“He was convinced that good could only flow, in a State, through the channel of the laws; that the way to make a benefit lasting was by practising the virtue of following them; that the way to make an evil lasting was by practising the vice of hindering their effect; that the duties of princes did not less consist in defending the laws against the passions of others than against their own personal ones.”—Montesquieu, Arsace et Isménie.

“The liberty which shows favour to the passions and licentiousness is a fatal license, a fresh yoke, a shameful slavery; and the rule of good morals is the leading principle of the happiness of empires.”—Massillon.

If woman too frequently acquiesces in depravity, man makes choice of it; it is against this active agent of corruption, therefore, that societies for the maintenance of the integrity of their original laws should fortify themselves beforehand; we moreover see ancient and purer civilisations ward off decay by prosecuting those who pay for prostitution, and by involving the accomplices of a common sin in a common punishment.

The best ages of Greece and Rome exhibit to us an extreme severity against breaches of good morals. So long as the body of laws framed by Lycurgus remained in force at Sparta, prostitution was unknown there. The laws of Solon followed up immoral men with an inexorable rigour, by requiring a public examination into the morals of those who were looking forward to public appointments; they degraded public officials of every rank discovered in a brothel, and declared the citizen who had been seen there a single time unworthy to serve his country. Independently of the archon commissioned to try these matters, every Athenian had the right and the obligation of prosecuting for the prostitution of a woman or of a child; in certain cases the criminals were put to death. Prostitutes, banished from society, wore a peculiar uniform. We observe similar regulations existing in the Roman republic, where the censor of morals degraded dissolute functionaries, and branded the citizen with disgrace who made prostitutes of his slaves or freed women-servants. Panders could not make over their property, nor sue in law, nor be sworn, nor retain legal authority over their children. Every harbourer and accomplice of a prostitute was condemned to the same punishment as herself. This wise legislation did not survive the ruin of liberty, and profligacy was the fruit of the system of governing which substituted the informer for the censor.

When the world-wide Roman empire had perished through excess of sensual gratification, Christianity caused the old laws to be resuscitated; and Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian put them in practice in Gaul; the last-mentioned ruler put panders to death. These measures corresponded in other things, for Gaul, to the mind of the Germans who, after dragging through a horse-pond men convicted of prostitution, threw a hurdle on their bodies and sunk them to the bottom of the slough.^[18] With the same penalties, Charlemagne subsequently punished prostitutes, their accomplices and harbourers, who were all whipped together. Our parliaments condemned those who paid for prostitution to a whipping, to temporary transportation, to the galleys, to fine, to confiscation of their property, and to the iron collar. St. Louis, who had shielded the destitution of women against profligacy, had incorrigible girls and the gentlemen, their accomplices, publicly flogged with the same whip. Philip the Bold, following up his father’s work, assigned to prostitution specific districts within which it was to be strictly confined. Charles V. likewise contributed to the moral amelioration of the nation; but, in the following reign, the precarious position of women, the effect of the war, and the excesses of the troops, again plunged France into serious profligacy.

The totality of our old legislation exhibits everywhere a considerable degree of severity against procurers and libertines; the decrees of our parliaments, and the proclamations of the provosts of Paris, often branded the former with disgrace, and condemned them to death; they had them even buried alive when they had cajoled women by flatteries or presents. A bill of the 15th century gives the cost of a dozen new brooms used at the execution of some procuresses, who had their ears cropt, were put in the pillory, whipped, and afterwards burnt.

At other times the brothel-keeper was led through the town, mounted on an ass, with her face to the animal’s tail; afterwards the executioner branded her with a hot-iron and expelled her from the locality. In the 18th century several examples of this kind of punishment occur, and it was inflicted in Paris as recently as A.D. 1756.

Every one conspired to punish the mother infamous enough to procure her daughter’s prostitution; the spectators beat her with rods, and the executioner cut off her nose.

The agents of profligacy were, in like manner, punished if they lent clothes or money to a woman of ill fame, with the design of encouraging her profligacy; the things supplied could not be legally re-demanded, and if an attempt were made to regain them by force from the woman to whom they had been lent, or to take others in way of compensation, they were prosecuted as thieves.

How far were our ancestors from this modern progress, which gives us, in the case of procuresses of infamy, ladies of the house sufficiently respected and sufficiently respectable to find husbands, and legionaries for sons-in-law! Oh, honour! Oh, my country!

