ACTON'S WISDOM
207
last sentence. He also offers some shrewd observations on the reciprocal
relation between prostitution and the demand made in the respectable
classes for money and position as the requirements for marriage. And
there is no doubt in his mind that the chief cause of prostitution is
"cruel biting poverty" and "the lowness of the wages paid to work–
women in various trades . . . unable to obtain by their labor the
means of procuring the bare necessaries of life, they gain, by surrender–
ing their bodies to evil uses, food to sustain and clothes to cover them.
Many thousand young women in the metropolis are unable by
drudgery that lasts from early morning till late into the night to
earn more than from
3s.
to
5s.
weekly. Many have to eke out their
living as best they may on a miserable pittance for less than the
least of the sums above-mentioned." Is
it
any wonder, he asks, that
"urged on by want and toil, encouraged by evil advisers, and exposed
to selfish tempters, a large proportion of these poor girls fall from
the path of virtue? Is it not a greater wonder that any of them are
found abiding in it?" It is a question that was asked by Henry Mayhew
and others before Acton, and that was asked repeatedly during the
age. And it is a question that takes a good deal of answering-in–
volving as it does the larger question of respectability and its social
meaning. Acton reserves some of his harshest comments for the
respectable classes, although there is never any doubt of where his
own allegiance lies. And of course he disapproves of prostitution on
moral grounds, reasoning that it offers satisfaction to only one part
of man's inclinations at the expense of the rest. But he also--unlike
many of .his contemporaries-does not morally confuse prostitution
with other kinds of illicit sexual relations, and asserts the need to
"distinguish the indulgence of unlawful love from commerce with
prostitutes; the one is the ill-regulated but complete gratification of
the entire human being, the other affords gratification to one part
only of his nature." However ambiguous the force of that term "ill–
regulated," and however inadequate we may judge the vocabulary
available to Acton, it seems clear that an effort to make the right kind
of distinctions is going on.
Acton is also concerned for the state of the medical profession
in England. When the first edition of this work was published in
1857, the London hospitals printed no statistical tables of their
patients; by 1869 things had considerably improved, though it still
