BLACKWELL FAMILY
ELIZABETH BLACKWELL    Book Purchase of WomenPURCHASE OF WOMEN:
THE
GREAT ECONOMIC BLUNDER.
BY 
DR. ELIZABETH BLACKWELL.
PART I.
LONDON;
JOHN KENSIT, 18 PATERNOSTER ROW.
PRICE SIXPENCE.
PURCHASE OF WOMEN.PURCHASE OF WOMEN:
THE
GREAT ECONOMIC BLUNDER.
BY 
DR. ELIZABETH BLACKWELL.
PART I.
LONDON;
JOHN KENSIT, 18 PATERNOSTER ROW.
PRICE SIXPENCE.Dedicated
WITH PROFOUND REVERENCE.
TO THAT EVER-LIVING MANIESTATION OF DIVINE GOODNESS,
Our Lord,
WHO IS CRUCIFIED AFRESH IN EVERY
OUTCAST WOMAN.CONTENTS.
PREFACE ix
CHAPTER I
HE FOUNDATIONS OF TRADE 15
CHAPTER II.
TRADE IN WOMEN 26PREFACE
The object of this work is to show the real meaning of
those relations of the sexes, which are commonly known
under the term "ordinary immorality."
Customs in the midst of which we are brought up often
befog the vision. Nations, like individuals, may journey on
unsuspicious of danger if no fresh wind lift the veil which
hides the fatal precipice towards which they are rapidly
moving.
Much has been heard of late respecting criminal immorality,
i.e., the abuse of the sexual powers which human
law recognises as crime. the boundary of criminal immorality
has of late been extended i the hope of protecting
young girls. When fathers and mothers begin to realise what
the destruction of their children by lust really means, natural
horror is felt at the corruption or torture of young children of
either sex, and a storm of righteous indignation compels an
attempt to provide a remedy. But at the same time the very
causes which directly lead to and produce these monstrous
crimes are not clearly seen. Horror at effects, diverts attention
Bx
tion from vicious customs which lie at the root of evil, and which inevitably produce crime. Many of those who are most actively engaged in devising safeguards for the very young, draw at the same time a radical distinction between so-called ordinary immorality, and what, at that particular epoch, has been labelled criminal by process of law.
It is a fatal imperfection of human laws, that being only an endeavour to enforce fragments of Divine Law, they carry the evil of such disruption with them; and whilst checking wrong in one direction strengthen it in another.
This evil is shown in the broad distinction now drawn between different kinds of sexual immorality, and the results which follow such distinction.
Many persons who would shrink from the guilt of being the authors of a first seduction, or of running the risks of legal prosecution, will not hesitate to engage in "ordinary immorality" -that is, they will without scruple purchase the temporary use of a consenting woman for a little money; they will justify the transaction by the plea that what women will sell men may buy; they may even consider that they show a little contemptuous kindness to women in such buying, as industrial conditions press most heavily on women. Women also, accept false theories of human nature that blaspheme their Creator, and degrade their exalted rank of motherhood by welcoming profligates and sacrificing their daughters in mercenary marriages.
Until the higher law of human relations is more clearly understood, great confusion of thought will necessarily exist as the result of ignorance and selfishness. But as old errors are gradually proved, an inevitable and growing discussion 

xi
will arise in the present age as to the natural relations of the sexes. The most contradictory theories are even now brought forward and actively spread abroad, and in the course of this unavoidable growth of the mental faculties, the necessity or expediency, the wisdom or the guilt, of what is called ordinary immorality, must finally be brought forward and actively spread abroad, and in the course of this unavoidable growth of the mental faculties, the necessity or expediency, the wisdom or the guilt, of what is called ordinary immorality, must finally be brought before the highest court of public opinion, i.e., the enlightened conscience of men and women.
Although however, the widest diversity of opinion may still exist on abstract questions, there is one practical point on which all persons are compelled to agree. It is this, viz. - If temporary bargains are made, either expressly or tacitly, by which one party gives money to another for a certain return, such a bargain is trade. If few such bargains are made it is a limited trade, if many it is an extensive trade, but in each case the transactions are equally trade, and are necessarily subject to the laws which govern trade. If, therefore, women are made the subjects of temporary purchase, they become the subjects of trade.  Now trade is always directed by the rules and customs prevailing at the time; and the economic aspect requires to be studied, for the laws which govern trade are not fanciful theories, but very real practical facts which lie at the foundation of our social institutions, and silently mould our every day life.
This is seen clearly by the effects which trade in land produces; for the methods by which land is held and treated will alter the character of a people as well as change the face of a country. The thrifty farms of New England help to create a sturdy self-respecting people, whilst the Bonanza machine-managed land monopolies of the West create luxu-
B2xii

rious absentees, and permanent paupers or tramps. Extensive 
enclosure of hills and commons will destroy the country
tastes and habits of generations, whose walks are confined to
dusty high roads ; and the destruction of a hamlet fills the
slums of a city. So the custom houses and protective
tariffs which all our municipalities now create within their
limits, hamper productive industry and help to produce
paupers. Even such a modern practice as bicycling has
created an extensive trade, with dress and habits and various
arrangements, all acting and re-acting on the life of
the younger generation. Whatever becomes an article of
trade, will become at once subject to the methods and regulations
of trade, with the ever widening circle of effects which
belong to all industrial action.
Every civilised nation is compelled to cope with the most
difficult of all social problems, viz.--sexual evil ; and the
great modern development of benevolence and reform, has
created a new force endeavouring to solve the same problem.
The most varied methods of action have been called forth. 
Religion and morality, physiology and expediency, pity and
severity, have all been invoked in turn to rescue the fallen
and to restrain the vicious.
But the subject of ordinary immorality as a trade necessity
governed by the economic laws which regulate trade, has
not been seriously examined in the light of political economy ;
nor has the inevitable effect which trade in women must
exercise on the character of a nation, been clearly shown.
There is wide spread mental evasion or unconscious
hypocrisy on the subject. So many wrongs in our social
state require to be dealt with, that reformers willingly avoid

xiii
the painful consideration of sexual evil. Hope is felt that
some of the great reforms of the day in which all thoughtful
individuals take a special interest, will prove fundamental in
their curative effects, and heal this gravest of our diseases.
Thus free access to land, co-operation and abolition of interest,
total abstinence, universal suffrage, emigration, arbitration,
state-socialism , &c., are all amongst the popular panaceas of
the present day ; each important reform or theory being
chiefly relied on by its special advocates, to change all social
relations and eradicate any serious social disorder.
Favourable, however, as improved material or legislative
conditions will undoubtedly be to the extension of health and
morality amongst a people, these reforms can only be palliative,
not curative, if the fundamental conditions of growth,
and freedom to use them, be not guaranteed to all portions of
a people. Every really curative measure which will ensure
the healthy growth of society, pre-supposes a recognition of
the needs of our human constitution, and an adaptation of
our social methods to those needs. It is only be such recognition
and such adaptation, that any human measure becomes
an embodiment of Divine law. Our conscience must recognise
this law, and our will must render it obedience, in both individual
and collective life ; for there is no other possible method
of securing durable and progressive growth. No human effort
can change the supremacy of law written on the human
constitution. Human perversity is free to thwart it temporarily,
with delusive results which serve to bewilder our
short vision, but the law is re-written with wonderful
persistency on each fresh generation of men, and it remains
inexorable in its demand for obedience.xiv
If trade in women be contrary to the Divine law written
on the human constitution, it will destroy society. Insignificant
as the needs of women's lives may seem superficial
politicians or self-worshipping wordlings, yet these apparently
weak lives, because God-created, will prove stronger
than all their unstable laws and customs. No arrogant
rebellion against the methods of moral progress, however
splendid in its material force and money-worship,, can
change the awful reality of Divine law.
Is the trade in women such a violation? Does it destroy
the freedom, and therefore the necessary conditions of
growth, in one half the human race?
The time has certainly come when earnest reformers
should consider to what extent trade in the human body
exists in this civilised and christian nation; and what its
effect upon the nation is.
In a subject so vital to human welfare as the social relations
which are established between men and women, it is
pusillanimous to refuse to examine them. If the human
conscience, slowly awakening, discovers that the necessary
laws of progress have been ignorantly violated during the
gradual development of humanity, none but pessimists will
fold their hands in despair, none but atheists will continue
to rebel against the Divine law of growth.
Dec., 1886.