These vile creatures, the objects of the just severity of laws, were marked out for public contempt by infamous designations; we may judge of that by the vehement indignation of old authors against this disgusting traffic, which was formerly looked upon, in France, and with so much reason, as the most horrible of crimes.

“What else do the procurers, if not restore, in their entirety, all the detestable slaveries abolished by law—to effect better than before the sale of men?”

“As for panders and procuresses,” exclaims another writer, “they are quite insufferable as enemies to respectability, betrayers of matronly and maidenly modesty, assassins of holy human society, traitors to the lawful succession of true heirs, firebrands of hell, and faithful interpreters of the filthy mind.”

This severity did not extend to the victim of loose morals, to whom the path of re-instatement was ever open.^[19] If we did not know how much unreasonableness and cruelty there are in a corrupt nation, we might learn it in the fact that France began to treat the common prostitute with severity at the close of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War had ruined the country, and when the excesses of the troops and the profligacy of the Court were beginning to extinguish the national morality; then, the birth of a free class developing personal responsibility, called for the means of livelihood for the friendless woman, who was getting them by the sale of her person; for the writers of that age attribute the progress of public corruption to the difficulty which women found in living by respectable means.

The Journal du Bourgeois de Paris, 1445, thus expresses itself:—“At that time, when everyone learned how to earn, wages were so bad that respectable women, who had learned how to earn five or six blancs a day, were willingly letting themselves out for two, and living on them.”

This sad picture sufficiently resembles that of the fifth quarter of the working day, which disgraces our time. Let it be observed, however, that instead of trying to ameliorate woman’s position by work, she was punished for not finding any at all. The edicts of the time overwhelm her by extending indulgence to her purchasers, who, beginning from that period, acquired new prerogatives daily. A writer on morals is, with reason, astonished at the cruelty of the 16th century in this respect. “It is,” he says, “truly remarkable, that never were royal and municipal enactments against public women more frequent or severe than during this period of disorder. No pity was shown to public prostitutes at a period when decency and shame seemed banished from morals.”^[20]

This brutality is ever in the direct ratio to social profligacy. When the French people, wallowing at a later period in the unchastity of royalty and nobility, had caused the goddess of love to be enthroned on its altars, it offered, on the revolutionary scaffold, the innocence, beauty, and attractions of women who were slaughtered by hecatombs; then the guillotine gathered its harvest from the young girls of Verdun, as the scythe cuts off a basket of lilies.

Nevertheless, in its moral debasement hitherto, France had made profligacy a privilege and not a right. If the nobles had freed themselves from the curb, if the middle class was irritated by it, the lower orders still endured it, and, up to the Revolution, the prison of St. Lazare tried to reform immoral men, over whom the Government reserved a discretionary power. Young people of dissolute morals, under 25, picked up by the police, were confined at La Salpétrière, and at Bicêtre; severe penalties were also attached to the prostituting of modest girls. In order the better to appreciate our decline since that period, let us recall the enactment of 6th November, 1778, which prohibits provoking to debauchery in the public street,^[21] and enjoins upon tavern and lodging-house proprietors, under the penalty of a fine of 200 to 500 livres, to keep a register of the names of all the persons they admit. The police, who made a strict inspection of these houses, brought into court the tavern and the lodging-house keepers guilty of harbouring women of doubtful character, and, in the event of their transgressing a second time, had their houses closed. When the Revolution abolished the old regulations, and expressed a formal purpose of establishing fresh ones, the lower orders, in their saturnalia, again became violators of women—a crime which, after having destroyed the aristocracy, was ruining the middle class. The Convention, alarmed at excesses which were threatening the very foundations of social order, thought to nip the evil in the bud, by enacting the distant deportation of abandoned women; but the instability of its short-lived powers did not admit the application of this measure.

