reform Act was before Parliament. During that period, petitions, speeches and appeals of every kind in favor of its passage were made by those outside the halls of legislation aided by a few honest men within. But the vicious and immoral fought the act with energy, despite the fact that the women of their own families were exposed to destruction through government protected iniquity. The bitter opposition by legislators to this act, is an additional proof that woman cannot trust man in the state to any greater extent than in the church.

Until woman holds political power in her own hands, her efforts for protective legislation will be arduous and protracted. Among the customs of the early christian church, we are able to trace the inception of marquette, the mundium, the legalization of vice and crimes of kindred character. With exception of among some savage races, that woman should appear unclothed before man, has been regarded as evidence of the deepest sensuality, yet throughout the history of Christianity from its earliest years when women were required to divest themselves of clothing before baptism down to the Endowment House ceremonies of the Mormon Church, we constantly find proof of like sensual exactions by the “Fathers,” priests and lay masculinity of the church. During the earliest days of christianity, women were baptized quite nude, in the presence of men, by men, their bodies being afterwards anointed with oil by the priest who had baptized them. One of the earliest schisms in the church arose from the protest of women against this indignity, their demand to be allowed to baptize those of their own sex, and the opposition of men to this demand.[100]

The early bishops of the church strenuously used their influence against the baptism of nude women by elders of their own sex. Women were sometimes brought entirely nude upon the stage at Rome, but it was in connection with religious representation, the theater at that period being an element of religious teaching. Lecky speaks of the undisguised sensuality of this practice.[101] What must be our conception of a christian custom that placed nude maidens and wives in the very hands of men, not alone for baptism but also for anointing with oil? Nude baptism is still practiced when converts are received into the Greek church, no position or station in life excusing from it, Catharine, the first wife of Peter the Great being baptized in this primitive christian manner.[102] As late as the seventeenth century a work upon the “Seven Sacraments” set certain days in which female penitents were to appear entirely unclothed before the confessor in order that he might discipline them on account of their sins.

Chapter Five

Witchcraft

Although toward the beginning of the IV century, people began to speak of the nocturnal meeting of witches and sorcerers, under the name of “Assembly of Diana,” or “Herodia,” it was not until canon or church law, had become quite engrafted upon the civil law, that the full persecution for witchcraft arose. A witch was held to be a woman who had deliberately sold herself to the evil one; who delighted in injuring others, and who, for the purpose of enhancing the enormity of her evil acts, choose the Sabbath day for the performance of her most impious rites, and to whom all black animals had special relationship; the black cat in many countries being held as her principal familiar. “To go to the Sabbath” signified taking part in witch orgies. The possession of a pet of any kind at this period was dangerous to woman. One who had tamed a frog, was condemned to be burned in consequence, the harmless amphibian being looked upon as a familiar of Satan. The devil ever being depicted in sermon or story as black, all black animals by an easy transition of ideas, became associated with evil and witches.[1] Although I have referred to witchcraft as having taken on a new phase soon after the confirmation of celibacy as a dogma of the church by the Lateran Council of 1215, it yet requires a chapter by itself, in order to show to what proportions this form of heresy arose, and the method of the church in its treatment. This period was the age of supreme despair for woman,[2] death by fire being the common form of witch punishment. Black cats were frequently burned with a witch at the stake;[3] during the reign of Louis XV of France, sacks of condemned cats were burned upon the public square devoted to witch torture. Cats and witches are found depicted together in a curious cut on the title page of a book printed in 1621. The proverbial “nine lives” of a cat were associated in the minds of people with the universally believed possible metamorphosis of a witch into a cat.[4] So firmly did the diabolical nature of the black cat impress itself upon the people, that its effects are felt in business to this day, the skin of black cats being less prized and of less value in the fur market than those of other colors. A curious exemplification of this inherited belief is found in Great Britain. An English taxidermist who exports thousands of mounted kittens each year to the United States and other countries, finds the prejudice against black cats still so great that he will not purchase kittens of this obnoxious color.[5] In the minds of many people, black seems ineradicably connected with sorcery.

In the Folk Lore of Cats, it is stated that as recently as 1867 a woman was publicly accused of witchcraft in the state of Pennsylvania on account of her administering three drops of a black cat’s blood to a child as a remedy for the croup. She admitted the fact but denied that witchcraft had anything to do with it, and twenty witnesses were called to prove its success as a remedy. From an early period the belief in metamorphosis by means of magical power was common throughout christendom. St. Augustine relates[6] that “hostesses or innkeepers sometimes put confections into a kind of cheese made by them, and travelers eating thereof, were presently metamorphosed into laboring beasts, as horses, asses or oxen.” It was also believed that the power of changing into various animals was possessed by witches themselves.[7] At the present day under certain forms of insanity persons imagine themselves to be animals, birds, and even inanimate things, as glass; but usually those hallucinations occur in isolated instances. But among the strange epidemics which have at various times affected christendom, none is more singular than that Lycanthropia, or wolf madness, which attacked such multitudes of inhabitants of the Jura in 1600, as to become a source of great public danger. The affected persons walked upon their feet and hands until their palms became hard and horny. They howled like wolves, and as wolves do they hunted in packs, murdering and devouring many children, nor could the most severe punishment put an end to this general madness. Six hundred persons were executed upon their own confessions, which included admissions of compact with the devil, attendance upon the Sabbath and cannibal feasting upon a mountain, the devil having used his power for their transmutation into wolves.[8] Witches were believed to ride through the air upon animals or bits of wood. The fact of their possession of such powers is asserted by many writers, the usual method of transportation being a goat, night crow or enchanted staff.[9] The rhyming Mother Goose question: