the heart which can be easily subdued by the exhibition of Christian kindness. Here is the omnipotent weapon which has achieved such moral victories, when wielded by gentle and loving women, like Miss Marsh, Mrs. Wightman, and Mrs. Sheppard.
The opposite mode of treatment, however successful it may be in the restoration of external character, or in the subjugation of turbulent passions, is defective, inasmuch as it fails to influence the heart, and therefore at best contributes only to an incomplete and partial cure. The almost penal character of the system pursued in many of the older penitentiaries is founded on the misconception, that the injury sustained by society in the departure from virtue of her female members, can only be atoned for by some personal mulct inflicted on the offender. While, therefore, the ultimate object is the reformation of lost character, this is too often overlooked or rendered subsidiary to the proximate one of propitiating society; and the austere regimen by which the latter point is secured, is generally found to be subversive of the other. When, however, as is too frequently the case, society is the tempter, the offence may surely be condoned by a less rigorous process! Society may indeed well waive the right to compensation for supposed damages, when it can be proved that she is at least particeps criminis, and when, moreover, she has a personal interest in the speedy restoration of her unhappy prodigals. The retributive suffering, which, in the majority of cases, so surely overtakes the female delinquent, may be urged as another reason for dealing leniently with the erring; but the strongest justification of such a method is undoubtedly derived from the success attending it, and from the Divine sanction which it has received.
The impediments which the old penitentiary system of close confinement, criminal fare, and hard labour, have unfortunately presented to the rescue of fallen women is too well known to those who are accustomed to deal with this class. Frequently are the urgent entreaties of the missionary to forsake an abandoned course of life, and seek shelter in some institution, met with either rancorous denunciations against the penal system, or by polite but firm refusals to submit to the discipline, which is supposed to extend to all reformatory asylums.
Gradually, however, this prevailing opinion is being cleared away, and the fallen women themselves are not slow to distinguish between the two opposite methods of treatment, a fact which is rendered clearly apparent by the overwhelming number of applications for admission into those Homes which are characterized by a more humane and gentle regimen.
The oldest reformatory institution in the metropolis for the reception of fallen women is The Magdalen Hospital, founded in 1758. During the last 100 years of its existence nearly 9,000 women have been admitted, about two-thirds of whom have been restored to friends or relations. At the time when this charity was first instituted “the notion of providing a house for the reception and maintenance of ‘Penitent Prostitutes’ seems not to have suggested itself to the public mind. Even good and actively benevolent men appear to have been startled at the novelty of the proposition, while they doubted the wisdom, and still more the success of such an attempt. The newspapers of that period contained both arguments against, and ridicule of the plan and its promoters. God, however, blessed the undertaking, and raised up friends and supporters in every direction.”
So that eighteen years after its incorporation its friends were able to use the following cheering language.
“We see many fellow-creatures, by means of this happy asylum, rescued from sorrow in which they had been involved by all the iniquitous stratagems of seduction; in which condition they had been detained by a species of horrid necessity; from which they had no probable or possible retreat; and in which they must, therefore, according to all human appearance, have perished. We see them restored to their God, to their parents, to their friends, their country, and themselves. What charitable heart, what truly Christian hand can withhold its best endeavours to promote an undertaking so laudable, so beneficent? Who would not desire to add to the number of souls preserved from the deepest guilt—of bodies rescued from shame, misery, and death? Who would not wish to wipe the tear from a parent’s eyes—to save the hoary head from being brought down with sorrow to the grave?”
An interval of half a century elapsed after the foundation of the Magdalen Asylum before the establishment of any similar institution. Within the last ten years, however, public attention has been directed with increasing interest to this subject, and numerous efforts have been made to provide more ample accommodation for those who are desirous of escaping from their wretched mode of life.
The London by Moonlight Mission, inaugurated some years ago by Lieutenant Blackmore, has been followed in our own day by the Midnight Meeting Movement, which has excited a world-wide sympathy and interest, and has been very generally approved even in quarters where encouragement could be least expected. The commencement of these meetings in London was the signal for similar experiments in Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Dublin, and other large towns.
Twenty-two of these meetings have now been held, and attended by upwards of 4,000 women, more than 600 of whom have been rescued, and either restored to friends, or placed in situations, where they are giving satisfactory evidence of outward reformation, and many of them of a thorough change of character.
The largest association in London for the reformation of fallen women, is the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children. The Society has at present eleven homes in various parts of London, and one at Dover. Four of these are “Family Homes” for the reception of preventive cases, or young girls who have not strayed from the path of virtue, but are addicted to crime, or are in circumstances of danger. One is a Home for orphan children, from nine to thirteen years of age; and the remaining seven are for fallen cases.