CHAPTER I.
The Foundations of Trade.
The Wealth of a nation is that which contributes to its
real and lasting well-being; which makes it powerful in the
present, and durable and progressive in the future. A happy 
and intelligent people, with just and far-seeing rulers or guides
amongst them, is a rich nation, and one that is fulfilling its
duty by carrying on the gradual growth and ever higher development
of the human race.
Political economy is the study of wealth; and particularly
of those results of human activity which spring from the necessary
physical relation of human beings to their surroundings.
It is this relation which makes the firm foundation on
which political economy rests.
The subject leads to three great branches of enquiry, viz.,
the things which constitute wealth; the method of their production;
and the way in which they are distributed.
The study of wealth must always take in this large scope
in any lasting system of political economy, because the many
special branches which the subject includes are all connected
together. Every part is built up on the sure foundation of
the relation of human needs to their surroundings. If our
knowledge of this relation is unsound, the edifice will in time
fall down. 16
In seeking truth in any branch of political economy,
whether it be the relations of labour and capital, land tenure,
or free trade, &c., examination must be made of this foundation
of knowledge. Artificial arrangements which do not recognise 
the primitive needs of human nature, can only lead at
last to misery.
Reason shows us that physical needs are imperative in a
material world, where mind must work through matter. They
come first in order of growth, as the primary condition of life,
through which and out of which the higher moral and intellectual
force grows. They are like the first gasping inspiration
of the infant, which sets in motion the astonishing
mechanism of conscious human life. Trade and commerce
are a necessary first outcome of a nation's physical needs;
the nature of its trade and commerce, and the methods by
which they are carried on, are inextricably woven in with
social life, and stamp the character of a nation.
Trade and commerce being the direct result of human
needs in relation to the material world, will be governed by
fixed laws respecting the production and distribution of
wealth. The term law however, is often erroneously applied to
temporary phases in the arrangements of human industry
which vary with age and country. But a fixed law in political 
economy can only become such when, and because, it
expresses the necessary relation between human growth or
nature, and the conditions which promote it. It is only the 
result of this necessary relation that can claim the name of
Law.
Political economy must, therefore, necessarily be a progressive
study, because, although human desires are
unlimited, human power or ability to discover law is much
more limited. This power grows with intelligence, and
intelligence is of slower development than the motive spring 
of human life, which is desire, emotion, will.

17
The methods of producing and distributing wealth must
therefore necessarily vary. The interval of growth between
the Esquimaux bartering his skins, and the Englishman exporting
machinery is great. Even the objects and definition
of wealth change with race and epoch. There can be so such
thing as finality in the applications of human knowledge, as 
the law of progress--progress of individuals and of races--is
stamped on our nature. Political economy, as every other
subject of knowledge, must be revised, extended, and readapted
from age to age.
Although the methods of producing and distributing
wealth may vary, the creative Divine laws which determine
the welfare of the human race cannot vary. Below the changing
phenomenon of epoch, country, and race, are fixed principles
on which trade (which may be designated human) must be 
based. The search for these necessary or fixed laws, and
their discrimination from temporary arrangements or adaptations,
is not only a legitimate but an indispensable subject of
inquiry. It affects not only the foundation, but the whole
edifice of life which is built upon it in every state of its
construction, helping or injuring each individual of the community,
as well as that collective mass of individuals which
we vaguely style the nation.
No religious teacher any more than the (technically
styled) social reformer, can afford to ignore this great subject
of political economy. A knowledge of its objects, and of the
laws which must govern industry, in its march to the promised 
land of human welfare, constitute a Divine revelation.
It is a revelation gradually made through the honest use of
our intellectual faculties, and constantly grows from imperfect
beginnings, to clearer guidance under an earnest search for
truth. 
A distinct recognition of the different kinds of wealth
must precede any wise or efficient regulation of trade and
commerce; for the same method of production and distri18
bution cannot be applied to all. We can neither produce air
nor sunshine, nor legitimately attempt to make them the
subject of trade, as, being essential to life, they are necessarily
supplied free to all. Neither can we produce earth which 
(as far as it is essential to life) cannot be made a subject of
trade on exactly the same methods, as products which can be
indefinitely multiplied. Neither can strength, energy, or
character, which constitute a valuable part of a nation's
wealth be grown in a similar way to corn, or thrown off by 
machinery like calico. Education is a different process from 
printing, and if reduced to the mechanism of manufacture, or
converted into a system of money getting, is self destructive,
frustrating the object of education, viz., the drawing out of
the infinitely varied human faculties.
The growth of reason and conscience in the leading nations
of the world is more and more differentiating the various
kinds of wealth; data are thus being collected from which the
progressive laws of political economy can be deduced. By
the leading nations, of course is here meant those communities
where a large number of unselfish and thoughtful men
inspired by truth, find their teaching accepted by the uncorrupted
though crude intelligence of a patient multitude.
Unfortunately the so-called ruling classes in these nations,
are now too often the creators or the creatures of the barbarous
and savage hordes, which false methods of political
economy have produced in our midst. But the possession of
a band of honest truth-seekers with earnest listeners eager
to be guided, marks the really progressive nation.
It will be found that a true system of political economy
must rest upon a moral basis. Trust, freedom, and gradually
evolved sympathy, are the foundations on which all systems
of industry are built up, that permanently civilise races.
Trust is the beginning of exchange. Nordenfeld, in his
record of observation round the Arctic circle, relates how
money or articles were left in perfect safety, and faithfully

19
replaced by equivalent articles in exchange. A striking
instance of the necessity of recreating trust, as the foundation
of industry, where it has been lost by long continued oppression,
is related by a gentleman who many years ago went as
mineral viewer to the Nerbudda Valley. Almost alone and
far removed from the possibility of obtaining white labour,
the natives refused to dig for him. He felt compelled to
capture a few men and enforce a day's work, which he at
once honestly paid for with the copper currency of the region.
But it seemed to the natives the grossest folly on his part
that, having gained the labour, he should pay for what he had
already obtained, and feeling sure that he would not repeat
such folly they hid away on the following day. The capture
had to be repeated during many successive days, and the
heavy coin brought at great inconvenience for the daily
payment, before the habit of trust could be fairly established;
then an over supply of willing workers crowded round the
encampment.
A great advance was made in the onward march of
humanity, when the reasons for abolishing slavery became
clear to the conscience of the minority, in those nations who
lead the van of human progress. The production and sale of
human beings as articles of merchandise can be made
extremely profitable as a money making trade. It has
been truly said that "if the reproduction of capital is the
one great means of a nation's wealth;" if demand and
supply, the employment of labour by capital, and profits
limited only by the wages of maintenance, are laws of political
economy, and the right guides of industry, "why should
sentimental notions about justice and abstract rights of freedom
interfere with the national good? Why not grow corn
on the sweating system? Why not by slaves? There is no
reason, on the so-called economic grounds, why slaves should not
be bred like cattle, bred to the exact wants of the agriculturist,
and when no more wanted melted down in the20
sulphuric acid tank and drilled in with the root crops. Any
farmer who would have courage to carry on the economy of
labour and the reproduction of capital in that way, would farm
at a splendid profit."
For long ages the trade in human beings has been, and is
still, carried on. It has only very gradually dawned upon
human intelligence, that short-sighted trading customs which
destroy the conditions of human development, injure equally
the sellers and the sold, and gradually degrade and destroy
the societies that practise them. This second foundation of
political economy--freedom--still remains unrecognised by
the large majority of the human race. But when the destracutice
character or essential wrong of human slavery was
once thoroughly understood by a portion of our nation, they
never rested from the fight until it was abolished. The
abolition of slavery was the revolt of conscience and intelligence,
against a false mercantile system which converts 
everything into money value.
The wisdom of Wilberforce and his heroic band made a
great step in advance by laying down a permanent law for
the guidance of human industry. They saw that the human
being belongs to a different category of creation from the subjects
of his industry, and that he may not be made a thing of
trade. That he owes duties to himself and to his neighbours,
and that he can neither sell another adult, nor his child, nor
himself. That the purpose of human life and the methods of
attaining it, are both destroyed when the condition of human
freedom is violated by converting human bodies into chattels.
The abolition of slavery forbade henceforward the purchase or
sale of any individual, whether adult or child.
The same uprising against injustice in the kindred nation 
of the United States, has produced a similar advance in intelligent
conscientiousness. However much the American Revolution
may be misunderstood, the facts remain which prove
the great moral movement which preceded it. Two generations
of united and resolute lovers of freedom, although a 

