c. June 21-23, 1899 — International Congress on the White Slave Trade, London, UK

The evil we have met to consider and endeavour to cope with is probably one that has existed for a very long time, and in all countries. It is not singular in this. Its grim companions are murder, theft and fraud, and it must be observed that it partakes of the character of all these. The sufferers by the crime we are considering are worse than murdered morally, and very often their actual physical life is destroyed: the worst of thefts is the theft of the innocence and purity of the youth — male and female — of a nation; and as for fraud, the crime we are considering lives and moves and has its being in an atmosphere of fraud. The great peculiarity of the crime is that, known to exist as it is in nearly all countries, and whilst, of course, it is in the highest degree abhorrent in the eyes of every decent man and woman, I believe that up to the present moment no concerted international effort has been made to grapple with it and render it more difficult and dangerous. We have extradition treaties with nearly all civilized countries to enable us to pursue and arrest criminals who fly from justice, and this particular crime, under the name of abduction, kidnapping or false imprisonment, is among extraditable offences. But the peculiarity of the crime is that it is often begun in one country, carried a step further in another, and actually completed in a third; and perhaps in no one country has what amounts to a criminal offence been committed. The fact must be faced that this crime is more internationally organized than any other, and therefore a specially organised international machinery for its suppression and punishment, and the protection of its victims, is called for. What that special international machinery should be, and how it should be worked, is the question which this International Conference has been called together to consider. It is very largely a matter for experts in international and criminal law. But the causes which have produced the crime, and the extraordinary and abnormal toleration of it in most countries, are subjects that should awaken in every intelligent citizen, man or woman, the strongest interest and concern.

The fact that the crime exists is not questioned by those who know anything about the darker side of human nature — that is to say, over a very large part of the world, women and girls can be bought and imprisoned, and used by the men who have bought them for immoral purposes as a source of income; that they can be shipped from country to country like so many head of cattle; and that when once they have passed into the clutches of the men who live on the proceeds of their infamy, they are all but powerless to escape.

I will illustrate what I mean by an example. An advertisement appears in an English paper that a lady of rank residing near Paris desires a young English girl as a companion for her only daughter, salary no object, and so on. Of course there would be hundreds of replies, and many girls might be foolish or inexperienced enough to keep an appointment to meet the advertiser without any protection: they might thus find themselves in the clutches of a bad man or woman who would certainly have made a careful study of the criminal law of the country they were in, so as to avoid bringing himself or herself within its provisions. The miscreants who engage in this trade would have been able to select, from among the numerous answers they had received to their false advertisement, those who were most friendless and helpless. They could deliberately select girls who were ignorant of the language of the country to which they were going; who were poor, who were presumably without influential and energetic relatives. Thus, the poorer and more ignorant and miserable the condition of the young female part of the population in any country, the more they are exposed to the evil machinations of the men who live on this nefarious trade. The cruel persecution of the Jews in Russia has, I am informed, been the cause of a terrible increase in the number of Russian Jewesses who have been the victims of the white slave trade. Deported in the first instance from Odessa to Constantinople, they are from the city sent to all parts of the world as the organisation of the ghastly trade may direct. When Mr Coote was in Russia, he was informed by a gentleman who had been Russian Consul at Buenos Ayers [sic] for three years that he estimated there were 3,000 European women enslaved and imprisoned in the “tolerated houses” of that city, and that he believed at least half of them to be Russians, many of them Jewesses. He added that the price of a woman varied from 3 to 500 roubles (about £30 to £50).

