A Delicate Subject
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A DELICATE SUBJECT.
If the object of the New York authorities were to increase prostitution and depravity, they could not better accomplish it than by their present policy toward the unfortunate class that everybody endeavors to ignore, but who suffer, and cause, more guilt, crime and misery, than even bad rum can justly be held accountable for. The police of that city neither vigorously put down all such places, nor tolerate them, under inspection; but every now and then make a descent on a particular quarter, destroy the last vestige of self-respect in the unhappy outcasts by herding them with thieves in the Tombs and on the Island, rendering them more promiscuous in their associations thereafter, and more liable to incur and propagate disease. On their discharge no steps are taken for their reformation and they go back to their loathsome trade ten fold worse than before. They do not resort to their old quarters for fear of re-arrest, but spread themselves, and the vice and disease ever marching in their train, over the previously uncontaminated parts of the metropolis and its suburbs. The New York police appear to think, that a poison, diffused, is harmless, which is concentrated is virulent—such at least is the only way to wards this social disease.
We advert to this subject, not only to remind the philanthropist and the Christian of the duty they neglect at home in favor of their Borioboola Gha Missions1 elsewhere; but to call the attention of the police of this city to the fact that the eccentric and occasional "descents" of their brethren in New York are having the effect of driving the frail sisterhood over to this city, where for a while at least they hope for privacy and safety. We trust that our police in dealing with this class of offenses, will act on some settled plan—either tolerate such of these places as are quietly kept, or steadily suppress them all. But at any rate let not such a policy be adopted as is carried out in New York, which is a mere system of black mail and favoritism, neither vindicating law and public decency, nor guarding the young from demoralization, nor affording any chance of reclaiming the unfortunates themselves.
Sooner or later the community will have to face this subject, on which every reflective person thinks, but none dares speak. The true solution lies in the recommendations of Dr. Sanger,2 in the book which created so general, but as it appears so evanescent, a feeling that something ought to be done in the premises, for the sake of health, decency, humanity, and morals.
Notes:
1. The fictional Mission of Borrioboola-Gha was the focus of Mrs. Jellyby's obsessive philanthropy in Dickens' Bleak House. [back]
2. William W. Sanger (1819–1872) was a New York physician and practitioner of medicine, becoming the first Resident Physician at Blackwell’s Island. He also wrote the History of Prostitution(Boston: Harper's, 1858), which appeared serialized in the New York Atlas alongside Whitman's "Manly Health and Training." See also Whitman's editorial on Sanger's History written for the Brooklyn Daily Times, December 9, 1858. [back]