call upon your Lordships, and the united powers of the State, to examine it thoroughly and decisively, and to stamp upon it the indelible stigma of the public abhorrence. And I again implore those holy prelates of our religion to do away with these iniquities from among us. Let them perform a lustration! Let them purify this House, and this country, from this sin!” But alas! among the hereditary counsellors, the bishops too sit silent and unmoved when those Acts of 1866 and 1869 were passed, which shook the bulwarks of our constitution, and which, pronouncing _that_ to be a necessity which God has pronounced to be deadly sin, exalted its practice henceforth into an acknowledged and regulated traffic! CHAPTER V. The offences which are punished under other Acts of Parliament, or according to the common law of England, are all either carefully defined by these Acts and that law, or else they are such as unmistakably to define themselves. In these Contagious Diseases Acts, on the contrary, there is no definition of the offence treated under them, nor do we find that the offence is such as unmistakably to define itself. On the contrary, we find amongst the advocates of these Acts, no less than in society generally, the widest possible variety of opinion as to the definition of a prostitute. This variety of opinion is only indicative of the immense difficulty of drawing any marked line as to where a woman may be justly designated by this name. There are many easy-going persons of the upper classes who know nothing of the poor, and who talk of this unhappy class as if they were as easily distinguishable as a negro is from a white man; but those who are acquainted with the poorer classes of women know the utter fallacy of this method of judgment, and are well aware that there is amongst this class of sinners as long and varied a series as in any other. Moreover, those who have looked at all carefully into the subject observe, that there are in human nature deeply-seated causes why this indistinctness of definition is maintained rather than otherwise; for they can scarcely help being conscious that the real cause of the difficulty which men who legislate on this subject experience in arriving at a just determination of that degree of guilt which is to attach this terrible appellation to a woman, arises in a great measure from the disingenuousness of men, and their disinclination that their sex should be acknowledged as the accomplices and companions of the persons thus defined. Until war be waged against impure men, as well as against impure women, it will remain impossible to define prostitution. It is amazing to see in this unequal war waged against the weaker sex only, how men who legislate for their own interests have, as it were, talked themselves into the notion, if it were possible to do so, that these poor women are sinners in this respect in their own