The Press. — London, England, 1858-04-03 00:00:00

314 system, and merely to replace it by a small Board of Crown-nominees, would surely seem strange. We doubt not, then, that the House of Commons, or any other body of Englishman, would unhesitatingly declare that it considered eighteen to be a better number than eight for the Council ; and that it approved of some in• fusion of the representative principle. But we no w approach the real difficulty of the case, and that which constitutes, iu fact, the only peril of the present Bill. In applying the principle of representation, two things are desirable. First, to bring into the Council a large amount of Indian know ledge and experience; but, secondly, to have also some members of English, nut Indian feelings, who would prevent the Council from being wholly ruled by the " old Indian " prej u- dices. The Board of Directors has been accustomed to welcome such men as Mr. RIIBBIiLT, ELLICE, Mr. MASTERMAN, or Mr. Mum, as cordially as it did the most dis tinguished men from Calcutta or Madras. Bearing this in mind, therefore, we do not at all wonder that the Government, in construct- ing its representative system, gave four seats to the representatives of East India stock, and five seats to the representatives of the great commercial towns. Still, the choice of great public officials by the ten-pounders of Liver pool and Glasgow strikes many as a novelty ; and it is, in truth, the one point of the Bill which excites the greatest amount of hostile criticism. Now, surely, if the House of Commons approves of the Bill of the present Govern ment, as to these two great points, that the strength of the Council should be eighteen, rather than eight, and that some portion of the Council should be elected, rather than nominated, there can be no reason why the Government should show any pertinacity in adhering to the single point of giving the choice of five members to the great commer cial towns. The offer has been made; and if the representatives of the commercial class in the present House of Commons do not receive that offer with any warmth or unanimity, we should anticipate that Ministers will consider themselves open to consider any other propo sition which might command a larger amount of support. A word or two on this point. Nine mem bers of the Council, we will suppose, are to be elected by some kind of constituency. If the plan submitted by M. DISRAELI 18 not thought quite satisfactory, let the most saga cious minds in Parliament see if they can suggest anything better. A correspondent, who himself sat in the House of Commons during many years, sends us a letter, which we piint in another column, recommending that the whole Council should be elected by the votes of the members of both Houses of Parliament. But this plan would undoubtedly be objected to by many, as stripping the Crown, unwisely, of a large por tion of its prerogative. Another idea which has been thrown out is, that the Crown should nominate six mem bers, the House of Lords six members, and the House of Commons six members ; thus making up the number of eighteen. But a third plan, which has less of novelty about it, and might therefore pass with less of opposition, adheres to the outline given in the present Bill, that the Crown should nominate nine members, and that the other nine should Pe elected. Only, instead of the apportionment •b or pr ni THE PRESS, APRIL 3, 1858. given in the Bill as it now stands, the whole nine, without any proviso, might be left to the free•choice of 831 who possessed any kind of stook in East Indian undertakings, whether the Company's stock, or railway or other stock, of a kindred kind. If we look forward to the great work now before us in the im provement of India, we may safely calculate that before the year 1605 arrives, the East India proprietors of all clams would exceed 10,000 in number. And surely there could be little risk in leaving the choice of one-half of the Council in the hands of such a body ; taken, as it would be, from the middle and higher classes of the people of the United Kingdom. " THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL." WE begin to nauseate this subject, and so, it is probable, do most of our readers. If we go into the discussion of it, then, it is from no en joyment we have in meddling with garbage; but from a sense of duty. We have seen honest men and dishonest men, wise men and fools, all on various wrong scents, and all doing quite as much harm as good. The right course is familiar to us ; and we are induced to take up our pen at last, simply to tell the aforesaid wise men and fools, and all whom it may con cern, what that right course is. And in so doing we shall not gratify any self conceit of our own, or exalt ourselves to the disparage ment of others ; for we are not going to speak of what we have discovered, but simply of what we have learned , The greater part of the irrelevant romance and twaddle which has been published in the Times on this subject, has been spent upon the question of the comparative guilt, or un guiltiness, of prostitutes. The greater part of the speaking at divers vestry-meetings in St. James's, Marylebone, &c., has turned upon what was to be done with the prostitutes. Some were for invigorating the police—others would appeal to the Government ; but all were for some increased action against the prostitutes. Now, all these ideas are merely various parts of one great mistake. Those who would wage war successfully with " The Great Social Evil," must learn to look at the poor women less as offenders than as victims. Any hostile measures taken against them, will probably fail; inasmuch as the charitable and compassionate feelings of the people will often be enlisted on their behalf, and a single false step will lay