The History of Prostitution

Arguments are unnecessary to prove the existence of prostitution. The evil is so notorious that none can possibly gainsay it. But when its extent, its causes, or its effects are questioned, a remarkable degree of ignorance or carelessness is manifested. Few care to know the secret springs from which prostitution emanates; few are anxious to know how wide the stream extends; few have any desire to know the devastation it causes. Society has formally laid a prohibition on the subject, and he who presumes to argue that what affects one may injure all; he who believes that the malady in his neighbor's family to-day may visit his own to-morrow; he who dares to intimate that a vice which has blighted the happiness of one parent, and ruined the character of one daughter, may produce, must inevitably produce, the same sad results in another circle; in short, he who dares allude to the subject of prostitution in any other than a mysterious and whispered manner, must prepare to meet the frowns and censure of society.Keen was the knowledge of human nature, acute the perception of worldly sentiment in the breast of an accomplished woman lately deceased, when she wrote, “To such grievances as society can not readily cure, it usually forbids utterance on pain of its scorn; this scorn being only a sort of tinseled cloak to its deformed weakness.” How true the idea, many a man who has attempted to unveil a hidden crime, or probe a secret sorrow, but too well knows.Not then to prove that prostitution exists, for that is so glaringly palpable that all must perforce concede it, but to ascertain its origin, progress, and end, is the object of these pages. The finger of scorn may be pointed at the labor; the self-righteous world may wrap itself in a mantle of prudery, and close its ears against sickening details; the complacent public may demur at an approach to sin and misery; the self-satisfied community may object to view wretchedness drawn from the obscurity of its hiding-place to the full light of investigation: nevertheless, there is now existing a moral pestilence which creeps insidiously into the privacy of the domestic circle, and draws thence the myriads of its victims, and which saps the foundation of that holy confidence, the first, the most beautiful attraction of home. There is an ever-present physical danger, so fatally destructive that the world would recoil, as from the spring of a serpent, could they but appreciate its malignity; a malignity which is daily and hourly threatening every man, woman, and child in the community; which for hundreds of years has been slowly but steadily making its way onward, leaving a track marked with broken hopes, ruined frames, and sad recollections of stricken friends; and which now, in the full force of an impetus acquired and aggravated by concealment, almost defies opposition. There is a social wrong which forces upon the community vast expenditures for an object of which they are ignorant; which swells the public taxes and increases individual outlay for a vice which has hitherto been studiously kept in concealment. These reasons were sufficiently powerful to induce the necessary researches for the accomplishment of this work, and they are considered sufficient to justify its publication.