21
minority, had fought to the death for the cause of justice, and
prepared the way for the great Emancipation Act of 1863.
It could not be denied that temporary phases of political
economy, were being set at nought by the abolitionists. There
was no flaw in the logic of maintaining slavery as a money
making machine. Vast tracts of land were to be cultivated,
useful products raised, craving desires satisfied, great profits
realised, and a clever energetic race was able to abuse a weak
childish one. But the abolition of slavery united the two
leading branches of the Anglo-Saxon race in setting a limit 
to trade. They established the law that no human being may
be bought or sold. They recognised the fundamental conditions 
of human industry, trust and freedom, and thus established
that higher law that removes human beings from the
operations of a mercantile system which measures all things
by the standard of money.
Another great step in advance has been made by the dawn
of the Co-operative move amongst us. As Abolition set a limit
to the subjects of trade, Co-operation is setting a limit to its
methods. True co-operators clearly see that to arrest the slave
owner and the slave dealer by the strong arm of the law, is but
a first step in human progress; it is only compelling a necessary 
condition, not ensuring a good end.
But co-operation will secure gradually the third necessary
basis of progressive and durable human industry, viz.,
sympathy.
Doubtless this statement will at once bring to mind, not
only the selfish combinations of Civil Service supply, but the
multifarious quarrels and departure from principle, in the
great body of working people distinctively called co-operators.
Nevertheless the statement is true, that co-operation is a
new development of practical Christianity, which can introduce
that essential element of true political economy--sympathy--
the hitherto missing guide of human industry.22
     The few friends who met in a small chamber in 1828 and 
initiated the Manchester and Salford Co-operative Schools
were fired by enthusiasm. The poor weavers of Toad Lane,
who saved their hard-earned pence and divided their first
chest of tea, were filled with pity for their suffering brethren,
and eagerly gave the poor room, the precious time, the exhausting
thought-all they had to give-to establish the
brotherly principle of mutual help. And the large-hearted
leaders of the movement, who changed the name of Christian
Socialist to Co-operator, Mauric, Kingsley, Ludlow, Hughes,
and many another of the first noble little band, laid down a 
spiritual basis, as the essential foundation of durable material
success.
     It has been said of the labouring classes that "they are
unfit for any order of things which would make any considerable
demand on either their intellect or their virtue." The
enlightened co-operator perceives that this is true of all
classes of men, rich or poor, in a state of things where industry
is ruled by unlimited competition, and trade subjects everything
to the domination of money. Where all restrictions are
removed, but no sympathy developed, new forms of oppression
and revenge arise.
     Co-operation therefore, announces a fundamental law of 
durable political economy. It adopts mutual aid instead of 
antagonism in industry, extends a share of the results of
labour in equitable proportion to all who produce them, and
replaces competition in money-getting by emulation in superiority
of production.
     Thus sympathy, the third necessary foundation of
industry and social union, is being slowly evolved by the
trials, the failures, but the ultimately assured success, of the
Co-operative movement.
    This gradual recognition of the necessary bases of progressive
political economy, viz., trust, freedom, and sympathy
(here slightly hinted at) is itself founded upon a rock-viz.,

 23
the immutability of the Creator's law of Moral Government,
the adaptation of the human constitution to its surroundings,
the only method by which steady growth can be secured. The
waves of selfishness and false theories dash themselves vainly
against this rock, and race after race perishes in the foolish
attempt to set aside the Moral Law.
     The hopeful light thrown upon the future by the revelation
of freedom and co-operative sympathy, as fundamental
laws of true political economy, can only be full perceived by
those who have measured the evils of slavery, and sounded
the fearful depths of misery produced by unlimited competition
The revelations of the results of this phase of competition
in which we are living are all around us, in every class
of society, in every quarter of the globe. The mercantile
system, which makes wealth and money synonymous, and 
reduces every interest to a subject of trade, spares no
relation of life, and desecrates every rank of society.
We need not go back to the crimes which Warren
Hastings committed to fill his treasury. The same methods
of crushing the weak for money, of bartering honour and
conscience in the lust of gain, are going on at this
moment in Asia and Africa, in the islands of the Pacific,
in uncontrolled America, and enchained Russia. Its effect
are seen in the legislature and the courts of law, in all
professions and trades, in the mansion and the lodging-house.
Corruption and cruelty inevitably resulting from a 
false system of political economy, are barring the progress of
the human race.
     In the present day we prostitute the superior strength
gained by us from the principles of Christianity, to the debasement
of human beings. Money being considered
identical with wealth, sensuality reigns supreme. Money
having under this system become the great means of gratifying
material desires, the strife to obtain it becomes even fiercer.24
The statesman regards it as a highest duty to open new
channels of commerce for national activity, quite regardless
of the conditions of mutual freedom and sympathy, which 
make commerce legitimate. Whisky, opium, and gunpowder
bring rich returns from the ignorant peoples to whom their
use was hitherto unknown; and this wicked abuse of our
superior intelligence is in strict accord with the short-sighted
teaching of the political economy accepted by trade.* This
species of trade carried on without limitation, without the
large intelligence of religious insight, must produce a fall of
any race equal to the height of its development, for although,
"Religion without science is a purblind angel; science without
religion is a full-blown devil."
It is into the last possible phase of limitless competition
in buying and selling, that our nineteenth century has entered,
by permitting one half the race to become the merchandise
for the other half. 
Under a specious hypocrisy, falsely styled freedom of
*"At a meeting of the British Association, held September 7, 1886,
the eminent African explorer, Mr. Joseph Thomson, spoke boldly of the
evil influence of Europeans in Africa, remarking that it has been terrible,
and that for one negro influenced for good by missionaries there were a
thousand who had been driven to deeper degradation. We supplied them
still with an incredible quantity of gin, rum, gunpowder, and guns, while
our defective Government brooded over them like an incubus."
A Government Blue Book was published, June 1886, entitled "Contagious
Diseases Ordinances (British Colonies)." This record embraces
twenty-seven Colonies, although the great continent of India, also Egypt,
and some other smaller settlements, and the great country of Burmah, are
all omitted.
In these conquered countries, extending all over the world, wherever
the British soldier plants his food, there the British Government enslaves
the helpless female population by the atheistic system of licensing vice.
Ceteway, whom we call a heathen, forbade his fighting men to indulge
in sexual intercourse. Our British Government trains its soldiers in
debauchery, an enslaves the poor heathen women to their use!