Upwards of 2,700 women and children have been admitted into these Homes since the Society’s formation in 1853, the greater part of whom have given satisfactory proof of having been reclaimed and permanently benefitted. The Society’s income for the past year amounted to £6,789 17s. 2d. The Homes are under the care of pious and experienced matrons, who labour incessantly to promote the spiritual and social welfare of their charges.
Another institution of recent origin, but of rapidly increasing growth, is the London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution, which already numbers four Homes, and has admitted, during the past year, upwards of 250 inmates.
The following are the objects embraced by the Institution:—
“I. To seek the destitute and fallen by voluntary missionary effort.
“II. To afford temporary protection to friendless young women, whose circumstances expose them to danger; also to effect the rescue of fallen females, especially those decoyed from the country, by admitting them to the benefits of this Institution.
“III. To restore, when practicable, the wanderer to her family and friends, whether in town or country.
“IV. To qualify those admitted into the Institution for various departments of domestic service, to obtain suitable situations for them, and provide them with clothing.
“V. To aid such as for approved reasons wish to emigrate.
“VI. Above all, to seek the spiritual welfare of the inmates.”
The two last-named Societies and the Home of Hope, which is another Refuge identical in character and spirit with that last named, have received most of the cases rescued by the midnight meetings.
Great and encouraging as are the results effected by these institutions, and wide as the sympathy is which they have awakened, it is clear that the means of rescue are as yet wholly disproportioned to the numbers claiming assistance.
Calculating the number of fallen women in London at eighty thousand, which is probably not far wide of the truth, and computing the number at present in the different institutions to be 1,000, the chance of rescue through the only recognized medium for female reformation is offered to one woman in every eighty!
This is the high-water mark of public charity, and the utmost provision made by Society for the rescue of these 80,000 outcasts! And yet there are special reasons which seem to give them a strong claim upon the sympathy and compassion of the benevolent public. The brief term of their existence, the average length of which is at best but a few years, and the fact that large numbers of them are driven upon the streets by a stern necessity, and compelled to live by sin as a trade, while everything contributes to prevent their escape from the mode of life into which they have been involuntarily forced, are surely considerations calculated to stimulate Christian effort on their behalf. But more than this,—it is well known that they are hanging as it were over the mouth of the bottomless pit.
“Their life-blood is ebbing at a fearful rate, and their souls are drifting madly to eternity. Their fate is certain; their doom impends: and, for their death-bed, there is not even the faintest glimmer of hope which charity can bequeath to the dying sinner. All others may find peace at last; but these, suddenly overtaken by death, and perishing in and by their sins, must be irrevocably lost. And who are they on whose warm vitals the ‘worm feeds sweetly,’ even on this side the grave, and around whose heads the unquenchable fire prematurely burns? Who are those whose souls, in countless numbers, are now glutting the chambers of hell? Not swarthy Indians nor sable Africans, whose deeds of violence and superstition have spread horror and astonishment among civilized nations, but delicately-nurtured Saxon women, who in infancy were lovingly fondled in the arms of Christian mothers, and received ‘into the ark of Christ’s Church’ in baptism, before a praying congregation; young girls, for whom pious sponsors promised that they should be ‘virtuously brought up to lead a godly and a Christian life,’ and who, in the faithful discharge of this promise, were trained in our Sabbath-schools, and ‘taken to the Bishop to be confirmed by him.’ They have sung the same hymns which we now sing; our congregational melodies are still familiar to them. They have read the same Scriptures which we now read, worshipped in the same temple in which we assemble, offered up the same prayers, listened to the same exhortations, and looked forward to the same glorious fruition of future blessedness. But where are they now? What are their hopes and expectations, and what the probable end of their existence? Let those answer these questions who sneeringly ask why such prodigious efforts are made to rescue the fallen.
“It not unfrequently happens, however, that the benevolent promoters of such schemes are perplexed and disheartened by those who assume a tone of expediency and argue thus: ‘Yes, it is all very true; and we can sympathise with your efforts, and pity the poor unhappy objects of your solicitude; but, then, this is a necessary evil, and any attempts to remove it are altogether mistaken, and are sure to end in failure, or to produce greater mischief. Besides, the demand will always create the supply, and for every fallen woman you snatch from the streets, an innocent, and hitherto virtuous girl, must be sacrificed. No, we are sorry for them, but better let them perish than save them at the sacrifice of other victims.’
“First then, this is a ‘necessary evil.’ Falsehood is sufficiently patent upon the face of this foolish and monstrous assertion. Could the Creator have pronounced his work ‘very good’ with such an inseparable appendage to social life? Again, how comes it that a ‘necessary evil’ only exhibits itself in certain localities, and under particular circumstances, disappearing altogether in uncivilized countries, and gathering strength and virulence in the most refined states of society? Will any modern philosopher favour us with a solution of this difficulty?
