| <Saturday Review 8 July 1865: Stephen>
| <M. Dupin On The Social Evil>
| The Paris Correspondent of the <hi> Times </hi> has lately 
| given us a sort of sketch of a speech, delivered in the 
| French Senate, on what is called the Social Evil in Paris. It 
| seems that a petition was presented on the subject, and 
| that a Report was ordered, on the presentation of which M. 
| Dupin spoke the speech of which we have an abstract, and 
| which is, it appears, about to be published in full. We are 
| not told who the petitioner was, or what exactly he prayed 
| for, except that it was for a more direct interference on the 
| part of the police with prostitution. Nor do we learn what 
| the Committee reported or recommended, if they 
| recommended anything; nor, indeed, does the abstract 
| before us show very clearly to what practical point M. 
| Dupin addressed himself, except that he seems to have 
| objected to the petition. The whole thing, as we have it in 
| the <hi> Times </hi> of Monday, is a specimen of the 
| unintelligent way in which matters of interest are dealt with 
| by the <hi> Times </hi> Correspondent; and though, from 
| motives of prudery or prudence, the debate was conducted 
| with closed doors, yet, as access of some sort of other was 
| gained to M. Dupin’s observations, we might perhaps have 
| been told a little more on the subject. If, as is said, the 
| present French <hi> regime </hi> displays in all ranks of 
| society a lowering of public morals, it would be very 
| interesting to know how the Conscript Fathers treat one of 
| the accredited signs of a falling Empire. As far as we can 
| guess out the matter, the petition seems to have called 
| attention to the excesses of public prostitution, and to have 
| demanded either that new police regulations should be 
| made, or that the existing ones should be more stringently 
| carried out. To this M. Dupin replied that there was a point 
| beyond which police interference would rather increase 
| than repress the evil, and that the real matter to be dealt 
| with was one which, being solely of a moral character, was 
| beyond legislation ~~ namely, the luxury and the low tone 
| of social morals prevalent in the higher classes. At least, if 
| M. Dupin did not say this, being a sensible man, he might 
| very well have said it; and if this were to be said in our 
| Parliament, where it is not said, some good might come of 
| it.
| Unless talkers and writers on this slippery subject bear 
| carefully in mind this limit between the wholesome and the 
| injurious effects of police interference, they only do more 
| harm than good by discussing it. Vague talk about social 
| evils is generally injurious, and serious thinkers are always 
| repelled by philanthropic platitudes and heavy 
| commonplaces in morality. Every special form under which 
| the evil exhibits itself must be canvassed on its own 
| grounds; but to recommend generally the prohibition of 
| prostitution, or, on the other hand, to argue that all its 
| details are to be regulated by law, is equally futile. Here, in 
| England, the changes constantly taking place in society will 
| always require vigilant attention to each exigency as it 
| arises; and the complaint against our Home Office is not 
| that it declines to propose new laws, but that it fails to see 
| that cases are perpetually arising which fall under the spirit, 
| even if they cannot be brought under the letter, of those 
| existing safeguards which have already been found 
| necessary to prevent glaring outrages on public decency. 
| For example, here are two or three new forms of evil. 
| There are the Priapeian Museums, together with the 
| offensive placards and advertisements which infest certain 
| public places. There is the public display of <hi> gaillard 
| </hi> photographs. And these are the quack doctors. The 
| last few years have given rise to these three monstrous 
| births of time. It would be futile to enlarge on the evil of 
| these things, and worse than futile to point out the lengths 
| to which they are carried; nor is it necessary to argue that 
| they fall within the general spirit of the existing law, which 
| professes, and rightly professes, only to restrain the 
| greater outrages on public decency. The only question is, 
| would dealing with them involve worse evils than those 
| actually existing? We cannot see how this can be even 
| pretended. It is quite true that an attempt to suppress 
| brothels has, as a matter of experience, produced other 
| and worse excesses. But what would come of it were those 
| dens of obscenity in the Strand and Tichborne Street 
| closed by order of Sir George Grey? Of course, the liberty 
| of the subject would be infringed; Magna Charta would be 
| endangered, and the Bill of Rights seriously imperilled. Is 
| such foolish pedantry as this to be listened to for a 
| moment? So in the matter of obscene and dirty 
| advertisements. What can be more easy than to bring 
| every person who is advertised as the vendor of certain 
| wares within Lord Campbell’s Act, and to make such public 
| announcements, where an address is given, penal 
| offences? The matter of questionable photographs, of 
| course, is more difficult, and will always be open to 
| conflicting decisions. But what at the present moment is 
| complained of by sober people ~~ and no other complaints 
| deserve to be attended to ~~ is the suspicion that there is 
| supineness and stupidity in the official mind as to the new 
| shapes which public indecency takes. Sir George Grey, by 
| diligent search into the archives of the Home Office, can 
| probably discover no authenticated instance of the 
| successful prosecution of the proprietor of an anatomical 
| museum. The public fail to perceive the cogency of the 
| answer, though we cannot dispute the fact. No doubt the 
| Government is right in expecting that the initiative should 
| be taken by the public. Public morality is not outraged until 
| there are complaints on the part of the public. It is neither 
| to be expected nor desired that the State should undertake 
| those duties which are best left to private persons. A 
| nuisance is not a nuisance till somebody complains of 
| being injured. <hi> Volenti non fit injuria. </hi> We do not 
| want a paternal government in the sense of undertaking 
| personal duties. The police authorities are quite right in 
| saying that the case of Regent Street, for example, was, in 
| the first instance, a matter for the inhabitants of Regent 
| Street, and its improved state 9for it is improved) is due to r. 