25
contract, a modern phase of slavery is still exercising its
influence in our midst, for the slave-holding principle that the
human body may be an article of merchandise is still applied
to women, and conscience is still dead to the essential principle
of freedom, viz., the sacredness of the human body,
through which the soul must grow.CHAPTER II.
Trade in Women.
IT is necessary to define clearly the practical form of evil 
which is now under consideration, and to the effects of which
the consciences of men and women must be roused. Ordinary
immorality is not the demoralisation of the slums--that
horrible result of monopoly and speculation in land, where
human beings are herded together like pigs--a condition into
which the bargains of trade hardly enter. Neither is it the 
practice of free lust--a practice where unlimited liberty is
claimed by both men and women, to indulge the impulses of
sexual caprice. Ordinary immorality is the distinct deliberate
application to women, of the trading system of money vales,
governed by unlimited competition. In this system activity,
opportunity, and cleverness carry the day; conscientiousness
and spiritual aspiration are out of place; innocence and
ignorance constitute weakness, and of course go to the wall.
Ordinary immorality or fornication assuming the female
body to be an article of merchandise, necessarily subjects this
merchandise to those fluctuations of the market, those variations
in demand and supply, and that tyranny of capital
over labour which destroy freedom of contract.
It may be urged that women "consent" to be purchased,
and that therefore, there is a radical difference between the
purchase of the bodies of men and women which the anti-

27
slavery movement has pronounced illegal, and the purchase of
women by men which we are now considering. The sophistry
of such evasion will be apparent if the question of "consent"
and the specious hypocrisy generally involved in freedom of
contract be closely examined. Freedom of contract can only
take place between those who in certain essential particulars
are equals. The parties to any contract must be so far equals
in intelligence, that they can equally understand any risks
that may be run, and clearly foresee the probable results of
the bargain; and they must be so far equals in social position,
that neither party is compelled by the pressure of circumstances, 
or the fear of want, to accept conditions which are
unjust or unwise. No freedom of contract is possible where
this degree of intellectual and practical equality does not 
exist. Freedom implies responsibility. There is no freedom
if both parties are not free. Any instance upon consent to
a bargain ignorantly or forcibly made, is fraud. It is fraud
darkened by varying degrees of cruelty, proportioned to the
superiority of intelligence and independence possessed by the
stronger party in the bargain.
The grace error of excusing purchase by the plea of
consent, is fully shown when the relations of capital to
labour in the present system of competitive industry are
understood. We are now so far removed from the primitive
trade of barter, where values were determined by necessities,
that first principles are commonly lost sight of. Generations
have passed during which ideas about wealth have become
confused through complicated exchanges, stored-up labour
inherited by those who no longer labour, violent seizures in
the past, or cunning ones in the present, with constantly
changing standards or ideals. The quite new standard of
converting everything into a money value, and measuring its
value by money, has taken the place of older methods. As a 
result, money has become the autocrat of industry. Character,
talent, activity, still possess their uses but only as the
c 228
servants of money or capital which have practically become
interchangeable terms. People of quite inferior worth constantly 
and, as a rule, rise into splendid material position
through the command of money, whilst talent and invention,
industry, activity, and noblest natures, wear out their lives in
drudgery, or sink in despair from inability to command the
money which has become the condition of life and its energies,
Thus the weaker portions of the human race are ever more
and more deeply crushed down by the misery of a limitless
competitive system, which is not based on the legitimate
foundations of trust, freedom, and sympathy, and which consequently
by place money as the irresponsible governor of
the industrial world, makes the hypocrisy of so-called "freedom
of contact" the most bitter mockery.
It is necessary to realise the overwhelming and illegitimate
power of money in the present day, if the condition of any
rade is to be justly judged, and the responsibilities for the
evils of a vicious trade rightly apportioned. In the terrible
trade which converts the human body into a marketable
commodity, it is no figure of speech, but a very weighty fact,
that vicious men are the capitalists. The responsibility of
that position must be recognised.
In judging either of the parties concerned in the trade,
the questions "Who are the capitalists or paymasters?" is the
point to be insisted on. This is the fundamental fact to be
steadily borne in mind, whether we consider the demoralised
women who consent to the conversion of their bodies into
merchandise; or the wholesale traders who organise to meet
a demand increasing beyond the power of individuals to
supply; or the State which connives at the trade; or society
which condones it; the capital on which this nefarious traffic
rests, is supplied by licentious men. This is the great
economic fact on which the whole system rests. All legislation
and all benevolent effort that do not recognise this
fundamental fact, will hopelessly wander in the labyrinth of

29
evil trade, with no clue to direct their energies aright. From
this unnatural employment of capital, two other economic
evils directly arise, viz., first, the discouragement of honest
industry; second, an unfair competition with male labour.
The discouragement of honest industry is a very serious
economic evil. Any discouragement to patient industry,
thrift, and self-control, is direct encouragement to reckless
improvidence, vicious indulgence, and the creation of a 
dangerously increasing predatory horde. Through obstacles
to honest labour, our prisons are now filled with criminals,
our streets with the vicious, and our workhouses with paupers.
The industrious workers are taxed beyond endurance to
support the institutions rendered necessary by the suicidal
policy of degrading labour; and our free institution of citizen
police, is being rapidly converted into a costly military
despotism to meet the imminent danger of revolutionary outbreaks.*
This discouraging difficulties which now surround all
honest industry, press with increased force upon women's
labour, and compel a moral heroism to resist the special
temptation which crowds upon them.
It is now a fact, that in every large city, no woman with 
any pretension to natural attractiveness can fail to meet a
purchaser. The streets, the hotels and lodging-houses--too
many of our homes, also--are filled with a mighty army of 
vicious men, who think it neither shame nor wrong to purchase
for shillings or pounds, as the case may be, a temporary
physical gratification, without reflection upon the 
inevitable results, individual and social, of their temporary
action. The knowledge that money may be gained so easily,
spreads from woman to woman. The contrast between the
*The mounted policeman, with sword by his side, galloping along
the Embankment at night, is an ominous sight to the thoughtful pedestrian.30
ease with which the wages of sin may be gained, and the
laborious, even crushing methods of honest industry, becomes
an ever present and burning temptation to all working
women.
It is undoubtedly true that the numerical excess of
women in Great Britain, with other economic facts, intensifies
most heavily upon woman the grinding pressure of our present
industrial system. All rescue workers seeking to help
their fallen sisters are constantly confronted with the appalling 
answer, "Give me work, I cannot starve." The awful
extent of woman's industrial misery would now be more
fully realised, had not well-meant benevolent efforts called
in the harsh hand of the police to suppress begging, and thus
crush it out of sight.
The increasing and perplexing flood of women in the
streets, begging to be bought, is a strange commentary on
the effect of the stern repression of begging for alms. If in
the future, in addition to the suppression of ordinary begging
by men and women, another edict goes forth forbidding women
to present themselves for sale, but not forbidding men to purchase
them, gross injustice to women will be added to a cruel
abuse of power, and fresh impulse given to male vice. Certainly
if it were in the nature of women to become murderous
criminals, any increasingly harsh and unjust attempts to
crush their misery and degradation out of sight, would drive
them into violent crime.
But is is not the seamstress slowly starving in her garret,
nor the mass of struggling poverty, that is alone, or even
chiefly, beset by the fiery temptations of gain, and the enticing
pleasures which money can provide. The deterioration of
character, which is the gravest result of a false system of
political economy, extends to much wider circles of society.
This serious fact is sufficient to prove the error of those who
ook to the industrial independence of women, as the chief
means of destroying licentiousness. Although freedom to

31
obtain decent remunerative employment will secure an important
condition for checking social evil, it will be a means
only, it can never attain the end.
The great army of servants, whether in public or private
dwellings, are surrounded by constant temptations to supplement
their wages or relieve their monotonous labour by selling
themselves. When we remember the conditions under
which the vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures
and privations of their homes, their undeveloped mental
state in relation to social duties, the exhausting work upon
which the majority of them enter in hotels, lodging-houses,
struggling households--or the special danger of rich, careless
establishments; and then realise both the condition under
which their service drags on and the natural instincts of the
human being, it is easy to understand why to a frightfully
increasing extent they yield to the solicitations to which they
are exposed. The five shillings secretly gained at night
becomes an important addition to scanty wages, the stolen
pleasures an intoxicating relief to drudgery. The economic
effect of thus bringing the lightly-earned wages of vice, into
competition with the hard-earned wages of honest industry, is
to discredit the latter, and to produce discontent and careless
unwilling service in industries for which women are naturally
better fitted than men; for the same state of things that is
injuring domestic service, exists in dress-making, millinery,
and all peculiarly feminine industries.
If we take the wider range of labour in which women
compete more directly with men in the labour market, it will
be found that his practice of purchasing women introduces
an unfair element into the remuneration of labour. The introduction
of the slave principle (the purchase of the human
body) in cheapening women's labour, has a formidable effect
in depressing the wages of working-men. In all systems of
industry carried on by slaves the cost of maintenance is as a 
rule the limit of expenditure--the equivalent of wages. Also32

in the industrial systems of so-called free industry, the maintenance
of the labourers again forms a limit beyond which 
profit cannot be extracted, for no man will consent to labour
for less wages than will keep him alive. But this is not the 
case in regard to women's labour. As was proved a generation 
ago in France, and can be amply verified in other 
civilised countries, women's wages are forced down below
subsistence point.

