SEDUCTION is the act of tempting and drawing aside from the right path, and comprehends every endeavour to corrupt any individual of the human race. This is the import of the word in its largest and most general sense; but it is commonly employed to express the act of tempting a virtuous woman to part with her chastity.

The seducer of female innocence practises the same stratagems of fraud to get possession of a woman’s person, that the swindler employs to get possession of his neighbour’s goods or money; yet the law of honour, which pretends to abhor deceit and which impels its votaries to murder every man who presumes, however justly, to suspect them of fraud, or to question their veracity, applauds the address of a successful intrigue, though it be well known that the seducer could not have obtained his end without swearing to the truth of a thousand falsehoods, and calling upon God to witness promises which he never meant to fulfil.

The law of honour is indeed a very capricious rule, which accommodates itself to the pleasures and conveniences of higher life; but the law of the land, which is enacted for the equal protection of high and low, may be supposed to view the guilt of seduction with a more impartial eye. Yet for this offence, even the laws of this kingdom have provided no other punishment than a pecuniary satisfaction to they injured family; which, in England, can be obtained only by one of the quaintest fictions in the world, by the father’s bringing his action against the seducer for the loss of his daughter’s service during her pregnancy and nurturing. (See Paley’s Moral Philosophy, book iii. part iii. chap. 3.)

The moralist, however, who estimates the merit or demerit of actions, not by laws of human appointment but by their general consequences as established by the laws of nature, must consider the seducer as a criminal of the deepest guilt. In every civilized country, and in many countries where civilization has made but small progress, the virtue of women is collected as it were into a single point which they are to guard above all things, as that on which their happiness and reputation wholly depend. At first sight this may appear a capricious regulation; but a moment’s reflection will convince us of the contrary. In the married state so much confidence is necessarily reposed in the fidelity of women to the beds of their husbands, and[7:20:75] evils so great result from the violation of that fidelity, that whatever contributes in any degree to its preservation, must be agreeable to Him who, in establishing the laws of nature, intended them to be subservient to the real happiness of all his creatures. But nothing contributes so much to preserve the fidelity of wives to their husbands, as the impressing upon the minds of women the highest veneration for the virtue of chastity. She who, when unmarried, has been accustomed to grant favours to different men, will not find it easy, if indeed possible, to resist afterwards the allurements of variety. It is therefore a wise institution, and agreeable to the will of Him who made us, to train up women so that they may look upon the loss of their chastity as the most disgraceful of all crimes; as that which sinks them in the order of society, and robs them of all their value. In this light virtuous women actually look upon the loss of chastity. The importance of that virtue has been so deeply impressed upon their minds, and is so closely associated with the principle of honour, that they cannot think but with abhorrence upon the very deed by which it is lost. He therefore who by fraud and falsehood persuades the unsuspecting girl to deviate in one instance from the honour of the sex, weakens in a great degree her moral principle; and if he reconcile her to a repetition of the crime, he destroys that principle entirely, as she has been taught to consider all other virtues as inferior to that of chastity. Hence it is that the hearts of prostitutes are generally steeled against the miseries of their fellow-creatures; that they lend their aid to the seducer in his practices upon other girls; that they lie, and swear, and steal without compunction; and that too many of them hesitate not to commit murder, if it can serve any selfish purpose of their own.

The loss of virtue, though the greatest that man or woman can sustain, is not the only injury which the seducer bringe upon the girl whom he deceives. She cannot at once reconcile herself to prostitution, or even to the loss of character, and whilst a sense of shame remains in her mind, the misery which she suffers must be exquisite. She knows that she has forfeited what in the female character is most valued by both sexes; and she must be under the perpetual dread of a discovery. She cannot even confide in the honour of her seducer, who may reveal her secret in a fit of drunkenness, and thus rob her of her fame as well as of her virtue; and whilst she is in this state of anxious uncertainty, the agony of her mind must be insupportable. That it is so in fact, the many instances of child-murder by unmarried women of every rank leave us no room to doubt. The affection of a mother to her new-born child is one of the strongest and most unequivocal instincts in human nature; and nothing short of the extremity of distress can prompt any one so far to oppose nature as to embrue her hands in the blood of her imploring infant.

Even this deed of horror seldom prevents a detection of the mother’s frailty, which is indeed commonly discovered, though no child has been the consequence of her intrigue. He who can seduce is base enough to betray; and assuredly no woman can part with her honour and yet retain any well-grounded hope that her amour shall be kept secret. The villain to whom she surrendered will glory in his victory, if it was with difficulty obtained; and if she surrendered at discretion, her own behaviour will reveal her secret. Her reputation is then irretrievably lost, and no future circumspection will be of the smallest avail to recover it. She will be shunned by the virtuous part of her own sex, and treated as a mere instrument of pleasure by the other. In such circumstances she cannot expect to he married with advantage. She may perhaps be able to captivate the heart of a heedless youth, and prevail upon him to unite his fate to hers, before the delirium of his passion shall give him time for reflection; she may be addressed by a man who is a stranger to her story, and married while he has no suspicion of her secret; or she may be solicited by one of a station inferior to her own, who, though acquainted with every thing that has befallen her, can barter the delicacy of wedded love for some pecuniary advantage. But from none of these marriages can she look for happiness. The delirium which prompted the first will soon vanish, and leave the husband to the bitterness of his own reflections, which can hardly fail to produce cruelty to the wife. Of the secret to which, in the second case, the lover was a stranger, the husband will soon make a discovery, or at least find room for harbouring strong suspicions; and suspicions of having been deceived in a point so delicate have hitherto been uniformly the parents of misery. In the third case, the man married her merely for her money, of which having got the possession, he has no further inducement to treat her with respect. Such are some of the consequences of seduction, even when the person seduced has the good fortune afterwards to get a husband. But this is a fortune which few in her circumstances can reasonably expect. By far the greater part of those who have been defrauded of their virtue by the arts of the seducer sink deeper and deeper into guilt, till they become at last common prostitutes. The public is then deprived of their services as wives and parents; and instead of contributing to the population of the state, and to the sum of domestic felicity, these outcasts of society become seducers in their turn, corrupting the morals of every young man whose appetites they can inflame, and of every young woman whom they can entice to their own practices.

All this complication of evil is produced at first by arts which, if employed to deprive a man of his property, would subject the offender to the execration of his fellow-subjects, and to an ignominious death. But while the forger of a bill is pursued with relentless rigour by the ministers of justice, and the swindler loaded with universal reproach, the man who by fraud and forgery has enticed an innocent girl to gratify his desires at the expense of her virtue, and thus introduced her into a path which must infallibly lead to her own ruin, as well as to repeated injuries to the public at large, is not despised by his own sex, and is too often caressed even by the virtuous part of the other. Yet the loss of property may be easily repaired; whilst the loss of honour is irreparable. It is vain to plead in alleviation of this guilt, that women should be on their guard against the arts of the seducer. Most unquestionably they should; but arts have been used which hardly any degree of caution would have been sufficient to counteract. It may as well be said that the trader should be on his guard against the arts of the forger, and accept of no bill without previously consulting him in whose name it is written. Cases, indeed, occur in trade, in which this caution would be impossible. But he must be little acquainted with the workings of the human heart, who does not know that situations likewise occur in life, in which it is equally impossible for a girl of tenderness and virtue to resist the arts of the man who has completely gained her affections.