Notwithstanding that, the feverish activity of the nation, its sacrifices during the wars of the Republic and the Empire, greatly restricted, in the beginning of the century, prostitution, which Napoleon I. regarded with horror.^[22] M. M. Pasquier and D’Anglés subsequently made a demand, but vainly, for effectual measures for extirpating this social canker; in presence of its rapid progress, honest magistrates and upright counsellors felt the necessity of having the old enactments put again in force. Tavern-keepers, harbourers of prostitutes were, at the instance of the public ministry, often brought before the Court of Correctional Police, and condemned to a fine, by the application to them of the enactment of 6th November, 1778. The Court of Cassation had quashed these verdicts but three times up to the year 1866, when the before-mentioned enactment received its last application from the Correctional Court of the Seine, which expressed the wish to see the laws of former times again put in force in modern legislation. Since that period, our judges, alleging their limited powers, declare that the fact of the tavern-keepers admitting prostitutes is only a breach of police-regulations, satisfied by a fine fixed at five francs, by the application of the article 471, No. 15, of the Penal Code.^[23] It is useless to say that this fresh moral weakness, by rendering the most cynical impunity in these immoralities certain, permits young men freely to indulge in illicit intercourse. Our Code referring all the means for repression to the police, it remains to be seen how this discretionary power acts with respect to the pander who procures the debauchery, to the man who pays for it, and to the woman who is the subject of it.

The brothel-keeper, as we know, acquires a right, even a monopoly, by becoming the mistress of a licensed brothel; her privileges are sacred to the degree that no one may meddle with them as regards that matter. I have no longer to touch upon the respect we owe to the ladies of the house, and I pass over that infamy. As for the individual sufficiently degraded to seek for the gratification of his brutal appetite in debauchery, he is under the very special protection of the public power, which keeps watch, night and day, to sanction his rights. The police by the Vagrants’ Act, it is true, strike down in the lower classes a few debauchees among respectable people, but for every man who has a home there is no curb; the “magistrate for morals” goes so far even as to object to the tears and supplications of a mother who implores him to take pity on the soul of her son, losing his health, money, and honour in brothels.

Far from keeping the young man at a distance from the sin by a threefold fear, our society even tries to take that fear away from him by using the utmost solicitude to set him free from every duty in contriving, if possible, to rid him of those selfish subjects of prior interest for him, which might have proved his safeguard upon the brink of ruin. The sanitary visits and the imprisonment of women guilty of not having kept the debauchee unharmed, cost nearly half a million in Paris. Let an approximate calculation be made for our other towns, and it will be apparent how valuable a citizen, in the interests of public order, is the frequenter of permitted brothels. His cynicism will have victims, above all among those women who have no material independence, and no moral development. We know the fate of the common prostitutes who, formerly kept down by laws applied equally to their accomplices, are now accounted for nothing in the eye of the law, for the profit of these same accomplices.^[24] The girl of the town is no longer a person, she is a thing in the eye of a species of roving commission, which gives its stamp of security to the bargain; prostitution is no longer an unspeakable infamy, it is a social want, as necessary as, more imperious even, than nutriment in the opinion of the legislator, since he does not permit a theft which might even be the sole means of appeasing a devouring hunger, whilst he is destroying human dignity and social justice in the interest of debauchery. The lower-class girl becomes as the sweepings of the streets, will be imprisoned therefore, not for her immoral way of getting a living, but for not complying with the law after the markets are closed, or for want of customers; because, from the moment she accepts an offer, she escapes from the control of the police. Our unsavoury raids upon the haunts of debauchery are termed service of morals; they are usually made by old soldiers—models, doubtlessly of chastity—in a military spirit, who have the right to treat, without ceremony, every woman guilty of walking about, and who will be looked upon as prostituted if she has no relatives to claim her. An absolute judge gives his sentence, without any appeal, for condemning this one to be registered, that to be imprisoned; if, week by week, they do not present themselves for detestable investigations, they will be imprisoned as persons guilty of intended prostitution. Twelve verdicts of guilty of this kind are, on an average, pronounced daily at Paris, to the gain of profligacy. In our seaports, the police, established for the security of evil, intrude even upon domestic privacy to oblige female servants to be enrolled.