This important fact, with its cause has evidently not been
fully realised, even by so close and impartial as observer as
Mill. He says, "The wages at least of single women must
be equal to their support; but need not be more than equal 
to it; the minimum, in their case, is the pittance absolutely
requisite for the sustenance of one human being. Now the 
lowest point to which the most superabundant competition
can permanently depress the wages of a man is always somewhat
more than this. The ne plus ultra of low wages can 
hardly occur in any occupation of a woman." Mill is 
evidently uncertain as to the causes of the underpayment of 
women in cases of equal efficiency with men, and is inclined
to attribute it to injustice, and to over-crowding in a few employments.
He remarks---"When the efficiency is equal but
the pay unequal the only explanation that can be given is 
custom, which, making almost every woman as appendage 
of some man, enables men to take the lion's share of whatever
belongs to both."

But in this generation, which has thrown open the broad
gate of education to women, and which has enormously extended
the range of employments into which they are invited
to enter, the cause which Mill suggests (over-crowding,
injustice, &c.) do not seem to give a sufficient economic
reason. One powerful and growing cause of derangement in 
the natural rewards of labour has been overlooked, viz., the 
unequal competition with male labour which must result, 


33

when the wages given by vice are allowed to supplement the 
underpayment for honest work, and the street door key makes
up for the deficient salary. Whilst this phase of human 
slavery exists, and the female body remains an article of 
merchandise, the increasing competition with male labour
will make itself more severely felt, as wider fields of industry
are extended to women, and they develope increasing ability
to enter them. The wages of women can never permanently
rise to a just scale of labour value, until this slavish principle is 
eliminated, because this purchase introduces an
uneconomical element into the remuneration of labour,
which destroys any legitimate effect of demand and supply. It 
enables competitive employers, solely intent on profit, to beat
down the price of male as well as female labour indefinitely.
Indeed, we have by no means reached the limits of this 
injustice. The practice of purchase is still more dangerous in 
an economic point of view, because whilst the labour of all
women tends to sink to the lowest point of remuneration, this
lowest point can be reached in the labour of the 
young and strong, who are the most eagerly sought for as 
merchandise.

The increasing employment of less remunerated female
labour, while male labour stands idle, is an alarming fact.
The family is barely held together by the earnings of a 
daughter, whilst father and brother lounge about the pot house. 
The results of any sudden stoppage of a factory where large
amounts of this cheap labour has been employed (as in the 
Barking jute factory, where 800 girls were suddenly thrown
out of employment) is an object lesson in the suicidal policy
of degrading women.

The natural order of industry by which the man is the 
chief material support of the family, is disturbed and destroyed
by this unnatural practice.

The purchase of young women adds cruelty to fraud.
Youth must always fail to realise results which are only 34
known through the experience of age. No amount of cautions
or theoretic teaching given to the young, can ever place them
on an equality with the experienced adult. Moreover, it is
Nature's law for youth, that sexual attraction is quite out of
proportion to intellectual development. The fact of this great
natural law of slower mental growth, is the Creator's imperative
command, laid upon the older generation, to protect
and guide the young of both sexes. The corruption
of the young by the adult is not only fraud--it is dastardly
cruelty.
Moreover, Nature has laid upon women the more important
share in the great work of continuing the race. It is
not therefore pity, but justice which requires that reverent
and grateful aid should be rendered by men, in the grand
duty of creating an ever nobler race.
Trust, freedom, and sympathy, form the bases of true relations
between men and women, as they are also the moral
foundations of political economy.
The depth of that sin against human nature--fornication,
or purchase--is seen in the results which follow,
from tempting women away from the paths of honest
industry. These effects necessarily extend to the whole
position and character of one half the race, when any portion
of women are turned into human merchandise. They are
seen, by a careful study of those reckless or hardened ones,
who have become so direful a problem in all our large towns.
How is that growing army of shameless women created,
who, with their companions, so fearfully avenge all social
injustice to our boys and girls, and to our young men and
maidens? 
It is well known that there are thousands of 
"fallen women" in London. What does this general
statement in relation to women mean in detail? What
is involved in living by the sale of the human body?
The woman however "fallen," is still a human being with its

35
desperate clinging to life. Let it be realised what is involved
in thousands of women living to the age of three score
years and ten, who must feed themselves three times a day,
and provide lodging, clothing, and the satisfaction of all
human needs by the repeated sale of their bodies. Thousands
of women, with all the craving and ever active necessities
of the human being, bodies and souls to be kept alive
by the money of their buyers, and who are compelled to use
every art of corruption, to find the fresh purchasers through
whom they have learned to live. Women to whom lust and
drink rapidly become a second nature, and sloth and falsehood
habitual. Women driven on by ceaseless material needs
to lower and lower phases of misery and vice, in whom a
bitterness is engendered that revenges itself on the weakness
and innocence of youth, tempting the lad when the adult
ceases to purchase; women who, terrible fact, finally losing
their own marketable value, and scourged by their own daily
recurring needs, throw away the last remnants of womanly
instinct, and drag down young girls into their hell of life.
The grave fact must be borne in mind that each one of
these hundred thousand marketable women--although once
an innocent infant--now forms a centre of ever-widening
corrupt influence in the varied relations of life. Each one,
with father and mother, brothers and sisters, friends and 
acquaintances, servants, and tradespeople, is exercising a
fatal influence; desecrating the sanctity of sexual relations,
proving the ease with which the rewards of vice are gained,
bewildering the conscience of the innocent, and transmitting
sensual tendencies to their descendants.
From these bought women, come those enemies of social
progress, who enslave our young men of the higher classes,
our future statesmen, those who should be the leaders of the
nation. From Skittles to Cora Pearl, our generation has
witnessed the enslaving power of these tyrants of lust. They
have dried up the generous enthusiasm of our youth, and36
destroyed those principles of trust, freedom, and sympathy,
which should guide our domestic and foreign policy. From
these purchased women--this human merchandise--come
the frenzied menads of bloody revolution, human tigers who
delight in destruction and torture. They are growing up
amongst us here, as elsewhere, moral dynamite ready for
explosion.
Who is guilty of this appalling conversation of women into
demons; this contagion of evil which in ever-widening circles
is destroying our moral health, and injuring the modesty,
freedom, and dignity of all womanhood? The immediate
cause is the man, whether prince or peasant, who purchases
a woman for the gratification of lust. It is this purchase
which draws women into the clutches of a godless money-making
machine, which never loosens its hold of the feeble
creature, until the essential features of womanhood are crushed
out of recognition. The irresponsible polyandry of prostitution
with its logical acceptance and regulation of brothels, has
replaced in the West the polygamy of the East. In both,
degradation, discouragement of marriage, and injustice to
women, create a fatal barrier to permanent national progress.
But there is a more insidious source of women into merchandise,
whilst it produces a dangerous deterioration of female character,
unavoidably re-acts upon male character. This evil
tends in women to produce the vices of the slave, viz., deceit,
falsehood, and servility; in men it tends to foster the vices
of the slave-holder, arrogance, selfishness, and cruelty. In
both it engenders that deadly sin--hypocrisy. (Matt. chap.
23.)
Hypocrisy is the vice which, above all others, our Lord
denounces with the most awful condemnation; raising the
drunkard and the harlot, with his far-seeing, merciful purity,
and thrusting the scribe and pharisee--secret fornicators
--into their place. "He that is without sin, let him cast the