“But ‘the demand will always create the supply.’ Inexorable logic apparently, and incontrovertible if the supply were limited to the demand. This, however, we deny. Thousands are driven to prostitution as the only alternative from starvation. Necessity, and not the demand, here creates the supply, and it is well known that the supply suggests the demand. Is, then, the balance of vice so exact and undeviating, that the gap occasioned by the removal of one victim must be speedily filled by another? Is the equilibrium of profligacy so nicely adjusted, that it would be dangerous to assert the prerogative of virtue; and shall we desire its unhappy votaries to continue in sin that virtue may abound? Shall we drive back anxious souls, striving to ‘flee from the wrath to come,’ with the cold-blooded assurance that, ‘for the good of society, they had better remain where they are?’ Will it satisfy an immortal spirit, to be told that she helps to maintain the proper equilibrium of vice; or that, by standing in the gap, she is a benefactor to the innocent of her own sex, who would otherwise be sacrificed? Shall we assign as our reason for not preaching the Gospel to ‘every creature,’ that the state of society would be unhinged by curtailing a necessary evil, or that greater injuries would result from any attempt to rescue perishing souls? Shall we mock Him who has said ‘All souls are mine,’ by elevating a doctrine of human expediency above the authority of a distinct command? Let us be sure that, in a case so intimately affecting the honour and glory of God, to ‘obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.’ In vain may we plead political necessity as a plausible pretext for disobedience.
“We are not afraid, however, to meet this argument on philosophical grounds; and we affirm, confidently, that the rescue of every fallen woman is a social boon. Admitting the possibility that, eventually, her place will be supplied by another—for we can approach no nearer to the truth—is it not better to remove a present evil than to provide for a remote contingency? Supposing that in the long vista of future years, the immolation of a fresh victim is the price of every individual rescue, do we overlook the fact, that in the mean time a powerful temptation is removed, and that not merely units, but probably hundreds, of the young of the opposite sex are delivered from the toils of the strange woman? Is nothing achieved by the temporary removal of one tempter from the streets, and is society a loser in the end, by the reformation of one whose sole occupation is to waylay and ruin the youth of the opposite sex? Let our moral economists escape from this dilemma if they can; the philanthropist and the Christian need no further arguments to convince them that they have not only the law of God, but the inexorable logic of common sense on their side.
“Who can tell the pestiferous influence exercised on society by one single fallen woman? Who can calculate the evils of such a system? Woman, waylaid, tempted, deceived, becomes in turn the terrible avenger of her sex. Armed with a power which is all but irresistible, and stript of that which can alone restrain and purify her influence, she steps upon the arena of life qualified to act her part in the reorganization of society. The lex talionis—the law of retaliation—is hers. Society has made her what she is, and must be now governed by her potent influence. The weight of this influence is untold: view it in the dissolution of domestic ties, in the sacrifice of family peace, in the cold desolation of promising homes; but, above all, in the growth of practical Atheism, and in the downward tendency of all that is pure and holy in life! One and another who has been educated in an atmosphere redolent of virtue and principle, and has given promise of high and noble qualities, falls a victim to the prevalence of meretricious allurements, and carries back to his hitherto untainted home the noxious influence he has imbibed. Another and another, within the range of that influence, is made to suffer for his sacrifice of moral rectitude, and they, in their turn, become the agents, and the originators of fresh evils. Who, in contemplating this pedigree of profligacy resulting from a solitary temptation, will venture to affirm that the temporary withdrawal of a single prostitute is not a social blessing? Surely for such immediate results we are justified in dispensing with considerations of future expediency; and, acting upon the first principles of Christian ethics, may help to reform the vicious and profligate, leaving it in the hands of a merciful God to avert the contingency of ruin overtaking the as yet unfallen woman.”[9]
In reference to all such Christian efforts to reclaim the fallen, it has been truly said that “You may ransack the world for objects of compassion. You may scour the earth in search of suffering humanity, on which to exercise your philanthropy; you may roam the countless hospitals and asylums of this vast city; you may penetrate the dens and caves of all other profligacy; you may lavish your bounty upon a transatlantic famine, or dive into Neapolitan dungeons, or scatter the Bible broadcast throughout the great moral wildernesses of heathendom: but in all the million claims upon your faith, upon your feeling as a man, upon your benevolence as a Christian, you will never fulfil a mission dearer to Christ, you will never promote a charity more congenial to the spirit of this gospel; you will never more surely wake up joy in heaven, and force tears into the eyes of sympathising angels, than when you can bring a Magdalene face to face with her Redeemer, and thrill her poor heart, even to breaking, with the plaintive music of that divine voice, calling her by name—Mary.”