The intense nausea this system has lately caused France may make apparent to what kind of despotism it gives up self-dependent women. Moreover, if a head official is continued in power after the mistakes which are the necessary consequence of his orders, it is a crying injustice; if he is deprived, it is as great an injustice, since this victim is sacrificed for having done what he considered his duty. Our machinery for morals will remain for ever an evidence of the degree of barbarity which depraved communities may attain to; let us not expect anything more humane from them, and if we have forgotten the history of prostitution in ancient France, let us recall that when slavery had developed in the Roman Empire those excesses which are consistent with the right of citizenship among ourselves, Tiberius was compelled to put down the incontinence of women, and Domitian issued sumptuary edicts against women of loose morals. The protection accorded to the immoralities of the man is the cause of the incessant persecution of the girl of the town; she alone is followed up in furnished rooms and hotels, which are likewise the refuge of the workwoman, the female-servant, and the art-worker without employment, who, when there, find themselves the subjects of the harsh misconstructions of the police, who are invested with the right of intruding upon, and of arresting them at any minute. Immorality has, from this motive, gone to the length of driving women from our boarding-houses who were trying to get a respectable living. In 1845, the Prefect of the Seine, acting on the express order of the Minister of Public Instruction, issued a regulation prohibiting mistresses of boarding-houses and secular institutions from receiving women-lodgers as boarders, and ordered them, under the penalty of a prompt closing of their establishments, to turn out of doors, without delay or exception, those then residing with them. As a consequence of this severe measure, the modest woman, often not knowing where to rest her head, sees herself obliged to submit to the discretionary discipline of public girls. The convents, it is true, not being included in the regulation cited above, admit women very far advanced in pregnancy, who are presented to them by an ecclesiastic.

The young woman endowed with youth and beauty cannot show her face alone in our streets without being exposed to insulting looks and words; if she accept a situation behind a counter, in a spirit dealer’s establishment, she will, by the laws of 1861, fall under the action of the police, as guilty of corrupting young people.

To finish on the subject of this despotic law, it must be added, that a large number of places of public resort, of promenades, cannot be frequented by unaccompanied women, and that a quite recent regulation forbids every unaccompanied woman to enter any of our cafés on the boulevards. Formerly, public places of resort were forbidden to prostitution; at present, having obtained the wall-side there, it drives respectable people away from them.

The anxiety of the Administration for the debauchee might, however, leave him some monetary miscalculations; but legislative enactment and legal exposition are on the watch, in their turn, like anxious mothers, that mistresses should not be too expensive. Every day our courts of law sanction the rights of prostitution by annulling his presents and debts, and issuing orders like this: “It exists as a principle in jurisprudence, that the individual who has excited to debauchery to gratify his own passions is by no means looked upon as guilty by our legislation.”^[25]

This solemn charter is confirmed in all the specific applications. Formerly our law courts, refusing their countenance to men whom they looked upon, and with justice, as the greatest disturbers of social order, refused to entertain any of their suits whatever, upon the ground of this old maxim of law; “Nemo auditur turpitudinem suam allegans.”^[26] Practically, those who support courtesans never appear before the judges except as complainants to claim protection, if these women owe or get money from them unfairly, or continue to use the name which they themselves had inscribed upon their crests.

Let us judge of the complicity of the courts of law by some facts recorded in our judicial annals, which constantly corroborate the same principles in similar occurrences. A clerk, convicted of having stolen 45,000 francs, which he had sent to his mistress, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, while the woman had to undergo five years of the same kind of punishment.^[27]

Justice sometimes goes so far as to punish the woman for the theft committed by him who keeps her. A young man of 20, after having freely prostituted himself with a courtesan, robbed his mother. The judge, by an inquisitorial examination, tried to make the thief acknowledge complicity on the part of the woman he was cohabiting with. He affirmed, on the contrary, that he left her in the belief that the money expended with her was part of the salary attached to his appointment. The court, however, let this precocious debauchee off, and sentenced the courtesan to 8 months’ imprisonment.^[28]

The young man who has not attained his majority thus meets with a special protection in corrupting himself; for, while our law courts, upon the pretence that it is swindling, annul the pecuniary engagements made with courtesans by men of all ages, they keep the young man under 21 especially safe. When robbery occurs, the fact of prostitution brings the two principles of family and property face to face, but the former is, in this matter, always sacrificed to the latter.

Military men, even officers, bring before the law courts the robbery of their epaulettes, which has been effected in a brothel; and, without any blame, without any penalty against these family destroyers, the Government or Magistrate, after imprisoning the woman inculpated, replaces the symbol of official honour on the shoulders of her accomplice in profligacy.

Has not the student, too, the privilege of declaring to our judges that he claims the repayment of 30, 40 francs, &c., pilfered by women with whom he was cohabiting; not only does the court not pronounce him guilty, it by no means seeks to know if this youth, the hope of his country, has been the cause of a wrong, irreparable, perchance, to society, by allying himself with abandoned women and outlawed youths, whom his irresponsibility in wickedness has urged on to commit larceny. It neither condemns this rebel against society to a fine nor to disgrace as a citizen, and, by imprisoning the woman, it proclaims the man’s right to be dissolute.