37
first stone."* Hypocrisy is the vice which distinguishes in
the most marked degree, those nations which dare to call
themselves Christian, but who practically deny every principle
of Christ's teaching in the conduct of public and, to a great
extent, private affairs. It is under this reign of hypocrisy
that a more dangerous condition of sexual evil has grown up
amongst us than has ever existed amongst heathen nations.
When a savage tribe enslaves its enemies and trades in
human flesh, it does not trade against its conscience. In its
rudimentary condition of slow emergence from brutish ignorance, 
it knows so higher standard than a savage display of
muscular force. When a polygamous nation buys both men
and women, or endeavors to enforce the physical chastity of
women by harem imprisonment, it obeys the highest authority
it knows of, its religion, believed in, although erroneous
in its teaching. The bitterest hatred and undying hostility
*Those who consider that the clergy are necessarily followers of
Christ should read attentively the Guardian of August 11th, 1886. It
is there stated, that "What is said about the rich in the New Testament
does not apply to all the rich of our time." "We give an answer
which does reverse the estimate in the New Testament." - "It is the
universal feeling of the clergy that the poor need their attention more
than the rich." The noteworthy statement is made in this journal,
"idleness, luxury, and pride may live side by side with religion;" and
that the rich who excited Christ's indignation were "proud, sensual,
covetous, religious." A New England Professor, in blindly classing
together Christ and Zola, says: "Jesus calls pride the blackest, and
incontinence the lightest, of mortal sins. (Boston Advertiser, July 29th.)
The church Guardian writes: "We see more plainly than is necessary
the danger of looseness." Christ "speaks tolerantly of common immorality."
He was "relatively scornful to religion, and indulgent towards
sensual vice." We thus see the Pantheist and the Guardian--professed
teachers of truth--inculcating the same heresy, and failing to see that it
was hypocrisy that Christ, the model to all rescue-workers, denounced
as the deadly sin. The lesson must be learned, that those who profess
to be religious teachers do not always understand the meaning of religion,
and are not always loyal to Christ.38
felt by Mohammedan as well as savage communities to their
Western invaders is due to the violation of their women, and
the treatment of those women according to the demoniacal
and hypocritical customs of their lustful conquerors. However
false the standard of the savage or semi-barbarous peoples
may be, they possess one, and strive to realise it. But the
corruption which the latest and intensest phase of competitive
money values has introduced into the most enlightened
nations, is unexampled in the history of the race. The
deliberate reasoning out and justification of the conversion
of women into things, is the abuse of our highest
faculties, our power of reason and conscience. Moral
hypocrisy, founded on intellectual dishonesty, is the most
dangerous disease that can afflict the human race.
The cruel vice of fornication, protected by hypocrisy, is
sowing moral scrofula broadcast, and like an insidious poison
producing generations of feeble ricketty wills, and maniacal
monsters. It is the degeneracy of the race! The palliation
of this vice is shaking the foundation of our civilisation, by
destroying the moral basis on which alone progressive
society can rest. The purchaser of a woman is directly guilty,
but a deeper source of evil influence is the man or the woman
who excuses and sanctions the purchase of women, by upholding
a double standard of morality for the sexes. In the
present age, whilst the actively licentious are following evil
customs like sheep, their intellectual and spiritual leaders are
throwing a veil of hypocrisy over these customs. The God-given
faculties for creating literature, investigating science,
and promoting religion, are being perverted to the justification
or palliation of lust. 
Our Brothers have hitherto been the rough and active
pioneers of human progress; first moulding the material
framework of society, then becoming its leaders and teachers;
teachers of those fundamental moral relations on which
human society rests.

39
But a time has come in the development of the race, when
much of the teaching and judgment formed by one half the
race alone, is seen to be liable to error, and requires to be
weighed and approved by the other half of mankind.
The woman half is necessarily slower in development
from being appointed to bear that great altruistic burden--
maternity. But the very shackles or sufferings thus undergone
for the sake of the race, tend gradually to produce in 
women special adaptations to the higher spiritual ends of 
creation.
When we now inquire into, and weigh the value of the
teachings offered to women as the guide of their human
relationship to men, we are struck with its amazing contradictions.
All classes and sections bring forth their varying
opinions. The scientist and the theologian, the physician
and the comtist, the lawyer and the journalist, the literary
and the business man, the official and the man of leisure, are
all see carrying their load of heterogeneous materials to help
build up the Babel of advice to women. All assert their
knowledge of "Nature and Instinct," of "Science and History,"
or "the tragical plea of material necessity," to justify
opinions founded on misunderstood data.* But the sectional
opinions of a portion of the race must necessarily be
either imperfect, arrogant, or sentimental, and God confounds
the Tower which foolish mortals strive to raise to Heaven.
All those, both men and women, who retain their reverence
for sex, turn away from this unseemly Babel of conceit
and short-sightedness, and ponder these things in hearts
earnestly seeking truth.
The great question now at issue is the Unity of the
Moral Law. This unity is being attacked by the intellectual
*A clergyman has lately justified harlotty on the ground that
"vicarious suffering is a law of existence, and sacrifice must continue."
Therefore, women must be victims.40
shortsightedness, or unconscious intellectual dishonesty of
those who should be its most enlightened upholders.
One of our leading family journals has lately stated that
"the modern notion of equality impairs the responsibility of
special classes for special virtues." There is a sense in which
special classes may be said to hold special responsibility.
Women who are so vitally affected by the relations of the sexes,
are especially called on to strengthen and guide the sexual
virtue of a people. They must consider the conditions essential
to such virtue, and when they clearly see the truth, an army of
noble men will zealously help in shaping truth into practice.
The great truth which women are now learning, is the necessity
that every man should be chaste. This is the truth so
long unrecognised, but at last discovered as the solution of
the great social problem. Without male chastity female
chastity is impossible.
Virtue is not self-righteousness. It is unconscious
of itself, because it has become a mode of individual
existence, and it maintains its vitality by care for
others. A chaste woman does not think of her own purity,
she thinks of the poor girl drudging in cellars, or hurrying at
night, waylaid by tempters, to her poor home, or "drilled" in
the rich man's shop; she thinks of her cherished sons with
their noble and innocent young manhood exposed to the 
influence of the corrupt adult. Woman's responsibility for
the purity of society commands her to announce the conditions
of purity, and unmask with a relentless justice--which
is now the truest mercy--those destroyers of national purity,
the upholders of a double standard of sexual morality. The
fact that so many cultivated intellects resort to fallacy or
metaphysical abstraction, to palliate the destructive abuse of
our sexual powers, is a direct call on women to help in spreading
truth.
There cannot be one moral law for human beings, which
is at the same time of unequal application to them. Moral
law is not the creation of mediaeval art, which substituting a

41
symbol for entity, represents the Great Creator as an aged
man, with long grey beard, seated upon clouds. The moral
law is not the arbitrary dictum of a man. The authority of
the moral law springs from it adaptation by the Creator, to
the nature of the beings subjected to it. It is the guide to
the highest end of that nature, the necessary method by which
its welfare is secured. Its authority is absolute, not relative,
because it is the method of highest growth. Divine law
admits of no exception, it cannot contradict itself. It is
equally binding on the weakest, as on the strongest; on the
man as on the woman--or it is not law. If men are so constituted
that they can grow to the full stature of manhood
without obedience to the law of purity, then the moral law of
purity does not exist for them, because it is not a necessary
method of growth to their highest human development; their
nature is not adapted by the Creator to the moral law; its
influence over them is thus weakened, its absolute authority
destroyed.
To profess to accept the Unity of the Moral Law, at but
the same time seek to avoid its consequences, is hypocrisy.
The moral law cannot be evaded by any metaphysical creation 
of "noble moral paradoxes." * Any attempt to define purity
as unequally binding on the sexes by being "more for women, 
but not less for men," is worse than nonsense, it is dangerous
sophistry. It is a confusion of right and wrong, placing men 
and women on diverging paths which will lead them ever
farther apart. It is a strange spectacle, the nineteenth
century Adam, cowering under the over-powering justice of
the moral law, seeking refuge behind a paradox! But the 
weak and erring children of one Great Creator, bound to live
together and help or injure one another, must not be turned
away from each other by the arrogance or ignorance of any
portion of the race. What mortal can determine the varying
*See the Spectator, July 31, 1886. 
D42
kind and quality of temptations which assail another mortal
life? Who shall dare to say to another, you are not tempted
as I am? Who can measure the weakness or the strength of
another soul, and measure our judgment by shifting standards
of right and wrong? Only by humility can we gain wisdom.
Only by doing the will of the Creator shall we learn the
doctrine of Truth.
On a future occasion it will be necessary to dwell on
those differences of adaptation in men and women which are
now so widely misunderstood, and which therefore produce
discord instead of harmony in human life. It will then be
seen that the cruel and destructive practice of purchase can
and will be entirely abolished. By the triumphant vindication
of the unity of the moral law, which underlies equally
political economy and all departments of social life, our race
will enter upon a new and hopeful stage of future progress.
T. W. DANKS AND CO., PRINTERS, 71 DEAN STREET, SOHO SQUARE, W.BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN SEX; a Medical Inquiry into the
Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality
(Churchill) Price Two Shillings
THE MORAL EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG IN RELATION TO
SEX. (Hatchard) Price Two Shillings.
CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM. (Moral Reform Union, 1 Leinster
Place, W.) Price Threepence.PURCHASE OF WOMEN
THE GREAT ECONOMIC BLUNDER
BY THE LATE
DR. ELIZABETH BLACKWELL
1886
BEING A REPRINT
WITH A FOREWORD BY
MRS. HENRY FAWCETT, LL.D.
1916
LONDON
G. BELL & SONS, LTD.
YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C.
PRICE THREEPENCEPURCHASE OF WOMENFirst Printed, 1886
Reprinted, 1916

