Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
DEAR FRIENDS--As I am unable to be present at your convention on
May 7, 8, 9, and as you ask for a communication from me, I gladly
write you on some of the later phases of our struggle against
legalized prostitution. A brave battle has been fought in St.
Louis against that iniquity, and we have regarded it with
sympathy and admiration; but you are not yet safe against the
devices of those who uphold this white slavery, nor are we safe,
although we know that in the end we shall be conquerors. You tell
me that "England is held up as an example of the beneficial
working of the legalizing of vice." England holds a peculiar
position in regard to the question. She was the last to adopt
this system of slavery and she adopted it in that thorough manner
which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon race. In no other country has
prostitution been regulated by law. It has been understood by the
Latin races, even when morally enervated, that the law could not
without risk of losing its majesty violate justice. In England
alone the regulations are law. Their promoters, by their
hardihood in asking parliament to decree injustice, have brought
on unconsciously to themselves, the beginning of the end of the
whole system. The Englishman is a powerful agent for evil as for
good. In the best times of our history my countrymen possessed
preeminently vigorous minds in vigorous bodies. But when the
animal nature has outgrown the moral, the appetites burst their
proper restraints, and man has no other notion of enjoyment save
bodily pleasure; he passes by a quick and easy transition into a
powerful brute. And this is what the upper-class Englishman has
to a deplorable extent become. There is no creature in the world
so ready as he to domineer, to enslave, to destroy. But together
with this development towards evil, there has been in our country
a counter development. Moral faith is still strong among us.
There are powerful women, as well as strong, pure, and
self-governed men, of the real old Anglo-Saxon type. It was in
England then, which adopted last the hideous slavery, that there
arose first a strong national protest in opposition. English
people rose up against the wicked law before it had been in
operation three months. English men and women determined to carry
abolition not at home only, but abroad, and they promptly carried
their standard to every country on the continent of Europe. In
all these countries men and women came forward at the first
appeal, and said, "We are ready, we only waited for you,
Anglo-Saxons, to take the lead; we have groaned under the
oppression, but there was not force enough among us to take the
initiative step."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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