The new Northwest. [volume] (Portland, Or.) 1871-1887, 1873-02-07
Who Is To Blame 2
EXTRACTS FEoN LECTURE BY NIss. 10
FlIiNE BUri.Ll.

-NNNN-l NcAANAAAAAl6 AiAl NNOhVALAN
position of women greatly aggravate
the injustice of certain laws. 1t is,
from the icoHldRs side, the key to the
whole question of the social degradation
OF women. Briefly, however, may re-
marx that, while women, ever since
the beginning of civilization, have been
sharing the hardest, and doing the most
unwholesOme work, they have also been
the TOrSt paid workers in the world.D
This poor pay, founded on a false esti-
mate of wOman's value as n human
being, and, consequently, as a laborer,
is daily filling our streets with crimi-
nails, with weary outcasts, with stricken
souls and bodies, for whose blood
society is responsible to God" We
know that in our own country the num-
Der OF women exceeds that of men by
more than 100000. That 100000 of
women in England are unsupported by
any man. New avenues of labor must
be thrown open to women. Just wages
must be accorded to them, for we know
too well what the utter dependence of
woman means-in the humber classes
ut least. DIR. Trench, of Liverpool,
when giving evidence before the Lords
Committee, said, - season of CONNER
eial distress in these large towns neces-
sarily casts n great number of women
into prostitution. Ny belief is that
want, more than passion, Is at the bot
tom of this sin.n Yet this same man,
in the same breath, recommends that
any poor woman, driven in seasons of
distress to want, and obliged to take up
the poorest lodgings she can find, ir-
respective of the eOmpaniOnship she
may there meet, is TO be legally consti-
tuted and treated as a prostitute; his
I f-fIa ~ u 4
house where there are loose women
lodging should be counted as Il pros
titute." Pity and justice are dead
within the coward breast of the man
who could thus advise. Seven Thousand
eight hundred and fifty ruined women
walk the streets of New York. They are
chiefly young women under twenty, the
average length of the lives they thus
! lead is four years. Every four years
then, from New York alone, :, 1850 wom-
en- are drawn from their homes, often
| from simple rural hearths, to meet this
| fate. What drives them to it? Want.
| And what shall ! say of London i'm this
respect? y few years ago two vagrant
women came before Liverpool court,
who had been driven to evil courses by
the hard blows of mems fists, and had
been forced TO support in idleness, by
their vice, the one her father, the other
/ her husband. This shocks YOU; but poor
pay can strike rs heavy a blow as q
mans right arm, and many of these
/ 1850 i'm New York, and those unreck-
Oned thousands in our cities, have sup
/ ported thousands of men in ease, "before
/ they dropped from the seamstresses
chair TO the curb-stOne and the gutter"
l TAFT says that "the permanent prOstitu-
/ tion Of any city bears a recognized
numerical relation to its means of occu-
| patton for women" | believe this is
capable of proof \ police officer not
long ago testified of one girl: "She
struggled hard before she fell, living on
bread and water, and sleeping i'm station
houses. In three years / have known
more than fifty such eases.u Emile
! SOuvestre tells i'm his "PhilOsODhie sous
les IOits," a story of two women en-
| plOyed in clasp factory; he speaks OF
their low wages, and says that, having
worked for thirty years, they had seen
ten masters grow rich and retire from
business, without having changed in
any degree their own position. These
clasp makers certainly contributed to
support these ten masters and their
families in ease, and, wonderful to tell,
these two did not fall. An angel clothed
in white sat on the sepulcher wherein
their hopes were buried, through all
those thirty years. y Chinese, called
kwei Chunk Flu, wrote teatise on
iuianticide, wherein occurs the follow
ing passage: "rO drown daughters is TO
make war upon Heavens harmony.
The more daughters you drown, the
more daughters you will have; and
never was it known that the destruction
of daughters led to the birth of sons. -
This passage may be translated so as to
apply to Christian nations. The
Chinese and Hindoos are not the only
people who drown daughters. England,
and the other leading intelligences of the
world, are busy at it this moment. If,
instead of the word daughters, you
insert the words "weak and useless
Kwei Chunk Flu is right. Let women
starve, let them be drowned in the
social flood of corruption, without an
effort to save them, and for every wom-
an so lost, two shall be born to inherit
her fate; and never has it been seen, and
never Will it be seen, that the drowning
in perditiOn of these poor female souls
tended to the birth, the Regeneration OF
health of your sons, but rather to their
corruption and extinction.
1t is only by the greatest faithfulness
from the earliest years that we become
capabl lie of touching pitch, as we are Of
ten, alas, compelled to do at a mature
age, in way TO benefit either ourselves
or the cummunity. How desirable il is
to keep the young eye steadily gazing
ut the light, TO keep the atmosphere
serene and holy till the necessary con-
fiict of life begins. All this is insisted
upon for our girls. The new preachers
now insist upon the same for our boys.
Utterly and scandalously false is the
hackneyed argument that because boys
are supposed TO be naturally less modest
and pure than girls ian assumption
which wholly deny, and because their
passions are naturally stronger, there
fore they may be the more freely in
trusted to play with the combustibles
which at any moment may kindle their
passions into an unholy flame, and may
be left with fewer securities for the
guardianship for the small portion of
modesty they are slanderously asserted
to have inherited by nature.
! believe that much of the difficulty
here suggested, if not all, by these re-
marks, would disappear il boys and
girls, young men and young women,
were educated i'm common schools and
colleges. | hope to see the day, even in
England, when the unnatural custom
will begin to be abhorred of sending
boys at an early age away from their
homes to be herded together in our
great public schools, apart from any in
tercourse with women en-growingu up from
year TO year in an ever-deepening re-
serve towards their parents, whom they
only see at long intervals; well trained
IN all muscular arts, athletic and INTEL