I do not refer to these things in any spirit of self-righteousness as far as our own country is concerned. We have no cause for self-complacency. It is less than a year since a law was passed in England making it a punishable offence in a man to live on the earnings of prostitution. Thus we had, till 1898, a law which provided punishment for the offence of solicitation on the part of the woman, but provided no punishment for the man who lived on her earnings. The Vagrancy Law Amendment Act put an end to that absurdity, and made the law about solicitation much more nearly equal as between the two sexes. It is cheering to learn that, within a few months of the new Act being passed in England, a similar Act was adopted in Cape Colony,8 and I have recently received cuttings from a Cape paper giving an account of the first prosecution under the new Act. It appears from this report that in punishing one villainy the Cape police unearthed another, and that other is the crime we are considering to-day how best to thwart. The man who, in Cape Town, was prosecuted for living on the earnings of prostitution, one George Terry, an Englishman born in France, was astounded at his arrest. He claimed that his was one of the best-conducted bad houses in Cape Town, and said, “I paid £50 for that girl you saw in the kitchen. I bought her at “So-and-so” without a skirt or a stitch of clothes. The other one I bought in Johannesburg, and paid £100 for her.” The man could, of course, only be punished for the offence with which he was charged, but the magistrate inflicted the heaviest penalty which the law allowed, £20 fine, or three months” hard labour. But here we have, in an English colony, sharing, no doubt, to the full all the English traditions of personal liberty, an example of the white slave trade flourishing, and only discovered accidentally in the course of the pursuit of another crime. The pretence on which the man claimed his victim was the one with which every one who has given even a casual attention to this subject is familiar, that of owning all the clothes in which the girl was attired; any attempt at flight is then represented as theft, theft of the clothes the victim is wearing at the time of her departure. When I was writing this paper I had the opportunity of conversation with an English lady who had lived many years in Italy. I told her what I was doing. She at once saw the connection of the subject with that of “tolerated houses”, as they exist in France, Italy, Belgium and other countries; she informed me that the female inmates of these houses in Italy are not allowed to go out, except under charge of their keepers; they are virtually imprisoned for life. The only means of escape which they have is if some man, touched by their miseries will either promise to marry them or be responsible for them for life. My informant told me she had, from time to time, heard in Italy of heart-breaking scenes taking place within the walls of these “tolerated houses”; of one of their inmates imploring and craving a man, who came for immoral purposes, to deliver her and take her out.

It seems, therefore, at whatever point we come to close quarters with this trade in human beings, we are brought forcibly to the conviction that it is closely associated with what is called ordinary immorality: that legal enactments and punitive measures, though they are necessary and right in every well-ordered State, yet will never really cut at the root of the evil with which we desire to contend if they are unaccompanied by an elevation in the moral tone. What is wanted above all is a higher moral standard in the community at large, and especially a higher moral standard among men; an abandonment of the false theory that vice is a necessity for men, and that, therefore, Governments are bound to make provision for it; and that the action or course of conduct which is social death to a woman is to be tolerated and excused in a man. For years and years, good men and women, who have tried to stem the flood of national immorality, have too much concentrated their efforts upon the reform of one sex, and that, probably, of the two, the least guilty. We hear a great deal of rescue and preventive work among women: admirable societies are at work in this country, and, no doubt, in other countries, with the object of awakening the moral sense in young women,9 of warning them of possible dangers, of sheltering and protecting them at critical moments. Many societies which may not have a direct moral purpose of this kind in view, yet very frequently subserve the same end, and by opening educational opportunities to women and extending the field for their employment by raising their wages and ameliorating their industrial conditions, make the position of the woman in honest industry more attractive and desirable, thereby lessening the economic temptation held out by a life of vice. All these various efforts are most valuable, and have done and are doing a vast amount of good. Still, how far are we from reaching any goal where we may sit down content! If this Conference is to do good we must dwell, not so much on our measure of success — such as it is — but upon the causes of failure.

I think the most obvious source of failure is the comparative absence of direct moral training and teaching for boys and men on this matter, and the low tone of public opinion as regards sexual immorality in men. In the home and in the school there is not, it is to be feared, among most parents and teachers, a sufficiently keen sense of their responsibility for starting the boy and the young man upon sound lines on this matter. Almost as soon as a child is old enough to think, observe and speak, he asks questions of his parents which bear on the most fundamental of human relations. What does birth mean, what is motherhood, and what is fatherhood? In all probability the answer given him is a lie: and this is considered even by fairly truthful people not only as excusable, but as absolutely necessary. In this way the child is started wrong from the first. If he has average intelligence he knows that his parents have told him an untruth; he is puzzled and bewildered, and he is left to gather the truth from the chance ribaldry of a companion or playfellow only a little less ignorant than himself. I do not mean that it is necessary or desirable to stimulate a child’s curiosity in these matters; but generally the curiosity is there, and whatever the child learns should be told it seriously, and if it is not the whole truth, what is said should at least be true as far as it goes.

If we follow the child’s life from home to the school, too often we know that he is placed in terribly unwholesome surroundings as regards sexual morality. Too young and ignorant to know what he is doing, he is very likely left to establish habits and a mode of thought that poisons domestic life at its source. Every now and then a terrible scandal startles society. A man with perhaps a well-known name and position is convicted of criminal vice. Hands are held up in horror: certain names must never again be mentioned. But why is it not asked “Where were these habits contracted? What is the source and origin of the evil? If boys at school have their minds poisoned and their bodies ruined, what is to be expected of the man a few years later?”