| Dolby and his friends undertaking that responsibility which 
| Sir Richard Mayne very properly declined. The same may 
| be said about the obscene museums. It will be time 
| enough to ask for new legislation when the insufficiency of 
| our present laws is proved. As matters stand, it may be 
| reasonably expected that the Strand tradesmen ~~ and, 
| we may especially add, the authorities of King’s College ~~ 
| should first move. If they fail ~~ and it is by no means 
| certain that they would fail ~~ in suppressing this particular 
| nuisance, we doubt whether new power would be refused 
| to the police to deal with a new emergency.
| But, as reported, M. Dupin dealt with the matter on larger 
| grounds. he seems to have said that the <hi> demi-monde 
| </hi> was encouraged by the <hi> haut-monde; </hi> and 
| we may add that what is true of Paris is true of London. 
| Our real social evil is that the manners of courtezans are 
| creeping into the very verge of the Court. The dress, the 
| equipage, the language, and the tastes of Lais are the 
| standard of respectability in its choicest haunts. It is now 
| virtue which pays the homage to vice, and it seems to be 
| daily becoming a settled thing that one of the best chances 
| of becoming a wife is to adopt the airs and style of those 
| who are not wives. Lais give hints to those who are to be 
| the mothers of our peers and gentlemen of the next 
| generation. It is these women, as M. Dupin says, who set 
| the fashion to ladies of fashion. Now the question, and of 
| course it is an interesting one, is whether there is anything 
| new in all this? As far as dress goes, we rather doubt it. M. 
| Dupin seems to rest a good deal on this, and utters a 
| vehement tirade against crinoline, chiefly, however, on 
| economical and sumptuary grounds. Just as Tertullian said 
| that high heels were unchristian because they affected to 
| add a cubit to the stature, so M. Dupin quotes the fable of 
| the ox and the frog against hoop petticoats. A voluminous 
| dress costs more than a scanty one; most of the wearers of 
| swelling and trailing skirts cannot afford to buy them; 
| therefore, the chances are that the wearers sell, or are 
| ready to sell, their virtue to buy their petticoats. We 
| question all this. There are of course cases, and many of 
| them, in which worthless wives run up long milliners’ bills. 
| But so they always did. There never was an age in which 
| female dress was not extravagant either in quantity or 
| material, or perhaps in both. We are all, alike, in England 
| and France and America, very rich; and therefore it is 
| nothing strange that female dress should be costly and 
| extravagant. Nor, again, are we prepared to say that the 
| present style of dress is especially and exceptionally 
| immodest. We are not saying that purists cannot, and 
| perhaps justly, find faults in this direction. But we are 
| content to incur the imputation of being thought cynical 
| when we venture to remark that all female dress is, and is 
| meant to be ~~ that is, it is in its original conception ~~ 
| suggestive. Whether it be of the past or the present 
| generation, classical or modern, of the East or West, there 
| may be detected in it one common nature. It is natural that 
| it should be so. To the pure all things are pure; the most 
| innocent of maidens, and matrons are not made immodest 
| by the dress, whatever it is, of the period. But to say this is 
| not to say that the dress of every period has not a 
| suggestive basis. Women being women in all lands and in 
| all countries, female dress must be female dress. And, 
| therefore, crinoline and all that belongs to it is not worse, 
| and certainly is not better, than the style which went before 
| it, or than the style which will follow it. Its real fault is not 
| that it is expensive ~~ for we may as well have this form of 
| expense as another; not that it is immodest ~~ for a certain 
| whiff of immodesty may be found by the curious in all 
| dress; but that it is singularly cumbrous and excessively 
| dirty.
| The vice of our age, however, is not this; it is something 
| more subtle and dangerous; and, unless we remembered 
| that in the decline of Rome there must have been 
| something like it which suggested to Horace his <q> <f> 
| </f> </q>
| we should have said that it was a new thing for chastity to 
| copy the outward life of unchastity. Anyhow, the fast girl 
| who has not lost her virtue, and does not intend to lose it, 
| is a social evil far worse than the fast girl who has not, and 
| does not pretend to have, any virtue at all. In English life 
| this is a novelty. Belinda might be, and probably was, vain, 
| silly, and frivolous; and her representatives in these days, 
| with many more pretensions, are often as empty. But 
| Belinda never dressed after and talked after Miss Kitty 
| Fisher. And for this, which i the last and worst vice of 
| modern society, the mothers are more responsible than the 
| daughters. If the matrons and <hi> chaperones </hi> of the 
| day permit, as they do, the gilded youth of the day to pass, 
| without remark or censure, from the opera-box of Lais to 
| the opera-box of the heiress of a half-hundred earls; if, 
| without rebuke, the anecdotes and adventures of the <hi> 
| demi-monde </hi> are reproduced as the small talk of the 
| drawing-room; if jests fresh as imported from the free 
| tongue of venal beauty are quoted on the croquet-ground 
| and the lawn <hi> fete; </hi> and if the mothers permit, or 
| perhaps encourage, all this, there is a blot on our morality 
| which we had better look to in time. There are a good 
| many awkward reasons for suspecting that, among many 
| of our swaggers, that which claims for English women a 
| pre-eminence in character above all the women of the 
| earth is not the least audacious. Anyhow, the text on which 
| M. Dupin addressed the French Senate might afford a 
| profitable and savoury <p> “exercise” </p> to ourselves.