whoever takes it under the charge of persecution. Most of what has been written, then, and much of what has been spoken, has been ill directed. It may have been clever or cogent, but its drift was altogether a mistaken one. The evil may be attacke 1, and ought to be at tacked, from a totally different quarter. Leave the poor women unmolested ; they are often, in fact usually, very much to be pitied. But there is another class for whom none will feel any sympathy, and who may and ought to be assailed continually and unrelentingly. We mean the traders in prostitution. Few, very few indeed, of the women of the town who live in London, are householders. They generally belong to one of the two following classes : either they live in an establishment of saleable women, and are let out as other traders let out horses; or else they hire lodgings for themselves, at about three times the current price, and so live, each apart, but paying an enormous rent to the people who give them accommodation. Now, both of these kinds of traders in prostitution break the law—those who keep women, and those who merely let them apartments; but it is their trade—a vile and filthy trade ; and that trade ought to be limited, cramped, dis countenanced, in every possible manner. The mistake, then, which mos t s p ea k ers and writers on this subject have made, is that of not rightly directing their anger and their efforts. Let them organize, raise funds, and devise efficient means, to annoy and punish those who live on the profits of prostitution. The profits. we say, for the poor creatures themselves do little more than exist by their evil courses. We speak not hastily, or without sufficient knowledge, when we say that by organized efforts of this kind, " The Great Social Evil" might be prodigiously diminished. To show this, we will name one or two facts in proof of what we are asserting. Twenty years ago we lived in a neighbour hood in which this evil had grown into an in tolerable nuisance. In a parish of very mode rate size there were fifteen houses of ill repute, the lodgers in which poured into the streets every evening, and made the wain thoroughfares unfit for the use of decent females or the young. When this pestiferous state of things had become a matter of genet al complaint, one gentleman called his neigh bours together, and they agreed to form them selves into a Protective Association. Funds were soon raised, and an active Committee was nominated. And, from first to last, this Committee never took any one step against the women. They attacked the nests—well know ing that if the resorts of vice were cleated away, the frequenters of them must go else where. Their first step was to give legal notice to all the fifteen keepers of houses of evil cha racter, that if they did not remove themselves away, and close their houses within a fort night, prosecutions would be commenced. Thirteen of the fifteen took the alarm, and fled before the expiration of the fortnight. The other two waited till they saw the prose cutions actually commenced, and then they too struck their flags, and evacuated the place. Thus, within one month after the commence ment of operations, the field was won. There was not one house of bad character left in the parish ; there was not one prostitute known to be inhabiting it. And, as a natural conse quence, when the nests were thus destroyed, the vermin quitted the place, and the streets became passable, even for respectable women, at all hours of the night. Prostitutes will not ply at a distance from their' lodgings. Those whom they entrap will not take a long walk to reach their dwellings. _ Success, then, entire success, attended this effort. Nor was it transitory. The Couimittee continued to meet; reports were made, from time to time, of attempts to creep back again, by some of the dealers ; but all such attempts were instantly frustrated. No sooner was a house reopened than a notice was immediately served, and if it was not closed, a prosecution was instantly commenced. And in no one in stance did a prosecution ever fail ! This, then, is the only efficient way of deal ing with the " Great Social Evil " It is useless, and often wrong, to annoy the poor women. But the creatures who scrape together we:llth —as many do—by trading in their profligacy and ruin, deserve no mercy; and if we hunt them down, as we would hunt down the most noxious of reptiles, we shall be doing an un mixed good. We are aware of one objection, which will be taken by those who dislike trouble. They will exclaim, " What is the use of driving these " people about ?—if they are driven out of ono " place, they will go into another." We answer that, in order to clear a street after a fall of snow, the authorities give notice that every man is to clear away the snow before his own dwelling ; and thus, every one taking his part, the street is cleansed. So, also, if every parish in London determined to tolerate no haunts of vice, by degrees all would be closed. What St. Ann's parish has done, St. Paul's parish can do, and then St Mary's and St. Peter's, till the whole town is purified. Do we expect, then, to eradicate vice? Cer tainly not. We are no believers in the per fectibility of human nature. But we know that vice of this kind increases and spreads enormously by the help of temptation and facility. Expose, as they do in some conti nental towns, half-naked women for sale in the windows of the principal streets, and let it be a matter of no disgrace for passers-by to drop in to hire them, and how many men of moral habits will there be in that town at the year's end? Our object should be to go to the other extreme—to make vice infamous, and to make its practice difficult. And this, we know, can easily be done, by the means we have just pointed out. II