That schoolmasters, especially the younger generation of schoolmasters, are facing these problems, and endeavouring to solve them, is one of the most encouraging signs of the times. But their efforts should be backed up by the influence of parents and of society in general if it is to prove truly effectual.

Another great engine of national education or of national degradation is the army. Especially is this the case in those countries which have universal military service. We know that in a book recently published in France, M. Gohier stated that in the barracks the young Frenchman learns lying, tale-bearing, low debauchery, moral cowardice and drunkenness; that he is made to believe that drunkenness and debauchery are the glorious prerogatives of manhood. We, in England, have no means of judging whether these charges are true or not: but we know that M. Gohier has been prosecuted for libelling the army, and that he has been acquitted by a jury of his countrymen. But let us not fix our eyes on what is happening in other countries where the judgments we are able to form are very likely to be arrived at without sufficient knowledge. Let us look at home and ask what sort of school the English army has been to the young Englishmen who enter it. The Times, on Monday, June 5th, less than three weeks ago, contained a telegraphic account of a ghastly outrage perpetuated upon a respectable Burmese woman in Rangoon, close to the public highway, not by a solitary man (any body of men may contain a scoundrel), but by twelve or sixteen men, and with some twenty-five or thirty others looking on. Forty men in all were implicated. The Burma Government has offered a reward of 1,000 rupees for the detection of the offenders; and the Viceroy of India has ordered that no expense or trouble shall be spared to bring the offenders to justice; but the fact that such an outrage has been committed, and for a long time remained unpunished, is an illustration of the bad social influences often brought to bear on young men who enter the army. It is no good going on with rescue and preventive work for women while the other half of the nation are given over to a state of mind which looks upon low debauchery, and cowardly villainy, as manly.

From 1868 to 1886, English Governments, Liberal as well as Conservative, passed laws, and had them carried out, which were based on the assumption that it was part of the duty of Parliament and of the military authorities to provide for the army physical safety in the indulgence of sexual vice. It has been conclusively proved that the military authorities had undertaken an impossibility; that the physical dangers could not be removed by the laws which had been passed, and that the disease in question was increased by their influence, because they led men to depend upon a security which did not exist. These bad laws were repealed thirteen years ago, and in the last published report of the Army Medical Department for the year 1897 we find the following satisfactory passage: “The decline in venereal diseases, which commenced in 1886, and which has continued practically without interruption ever since, is again observed in 1897 . . .” — Times, March 3rd, 1899.

We note with satisfaction a very great change for the better in the tone in which some of the military authorities in this country deal with this and kindred subjects, and although we have not universal military service, the change is of great importance to the whole population, for the tone of the army has an immense influence either for good or evil on the tone of civil society. The army may be looked upon as a vast school through which many thousands of our countrymen pass year by year. If they come out of the army better men all round than they went in, the whole community benefits, while there is no need to point out that the whole community suffers if the reverse is the case. Now what did Commander-in-Chief, General Lord Wolseley, say on this point, about a year ago? In

a memorandum which he addressed to the officers of the army in April 1898, he said, “Nothing has probably done more to deter young men who have been respectably brought up from entering the army than the belief, entertained by them and their families, that barrack-room life is hell; that no decent lad can submit to it without loss of character or self-respect.” He goes on to express his desire that in making recommendations for promotion, regard should be had not only to professional efficiency but also to personal character, and that “no man, however efficient in other respects, should be considered fit to exercise authority over his comrades if he is of notoriously vicious and intemperate habits”. We know that a general order, quite on the same lines, was addressed, a few months earlier, by the late Commander-in-Chief of India, General Sir George White, to the officers of the Indian Army. We are very thankful for this evidence that the Heads of the Army are beginning to make a serious endeavour to raise the tone of the officers and men on this subject, and that they see that the army suffers if its low reputation keeps men of good character from joining it. It will make things much easier for those who are longing for a higher tone throughout society in sexual morality if the army should become a help instead of a hindrance. There is reason for hopefulness, but there is also reason for deep humiliation. Hope may be derived from noting what had already been done with regard to the closely allied subject of drunkenness. Can we not, many of us, remember the time when it seemed almost as much a matter of course that a soldier should be a drunkard as that he should wear a red coat? People were considered to be foolish fanatics when they wished to start army temperance associations; now there are large numbers of these societies: there are 22,000 total abstainers in the Indian Army; and in twenty years the fines for drunkenness had diminished by about half. The reproach of drunkenness is very largely removed from the army, and the army authorities, from the Secretary of State and Commander-in-Chief downwards, lose no opportunity of encouraging sobriety among all ranks in the army.