PURCHASE OF WOMEN
THE GREAT ECONOMIC BLUNDER
BY THE LATE
DR. ELIZABETH BLACKWELL
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.Dedicated
WITH PROFOUND REVERENCE
TO THAT EVER-LIVING MANIFESTATION OF DIVINE GOODNESS
Our Lord,
WHO IS CRUCIFIED AFRESH IN EVERY
OUTCAST WOMAN.CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD......ix
ORIGINAL.....xiii
CHAPTER I
THE FOUNDATIONS OF TRADE...21
CHAPTER II
TRADE IN WOMEN.....34
viiFOREWORD
BY MRS. HENRY FAWCETT, LL.D.
AT the end of March, 1916, Mr. Coote, the Secretary
of the National Vigilance Association, read a paper
at a Conference at the Caxton Hall on the subject of
the possibility of abolishing commercialised vice--
i.e., the buying and selling of that which should
never be bought or sold. Mr. Coote's aim was
thought even by many of those who had worked with 
him for years to be a waste of energy, quixotic, and
impossible of realisation. It was, however, pointed
out that thirty years earlier, in 1886, immediately
after Mr. Stead's great campaign which forced a 
reluctant House of Commons to pass the Criminal
Law Amendment Act of that year, Dr. Elizabeth
Blackwell had published a very able pamphlet on 
the same subject, advocating practically the same
views as those brought forward by Mr. Coote.
Quotations from this pamphlet seemed like a voice
from the dead supporting Mr. Coote in his new 
crusade. This pamphlet is here reprinted, and
will repay careful study.
Dr. Blackwell, English born, as we are proud to
remember, was transplanted to the United States
ixx FOREWORD
at an early age, and had been a witness of the 
death struggle of human slavery in that country.
This had a strong formative influence on her character.
She had seen the degrading effect of slavery
on slaves and slave-owners alike. She saw in the
purchase of the human body for any purpose whatsoever
the essential principle of slavery. "If
temporary bargains are made," she wrote, "by
which one party gives money to another for a certain
return, such a bargain is trade." Again continuing
her argument: "If trade in women be contrary to
the Divine law written in the human constitution,
it will destroy Society...." "Race after race
perishes in the foolish attempt to set aside the moral
law...." "The time has certainly come when
earnest reformers should consider to what extent
trade in the human body exists in this civilised
and Christian nation, and what its effect on the 
nation is."
She also points out that "the introduction of the
slave principle (the purchase of the human body)
has a formidable effect in depressing the wages of
working men." A woman be the better afford to
undercut the man if she can add to her scanty industrial
wage the 5s. secretly gained at night "in
the streets"; or, in other words, "the wages given
by vice are allowed to supplement the underpayment
for honest work, and the street-door key makes up
for the deficient salary." Even in these days, when
there is a boom in female labour and women are
better paid than ever before, an arbitrator the other

FOREWORD xi
day fixed 2 3/4d. an hour as a fair wage for an adult
woman employed on Government work. For a sixty-
hours week this is only 13s. IId., equal, since the rise
in prices, to no more than 9s. or 10s. a week two
years ago, and certainly insufficient to keep an
adult woman in full efficiency of mind and body.
Miss Blackwell in her early years had heard the
abolition of negro slavery called "impossible."
In her pioneer work in opening the medical profession
to women this aim had also been called "impossible."
Her best friends told her that her scheme
for enabling women to be doctors was excellent
but "impossible" of attainment. She replied that
if it was right it could not be impossible. In that
spirit she approached the problem of The Purchase
of Women: the Great Economic Blunder, now reprinted
by her friend Miss Leigh Browne. Dr. 
Blackwell's spirit lives with us to-day, and encourages
us to new effort, and to go on working for
the right principle in faith and hope.
Mr. Coote's contention is that this "oldest
profession in the world" is a trade, and if it is possible
to take the money out of it, it would collapse like
any other trade under similar circumstances. He
is hopeful, and let no one blame him for being so,
for, as Dante teaches us:
"Hope is the mark of all the souls
Whom God hath made His friends."
LONDON,
July, 1916.ORIGINAL PREFACE
THE object of this work is to show the real meaning
of those relations of the sexes, which are commonly
known under the term "ordinary immorality."
     Customs in the midst of which we are brought
up often befog the vision. Nations, like individuals,
may journey on unsuspicious of danger if no fresh
wind lift the veil which hides the fatal precipice
towards which they are rapidly moving.
     Much has been heard of late respecting criminal
immorality-i.e., the abuse of the sexual powers
which human law recognises as crime. The boundary
of criminal immorality has of late been extended 
in the hope of protecting young girls. When
fathers and mothers begin to realise what the destruction
of their children by lust really means,
natural horror is felt at the corruption of torture
of young children of either sex, and a storm of righteous
indignation compels an attempt to provide a
remedy. But at the same time the very causes
which directly lead to and produce these monstrous
crimes, are not clearly seen. Horror at effects
diverts attention from vicious customs which lie at
the root of evil, and which inevitably produce crime.
xiiixiv     ORIGINAL PREFACE
Many of those who are most actively engaged in
devising safeguards for the very young draw at the
same time a radical distinction between so-called
ordinary immorality, and what, at that particular
epoch, has been labelled criminal by process of
law.
     It is a fatal imperfection of human laws that,
being only an endeavour to enforce fragments of
Divine law, they carry the evil of such disruption
with them; and whilst checking wrong in one direction
strengthen it in another.
     This evil is shown in the broad distinction now
drawn between different kinds of sexual immorality,
and the results which follow such distinction.
     Many persons who would shrink from the guilt of
being the authors of a first seduction, or of running
the risks of legal prosecution, will not hesitate to
engage in "ordinary immorality"-that is, they
will without scruple purchase the temporary use of
a consenting woman for a little money; they will
justify the transaction by the plea that what women
will sell men may buy; they may even consider that
they show a little contemptuous kindness to women
in such buying, as industrial conditions press most
heavily on women. Women also accept false
theories of human nature that blaspheme their
Creator, and degrade their exalted rank of motherhood
by welcoming profligates and sacrificing their
daughters in mercenary marriages.
     Until the higher law of human relations is more
clearly understood, great confusion of thought will

