“592. There was one house into which I went with the inspector of police lately. I heard a woman reading with a loud voice. When we got in the passage I stopped to listen, and I found, to my astonishment, that she was reading from Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_. I went into the room and found no less than seven women sitting round a good-looking female of twenty-five, who was reading from the Pilgrim’s Progress, all paying the greatest attention. “593. Was the woman reading it in a spirit which showed that she was feeling what she was reading?—Most decidedly; I never saw clergyman or audience in a church look more serious than the reader or the listeners. “594. Were those prostitutes?—They were. “595. Were they engaged in the prosecution of their trade?—Most decidedly; I have, I am sorry to say, two or three of them in the hospital now.” The reader will observe, however, that in this instance the witness whose moral obliquity was such that he could suppose that his evidence evinced a moral improvement in the character of a harlot, was probably an uneducated Government official; but now we find the framers of Government reports, and advocates of this Act in high place, falling into exactly the same confusion, and mistaking obedience to this Act for moral rectitude. We deeply deplore this deadly confusion, which we maintain that these Acts give rise to, and believe it to be fraught with the most ruinous moral consequences to England, bringing, as it must, in its train moral obliquity and the spread of fornication. We further maintain that that moral obliquity is here introduced at a point in social relationship where its introduction is more calculated than at any other to undermine the whole moral code of the country. Striking at the root of family life by the encouragement of prostitution, it introduces a complete confusion of right and wrong, with respect to a vice more typical than any other, and is calculated to reproduce itself in moral enormities through the whole fabric of social life. But what moral enormity can surprise us now, when we have found that the Admiralty and the War Office have risen up to be the saviours of the souls of women? I might address them in the words in which Milton once addressed the Treasury Bench:—“Indeed, my Lords of the Admiralty and the War Office, are ye at last become the gracious guardians of those principles which in your hearts you despise? Or has the Spirit at length beamed in light upon souls where light never shone before? For shame, my Lords! will ye never forsake inconsistance? Demons have trembled and Jews have been converted, but when the cause of religion is echoed from the Admiralty and War Office, perfidy is at hand, and we ought to look about us.”[81] CHAPTER VII.