The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-02-01

incense Whlch we call liberty, the provisions
of any ordinance are without much difficulty
evaded Having substantially removed the
moral stigma of prostitution by giving it, If
not the sanction at least the sufferance of
law, fallen women without even the required
condition of following their vocations will
find many secret ways of plying their
miserable traffic in their own diseased
and degraded persons. Once the necessity of
polluted class in society admitted, that class
has secured certain status from which it will
not be found easy to dislodge it. Then it is
that the still-beginning, never-ending trouble
begins. The time of the police is spent it's
energies taxed, its patience exhausted in
hunting offenders who have retired still
deeper within the recesses of abomination.
The public money is wasted in tracking
few miserable offenders, and before these
have been indicted and convicted the whole
work is to do over again. Standing in her
wretchedness and degradation, a poor, de-
spised, and unlicensed outcast, the fallen
woman of st. Louis to whom the Honorable
the City Council of st. Louis has refused
protection accorded to her sisters in sin will
defy all legal authority, and will find ways
enough to make good her defiance
But this is not the worst. Women of the
class affected by this special legislation are
especially sensitive to espionage and control.
They have a hatred of restraint which is pc
culiar to their calling. This is the chief diff
fculty which retreats for fallen women have
had to encounter. To one who has been
accustomed to the wild abandonment of the
stews, the quiet, religious atmosphere, the
orderly ways, the regular habits of Mag
dalen asylum are insutferable The purity
disgusts, the piety repels, the restraint
torments her. 1t will be found, if we
are not mistaken, in st. Louis, that these feel
ings will render the enforcement of the new
ordinance equally difficult with the enforce
ment of the old one. The 'cards of health"
will be considered as certificates of shame.
The physical examinations will be regarded
with adherence The license may be one
for which very few will be thankful. There
will always be temptation to "break out"
European prostitution may be kept in better
subjectlon, as we have intimated, because of
the superior power and vigor and acunen of
the police; but in America it is more difficult
to secure respect for legal restraint The
only result therefore in st. Louis will be that
prostitution will have received a kind of in
dorsement of its responsibility, a sort of
acknowledgment that it is necessary, or at
least that it is impossible to suppress it.
The st. Louis view is merely the view of
the Psychologist. Is the moral view to be
left out altogether? Well, all we can say is,
that this st. Louis legislation does leave it
out substantially. A regular method of graft
flying lust is determined upon-of the
wickedness, of the folly, of the madness
of this qualification of the coarsest of
human propensities, no heed is taken.
Ample opportunity Is to be afforded to
every man who desires to sin, and the Coun-
Gil of st. Louis promises the sinner immu-
nifty from the only penalty which might deter
him-the penalty which God and Nature
have enacted against immortality! 1t is unne-
cessary to urge this consideration, because
the scheme must prove a failure. There is
no security for even the immunity offered.
Alas for the courtesau! There is no legis-
lation which can make her calling different
from what it is now. From the moment she
enters upon it, her steps must be downward
into the pit of despair and death Soon she
passes that point beyond which there is
hardly hope. Kind voices may call to her,
but she will not heed them;
hands will be stretched out
to help her, but she will put them aside:
prayers will be offered for her, but she will
refuse to have them answered Gradually the
last traces of gilded and meretricious pros
perity disappear, and then come the paaper's
death and the pauper's grave. Is not this
warning which every young woman still vir-
tuous should take to heart?
THE WAY WE TREAT POLITICAL PRI-
SONERS.
From the London Spectator.
1t is a sorry admission to be obliged to
make, but it is the truth-and we believe
that the policy, no less than the duty, of
those who seek to reconcile the people of
England and the people of Ireland is to state
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, on all the questions at issue be-
tween them-it is the truth then, we are
sorry to say, that the complaints so angrily
and persistently made in Ireland for the
last three years regarding the treatment of
Fenian prisoners detained in English gaols
have been, if not literally maintained,
certainly in their substance justi-
fed. Those statements, advanced in
the House of Commons, by members of Paria-
ment, and in memorials addressed to th o
Government by Irish municipalities, in the
most formal and serious manner therefore in
which such charges could be raised, have in
variably been met by the Ministers especially
responsible, and by the Prime Minister him
self, with an indignant and categorical de-
nial. At last, however, on the occasion when
MIR. Gladstone promised to ''liberate' these
prisoners in the event of a cessation
of the agrarian disturbances which
prevailed in three or four Irish coun-
ties last March, he also consented
to the appointment of commission to in
quire into the charges brought against the
prison officials That commission has re-
ported; and its report justifies some of the
worst charges advanced against the admins
tration. 1t is a simple matter of fact that in
one case, the case of ODonovan Rosa, pun
ishment was carried to the extent of torture
torture of a novel kind certainly, but quite as
brutal as the boot, and protracted with vim
dictive pertinacity unprecedented, we hope
and believe, in this century on this side of
the equator. Mr.. Gladstone saw a great
many shocking things in the prisons OF
Naples and he recorded them in terms and