There is another important and influential section of society from whom, in times gone by, the question of sexual morality received little help, but among whom in recent years a better tone has prevailed, and from whom, in the future, I believe great things may be expected. Is it necessary to say that I refer to the medical profession? Here, again, is a case in point, where a contrast of the present with the past gives a new hope for the future. How often in years that are past have medical men taught their male patients that the laws of health were at variance with the laws of morality, and that immorality was a necessity, to which it was absolutely inevitable that a certain number of women should be sacrificed — that the harlot was therefore a public benefactor, screening by her personal sacrifice the innocence and purity of home? The death-blow to this ghastly falsehood has been given by such leaders of the medical profession as Sir James Paget, Sir Andrew Clark, Dr Barlow and others.

If I am asked what moral agencies we have in England endeavouring to cope with this evil, of which the culminating horror is the white slave trade, instead of enumerating the names of philanthropic societies, the object of which is to patch together again the human wreckage caused by immorality, rather would I call attention to the growth of a sounder state of feeling in the home, in the school, in the university, in the barracks, and in the consulting-room.

There are also two social movements of comparatively recent growth which are, I believe, purifying influences. We know that in the physical world the greatest of deodorisers and antiseptics are light and air. We observe a similar thing in the moral world. The evil deeds we want to make war upon love the darkness because they are evil. To drag them into the light is going a long way towards annihilating them. May I recall to you for a moment a memorable correspondence which took place in 1861 between Thackeray and Elizabeth Barrett Browning on this point? She had offered him for publication in the Cornhill, a poem which he felt bound, with very great reluctance, to refuse. “Not”. he wrote to her, “that the writer is not pure, and the moral most pure, chaste and right, but there are things my squeamish public will not hear on Monday, though on Sunday they listen to them without scruple . . . Though you write pure doctrine and real modesty and pure ethics, I am sure our readers would make an outcry and so I have not published the poem.”

She replies, Also I confess that from your Cornhill standpoint (pater familias looking on), you are probably right ten times over. From mine, however, I may not be wrong, and I appeal to you as the deep man you are, whether it is not the higher mood which on Sundays bears with the plain word . . . I don’t like coarse subjects or the coarse treatment of any subject. But I am deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires not shut doors and windows, but light and air; and that it is exactly because pure, prosperous women choose to ignore vice, that miserable women suffer wrong by it everywhere. Has pater familias, with his oriental traditions and veiled female faces, very successfully dealt with a certain class of evil? What if mater familias, with her quick sure instincts and honest, innocent eyes, do more towards their expulsion by simply looking at them and calling them by their names? There is a vast deal more openness in dealing with these subjects than there was when Mrs Browning wrote nearly forty years ago. No one will deny that there are drawbacks connected with this development of plain speaking; but also, I think, no one can deny that on the whole the change has been for good.

One other social change which has made great progress during the present generation, and has proved a moral agency in coping with the powers of darkness, is the growing movement towards equality between men and women. Most men have heretofore exacted a higher standard of conduct (in sexual matters) from women of their families than they have attempted to act up to themselves. It is a result of the highest importance of the women’s movement, that women are now beginning to ask men to practice as well as preach; not “to show the steep and thorny path to heaven whilst . . . himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, and recks not his own rede”. It is characteristic of Shakespeare’s insight into human nature that as soon as Ophelia says this, Laertes, who up to then had seemed to have ample time to give moral advice to his sister, exclaims hurriedly, “Oh fear me not. I stay too long.”

I believe that some among my audience may fear that this growing tendency to apply the same moral standard to men and women has its drawbacks, that there is a danger that we shall level down instead of levelling up. No one ought to leave this danger out of account. But if we are duly on our guard against it, I believe that the only true road towards a permanently higher and purer state of things is the universal recognition of one moral law for men and women. Then our civilisation will no longer be disgraced by the entrapping and imprisoning of women for the gratification of the cupidity and other evil passions of men.

Source: Transactions of the International Congress on the White Slave Trace, Held in London on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of June, 1899, at the Invitation of the National Vigilance Association, (London: Office of the National Vigilance Association, 1899), pp. 139-147.