A well-known courtesan who lived in a splendid town-house in one of our wealthiest districts, was there receiving, every year, from her admirers, an income of about 100,000 francs. Carriages, liveries well known in the official world, were shamelessly standing at her door. In those orgies, which are only to be compared to the Babylonian nights, she boasted of having the particular charge of training young people. The police, forcing an entrance into her house, accused her of illegal gambling. It is unnecessary to say that the court did not sentence—did not even name, any of her high-placed accomplices; certain organs of the periodical press gave an account of this affair, and spoke of the courtesan under the appellation of amiable hostess, well-known in the fashionable world of Paris for the choice suppers she gave. Our jurisprudence is still the zealous protectress of these men who manifest an equal shamelessness in tricking out the courtesan with their heraldic name, and taking it from her when they are in search of the marriage portion necessary to restore their fortune impaired by profligacy. With an unfeeling barbarity they then set to work to drag their discarded mistress before the courts of law, to take her ducal coronet from her, to efface the coats-of-arms they had themselves engraven upon her carriage, and, at length, to have her sentenced for usurping the titles of the aristocracy.

The seducer unpunished, (what do I say,) protected, encouraged! is not even prosecuted for the purchase of girls under age; for our code only recognises guilt where this traffic is made a regular calling. As to the seller bungling enough to fulfil all the required conditions, he renders himself liable to an imprisonment of from one month to five years, and to a fine of from 50 to 500 francs; but the full extent of the punishment being never imposed, the risk is small, the advantage certain from the time that the sale of a young girl can fetch, from 1,500 to 10,000 francs. No search for, no mention even is made in any case of these monsters with a human face, who have a constant right to the produce of this horrible traffic; no indemnification is granted to the wretched parents from whom the victims have been carried off by stratagem. I have already cited the solemn right which the spirit of our laws acknowledges for those who procure debauchery on their own account. Different decrees declare that Article 334 of the Penal Code, relating to the exciting to debauchery, is not applicable to this kind of crime. Even when there has been systematic persuasion, cleverly exercised by a man of ripe years upon a girl under age hurried away from a respectable way of life, our courts acknowledge that they have no means of bringing the guilty person to justice.

To the privileges I have just enumerated, prostitution on the part of the man adds that of honour intact. Every time a punishment loses anything in its degree of publicity, or is no longer available for an act that is blameable and hurtful to society, the cry of public opinion is stifled; its isolated manifestations remain powerless, especially when they are looked upon as a crime. Then indignation, no longer finding a free course, a tacit acquiescence, which may be thought a voluntary one, gives daily, new force to the reign of vice, and a great confusion of principle exists between good and evil. It must be confessed, with sorrow, never did civilization in this matter protect evil with more effrontery than ours does. Respect for the man of dissolute morals is, among ourselves, imposed by a system of vicious laws which furnish him with an impenetrable breast-plate; he is able to brave, and he does brave, honour and duty, beneath the shield of the interdiction of investigation to discover the father of illegitimate children, and by the law which refuses to admit proof in cases of libel, and forbids the making known any act of private life. If he is in the service of the State or of his country, his irresponsibility will be still greater; his freedom from annoyance will follow him even in death, for society has further provided that his vices may sleep in the grave with him. Sullied by baseness, he will even receive distinctions that will enrol him in the list of those chosen for official rewards. Do not let us be any longer surprised, then, at the discredit into which these rewards are falling; for, if the cross of honour is given to a man who has deserved well of his country, it will lose its value if a man who has done nothing remarkable obtains it also; it will fall into contempt if a despicable man can get it. Hence result the indifference and disdain which, in depraved societies, certain men profess for official honours, whose symbols which might serve as a safeguard against infamy, they sometimes refuse to wear.

The study of our present subject has shown us a thorough absence of discretionary measures and of penal laws against prostitution in men—a fact unheard of, I think, in the history of civilizations based on the principle of the family.

Is this culpable toleration the effect of a general relaxation of morals? Is it possible to reform our laws? This is what every serious mind must ask itself in view of such a rapid downward course.

