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STEVEN MARCUS
hospitalized and treated at government expense; refusal to conform
to the provisions of this act made her liable to be punished by
imprisonment- this latter provision appears to have been largely
unenforced or unenforceable. The first edition of this work was
published some eight years before the Act was passed; the second,
which carne out in 1870, was much enlarged and revised, and
incorporated Acton's observations on the workings of the new law.
Its full, ringing title reads:
Prostitution, considered in its Moral, Social,
and Sanitary Aspects, in London and other Large Cities and Garrison
Towns, with Proposals for the Control and Prevention of its Attendant
Evils.
And
it
is a very good book, certainly the best piece of work
of its kind from the period that I have read. A brief examination
of it will serve to introduce us to the quality of Acton's mind-at
least to the quality of one side of it.
Acton's position can be straightforwardly outlined. Prostitution,
he believed, was an inevitable, almost an organic, part of society.
Efforts to repress or extirpate it have always ended in failure. At
the same time, he argues, it would be "equally irrational ... to imagine
that this irrepressible evil can exist without entailing upon society
serious mischief; though incapable of absolute repression, prostitution
admits of mitigation. To ignore an ever-present evil appears a mistake
as fatal as the attempt to repress
it."
The English habit of dealing
with prostitution had been until then largely to ignore its existence;
prostitution as it was practiced in England was, in the terminology
of the times, free, private and clandestine, while on most of the
Continent it was public, regulated, and licensed. Acton is too English
himself, and too acutely aware of what the social possibilities in
England were, to recommend the adoption of any system in which
society through the agency of the State should appear to sponsor
"immorality" by means of legalizing or licensing it. Yet he believes
that it is "necessary to recognize its existence, and to provide for
its regulation." Opposed by a combination of Podsnappery and
religious extremism, by, as he puts it, "the dull stupidity that shuts
its eyes to well-known evils, and by refusing to recognize accomplished
facts and actual circumstances, endows them with a tenfold power of
mischief, and which, while it justifies its inertness by religious theories,
forgets the first practical duty of the Christian," Acton feels it
necessary to corne out strongly as "an advocate of RECOGNITION"
