Page:Wrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil - Elizabeth Blackwell (1883).djvu/20

10 1881, to examine this subject. The Committee was directed to inquire into the actual facts relating to this traffic, and also to consider whether further legislation can remedy the evil.

Although the work of the Committee was limited to the facts of this infamous traffic, and to the legislation which is necessary to suppress it, the evidence laid before it covers much wider ground. This evidence reveals, both directly and indirectly, facts of the gravest significance in relation to our own condition, as well as to that of our neighbors, in respect to social vice. It thus renders important assistance toward the solution of weighty but perplexing problems, which are now being widely discussed amongst us.

The great body of facts brought forward in this report, relate to two different but false methods of dealing with vice, methods which have come prominently forward in the present century, in connection with the marked decay of the older forms of religious faith.

The distinctive national tendencies of the French and English nations are strikingly shown in the attitude they have gradually assumed toward the subject of prostitution; the French with their remarkable organizing power tending toward tyranny, the English