This consideration is so much the more important that, in its economical aspect, it is connected with the European balance of power. The relative strength of the powers especially consists, it will not be denied, in the manner, more or less effectual, which they adopt in order to maintain, together with the dignity of the man and the woman, the vigour of the child and the honour of the family. We see, in fact, that those nations only which sanction the principle of moral responsibility, have been able to preserve themselves from the decay which prostitution brings in its train. England,^[29] Sweden, Switzerland, Prussia, Saxony, the United States, &c., permit, as France in former times did, the private initiative in the closing of the places for debauchery; they refuse to allow the accomplices of prostitutes to bring any action for debt, and impose penalties for the immoralities which we both condone and surround with outward signs of splendour.^[30] On the contrary, we see the greatest slavery—that of the passions—among peoples which, having the likeness of liberty, are governed according to the French code. Thus Belgium, suffering from the like social wounds with ourselves, gives the title conversational drawing-room (salons de conversation), to places where young girls are to be bought, and where important personages go to be supplied.

Without pausing here upon all the economic consequences of debauchery, I shall draw attention to the fact that it enervates, enfeebles, and diminishes population, accumulating and scattering, besides, riches got without labour; and devoting to orgies food obtained by pinching the poor, it creates a pauperised community in the midst of one of sybarites.^[31]

The European nation which shall most imperfectly put down this vice will therefore be the weakest, the most unstable, and, consequently, the ripest for downfall. Experience teaches that this truth applies alike to ancient and modern civilizations.

Moral responsibility, interpreted in Egypt, by the duty which the lawgiver imposed upon fathers and mothers of providing for their illegitimate children, and by their custom of passing judgment on the dead, had fashioned that granite people which will continue to be the wonder and admiration of all ages. So long as Greece and Rome preserved this Egyptian policy, whose light had been introduced among them by severe lawgivers, they were in a position to defy, in like manner, all external enemies; but, from the time that the absolutism of profligacy towards their slaves had hurried them along the downward path to ruin, they refused to submit to those wise laws, which had constituted their strength, and ensured a hopeful future. What vigour, what energy, did this unceasing control bestow upon the administrator! Despite the depravity which found its way into Greece, in the age of Pericles, still what a noble spectacle there is in the struggles of Æschines and of Demosthenes—in that immortal discourse upon the crown in which we perceive the heart of a free people throb in the reciprocal responsibility of the public man and his accusers!

It is, on the other hand, sad to consider the work of absolutism, not so much in the pyramids formed out of human carcases by the Genghis Khans and the Tamerlanes, as in the civilized systems, polished like the Roman Empire, that of the Low Countries and of France, in which are observed the highest development of material and intellectual progress side by side with moral decline.

Certes, reformers, moralists and satirists, were not wanting in the Roman empire. Honest men, saddened and indignant at the depravity of their age, tried to stem the muddy torrent which was hurrying it in the direction of degrading gratifications. What noble efforts we see, whether among the Catos, the Tacituses, and the Juvenals; or among the Origens, the Tertullians, and the Justins! What moral energy among the Stoics, who took for their maxim endurance and self-denial! What grandeur of soul among those obscure Christians, whose performance of the moral obligations which are based upon respect for the dignity of humanity, caused spiritual development to be carried to such a high degree! Did not this reformation, seated upon the throne itself, produce the admirable epoch of the Antonines!^[32]

Individual virtues were unable, notwithstanding, to save the empire, ruined as it was from the day when the rule of morals no longer found a place in either law or authority; from the moment when there were no longer either tribunes to denounce abuses, or censors to repress them. Yes, the Roman empire received its death-warrant at the inconsistent epoch in which Cæsar erected his vices into laws; in which Augustus destroyed, by his example, the morality he preached by his precepts; in which that censor of morals, who issued severe edicts against an unmarried seducer, who caused the consecrated fire to be maintained by the virgins on the altar of Vesta, being personally affected by the contagion of the period, secretly introduced the courtesan at home, by paying public and hypocritical honours to Livia. It is all over with that power which shall have for its moral law nothing more than the individual temperament of those who wield it, and Juvenal shall very soon utter his prophetic warning:—

Rome shall drink the poisoned cup by copious draughts; when the queen of the world shall have emptied the fatal beverage, God shall make a sign to the barbarians, and the Northern hordes shall arise. A thousand times unhappy should we be, similarly, if, by scandalous privileges, we continued to attract the dregs of the entire world which will sacrifice France’s future by corrupting her youth and her women. Before pointing out the remedies which the evil calls for, let us, however, see to what degree of horror its too great freedoms have brought the prostitution of the man.