ACTON'S
WISDOM
206
- in capitals. (Which leads to the reflection that prostitution in
Victorian England was the Red China of its day. ) Acton's position
then may be thought of as generally realistic, liberal, and Benthamite,
a typical constellation of attitudes. He is concerned with the ameliora–
tion of a social evil, and for the intervention of government in a
regulatory but minimal capacity. At the same time he feels it neces–
sary to tip his hat toward the principles of personal liberty and
laissez-taire,
which had inevitably gotten involved in the discussion,
and to "admit that a woman if so disposed may make profit of her
own person, and that the State has no right to prevent her." Such
an admission, of course, merely sharpens the horns of the dilemma on
which this question- not to say Acton himself- is impaled, but we
should recall that Acton is quite aware of the fact that it is a dilemma,
and that all his choices are lesser evils.
One of Acton's chief purposes in this book is to humanize the
prostitute, to educate or persuade his respectable audience to regard
her not as some alien and monstrous creature but as a fellow human
being. To
thi
end he explodes the popular myth of the harlot's
progress, demonstrating from his own professional experience that
"such an ending of the harlot' life is the altogether rare exception
. . . that the downward progress and death of the prostitute in the
absolute ranks of that occupation are exceptional also, and that she
succumbs at last, not to tha t calling, nor to venereal disease, but in
due time, and to the various maladies common to respectable hu–
manity." Moreover, he reports
it
as the general medical opinion "that
no other class of females is so free from general disease" and that
as a rule prostitutes are endowed with "iron bodies," with extremely
resilient and resistant constitutions. He then goes on to institute this
surprising comparison.
If
we compare the prostitute at thirty-five with her sister, who
perhaps is the married mother of a family, or has been a toiling
slave for years in the over-heated laboratories of fashion, we
shall seldom find that the constitutional ravages often thought
to be necessary consequences of prostitution exceed those at–
tributable
to
the cares of a family and the heart-wearing
struggles of virtuous labor.
These remarks may help to illuminate another side of the complex
hostility which all the respectable classes of society directed toward
