p. 677 | London Vice

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 12, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 43.

London Vice.

CARDINAL MANNING, in the October number of the North American Review, sustains the charge of the Pall Mall Gazette about the infamous crimes of London. Speaking of the existing laws of England, the Cardinal thus shows how they encourage inhuman crimes:— “By our present legal code a girl cannot give her consent to marriage before the age of twenty-two, but she is regarded as capable of consenting to her own ruin at the age of thirteen years. The man who marries her before twenty-one is punishable by law. The man who ruins a child of thirteen escapes with impunity. She may ruin herself at thirteen, but cannot marry, for defect of consent, till twenty-one. If any one should know that his dog or cat were detained in any house, the police, with all expedition, could search for his property. But if he knew that his child were detained in the house, neither he nor the police could enter it. His only remedy would be by writ of habeas corpus, which could not be obtained for many hours, and perhaps for days; but the ruin of his child might be at any moment. Once more I say, Children of thirteen, and all girls above that age, are supposed to be free agents, and capable of consenting to their own ruin; thus he who ruins them for life escapes with impunity, on the rule ‘Volenti non fit injuria.’” It has therefore been solemnly argued by men who have great legal reputation, that the abominable and inhuman trade of the procurer and the procuress cannot be punishable at law, because the end to which their hideous traffic is directed is not illegal. Here we have another legal dictum; the accomplices are not punishable, because the principals are within the rights of their liberty.”

After stating how every effort to amend these infamous laws was persistently defeated “for five long years,” the Cardinal then refers to Mr. Stead’s assault:— “This heartless delay, full of vital consequences of demoralization and wreck and ruin to the innocent, the helpless of our people, justly aroused the indignation of those to whom justice and mercy are more dear than the redistribution of seats, or the disfranchisement for medical relief. Prompted—I might say stung—by an indignant impatience, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and other like-minded men, defying all antagonists, entered upon their warfare against the dominion of cruelty and lust. I have said elsewhere, that many of those who profoundly sympathize in the motives which induced the Pall Mall Gazette to take up the question might have desired its modes and expressions to have been revised and chastened; but that in such matter of moral life and death, and above all, when the obloquy and calumny of the bad and hasty and short-sighted censures of some good men, were heaped upon those who enter the furnace to save souls, I should hold it to be not only ungenerous, but cowardly and cruel, not to stand between the handful of men, who for the moral life of England, dared this courageous action, and the whole world of their censors. The substance of this action is intrinsically just and merciful. The incidental evils that may arise are of a lower order, and depend upon the use or the abuse which individuals may make of these terrible revelations.”