Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/828

794 of moral degradation exacted of the serf under feudalism. In some portions of Christendom the "service" of young girls to-day implies their sacrifice to the Moloch of man's unrestrained passions.

Augustine, in his work, "The City of God," taunts Rome with having caused her own downfall. He speaks of her slaves, miserable men, put to labors only fit for the beasts of the field, degraded below them; their condition had brought Rome to its own destruction. If such wrongs contributed to the overthrow of Rome, what can we not predict of the Christian civilization which, in the twentieth century of its existence, degrades its Christian women to labors fit only for the beasts of the field; harnessing them with dogs to do the most menial labors; which drags them below even this, holding their womanhood up to sale, putting both Church and State sanction upon their moral death; which, in some places, as in the city of Berlin, so far recognizes the sale of women's bodies for the vilest purposes as part of the Christian religion, that license for this life is refused until they have partaken of the Sacrament; and which demands of the "10,000 licensed women of the town" of the city of Hamburg, certificates showing that they regularly attend church and also partake of the sacrament?

A civilization which even there has not reached its lowest depths, but which has created in England, as a result of its highest Christian civilization, a class of women under the protection of the State, known as "Queen's women," or "Government women," with direct purpose of more fully protecting man in his departure from the moral law, and which makes woman the hopeless slave of man's lowest nature; a system not confined to England, but already in practice in France, in Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany, and nearly every country in Europe. A system of morality which declares "the necessity" of woman's degradation, and which annually sends its tens of thousands down to a death from which society grants no resurrection.