ORIGINAL PREFACE     xv
necessarily exist as the result of ignorance and selfishness.
But as old errors are gradually proved, an
inevitable and growing discussion will arise in the
present age as to the natural relations of the sexes.
The most contradictory theories are even now
brought forward and actively spread abroad, and
in the course of this unavoidable growth of the
mental faculties, the necessity or expediency, the
wisdom or the guilt, of what is called ordinary immorality,
must finally be brought before the highest
court of public opinion-i.e., the enlightened conscience
of men and women.
     Although, however, the widest diversity of opinion
may still exist on abstract questions, there is one
practical point on which all persons are compelled
to agree. It is this-viz., If temporary bargains are
made, either expressly or tacitly, by which one party
gives money to another for a certain return, such a 
bargain is trade. If few such bargains are made, it
is a limited trade; if many, it is an extensive trade;
but in each case the transactions are equally trade,
and are necessarily subject to the laws which govern
trade. If, therefore, women are made the subjects
of temporary purchase, they become the subjects
of trade. Now, trade is always directed by the
rules and customs prevailing at the time, and the
economic aspect requires to be studied; for the laws
which govern trade are not fanciful theories, but
very real practical facts which lie at the foundation
of our social institutions, and silently mould our
everyday life.xvi     ORIGINAL PREFACE
     This is seen clearly by the effects which trade in
land produces; for the methods by which land is
held and treated will alter the character of a people
as well as change the face of a country. The thrifty
farms of New England help to create a sturdy
self-respecting people, whilst the Bonanza machine-managed
land monopolies of the West create luxurious
absentees, and permanent paupers or  tramps.
Extensive enclosure of hills and commons will destroy
the country tastes and habits of generations,
whose walks are confined to dusty high roads; and
the destruction of a hamlet fills the slums of a city.
So the Custom-houses and protective tariffs which
all our municipalities* now create within their limits,
hamper productive industry and help to produce
paupers. Even such a modern practice as bicycling
has created an extensive trade, with dress and habits
and various arrangements, all acting and re-acting
on the life of the younger generation. Whatever
becomes an article of trade will become at once
subject to the methods and regulations of trade,
with the ever-widening circle of effects which belong
to all industrial action.
     Every civilised nation is compelled to cope with
the most difficult of all social problems-viz., sexual
evil; and the great modern development of benevolence
and reform has created a new force endeavouring
to solve the same problem. The most varied
methods of action have been called forth. Religion
and morality, physiology and expediency, pity and

*U.S.A.


ORIGINAL PREFACE     xvii
severity, have all been invoked in turn to rescue the
fallen and to restrain the vicious.
     But the subject of ordinary immorality, as a trade
necessity governed by the economic laws which
regulate trade, has not been seriously examined in
the light of political economy; nor has the inevitable
effect which trade in women must exercise on the
character of a nation been clearly shown.
     There is widespread mental evasion or unconscious
hypocrisy on this subject. So many wrongs
in our social state require to be dealt with, that reformers
willingly avoid the painful consideration of
sexual evil. Hope is felt that some of the great
reforms of the day in which all thoughtful individuals
take a special interest, will prove fundamental
in their curative effects, and heal this gravest of
our diseases. Thus, free access to land, co-operation
and abolition of interest, total abstinence, universal
suffrage, emigration, arbitration, state-socialism,
etc., are all amongst the popular panaceas of the 
present day; each important reform or theory being
chiefly relied on by its special advocates, to change
all social relations and eradicate any serious social
disorder.
      Favourable, however, as improved material or
legislative conditions will undoubtedly be to the 
extension of health and morality amongst a people,
these reforms can only be palliative, not curative,
if the fundamental conditions of growth, and freedom
to use them be not guaranteed to all portions
of a people. Every really curative measure which
2xviii     ORIGINAL PREFACE
will ensure the healthy growth of society, pre-supposes
a recognition of the needs of our human constitution,
and an adaptation of our social methods
to those needs. It is only by such recognition and
such adaptation, that any human measure becomes
an embodiment of Divine law. Our conscience must
recognise this law, and our will must render it
obedience, in both individual and collective life; for
there is no other possible method of securing durable
and progressive growth. No human effort can
change the supremacy of law written on the human
constitution. Human perversity is free to thwart it
temporarily, with delusive results which serve to
bewilder our short vision, but the law is rewritten
with wonderful persistency on each fresh generation
of men, and it remains inexorable in its demand for
obedience.
     If trade in women be contrary to the Divine law
written on the human constitution, it will destroy
society. Insignificant as the needs of women's lives
may seem to superficial politicians or self-worshipping
worldlings, yet these apparently weak lives,
because God-created, will prove stronger than all
their unstable laws and customs. No arrogant rebellion
against the methods of moral progress, however
splendid in its material force and its money-worship,
can change the awful reality of Divine law.
     Is the trade in women such a violation? Does
it destroy the freedom, and therefore the necessary
conditions of growth, in one half the human race?
     The time has certainly come when earnest reformers


ORIGINAL PREFACE      xix
reformers should consider to what extent trade in the 
human body exists in this civilised and Christian
nation; and what its effect upon the nation is.
     In a subject so vital to human welfare as the social
relations which are established between men and 
women, it is pusillanimous to refuse to examine
them. If the human conscience, slowly awakening,
discovers that the necessary laws of progress have
been ignorantly violated during the gradual development
of humanity, none but pessimists will fold
their hands in despair, none but atheists will continue
to rebel against the Divine law of growth.

December, 1886.PURCHASE OF WOMEN
CHAPTER I
The Foundation of Trade.

THE Wealth of a nation is that which contributes to
its real and lasting well-being; which makes it powerful
in the present, and durable and progressive in
the future. A happy and intelligent people, with
just and far-seeing rulers or guides amongst them,
is a rich nation, and one that is fulfilling its duty
by carrying on the gradual growth and ever higher
development of the human race.
     Political economy is the study of wealth; and
particularly of those results of human activity which
spring from the necessary of physical relation of human
beings to their surroundings. It is this relation
which makes the firm foundation on which political
economy rests.
     The subject leads to three great branches of enquiry-
viz., the things which constitute wealth; the
method of their production; and the way in which
they are distributed.
     The study of wealth must always take in this large
scope in any lasting system of political economy,
21
22     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
because the many special branches which the subject
includes are all connected together. Every part
is built up on the sure foundation of the relation of
human needs to their surroundings. If our knowledge
of this relation is unsound, the edifice will in
time fall down.
     In seeking truth in any branch of political economy,
whether it be the relations of labour and capital,
land tenure, or free trade, etc., examination must be
made of this foundation of knowledge. Artificial
arrangements which do not recognise the primitive
needs of human nature can only lead at last to
misery.
     Reason shows us that physical needs are imperative
in a material world, where mind must work
through matter. They come first in order of growth,
as the primary condition of life, through which and 
out of which the higher moral and intellectual force
grows. They are like the first gasping inspiration
of the infant, which sets in motion the astonishing
mechanism of conscious human life. Trade and 
commerce are a necessary first outcome of a
nation's physical needs; the nature of its trade and
commerce, and the methods by which they are
carried on, are inextricably woven in with social
life, and stamp the character of a nation.
     Trade and commerce being the direct result of
human needs in relation to the material world, will
be governed by fixed laws respecting the production
and distribution of wealth.
     The term law, however, is often erroneously applied


THE FOUNDATION OF TRADE     23
to temporary phases in the arrangements of human
industry which vary with age and country. But a 
fixed law in political economy can only become such
when, and because, it expresses the necessary relation
between human growth or nature, and the conditions
which promote it. It is only the result of
this necessary relation that can claim the name of 
Law.
     Political economy must, therefore, necessarily be
a progressive study, because, although human desires
are unlimited, human power or ability to discover
law is much more limited. This power grows
with intelligence, and intelligence is of slower development
than the moving spring of human life,
which is desire, emotion, will.
     The methods of producing and distributing wealth
must therefore necessarily vary. The interval of
growth between the Esquimaux bartering his skins,
and the Englishman exporting machinery is great.
Even the objects and definition of wealth change
with race and epoch. There can be no such thing
as finality in the applications of human knowledge,
as the law of progress-progress of individuals and 
of races-is stamped on our nature. Political economy,
as every other subject of knowledge, must be
revised, extended, and readapted from age to age.
     Although the methods of producing and distributing
wealth may vary, the creative Divine laws
which determine the welfare of the human race
cannot vary. Below the changing phenomenon of
epoch, country, and race, are fixed principles on24     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
which trade (which may be designated human) must
be based. The search for these necessary or fixed
laws, and their discrimination from temporary arrangements
or adaptations, is not only a legitimate
but an indispensable subject of inquiry. It affects
not only the foundation, but the whole edifice of
life which is built upon it in every stage of its construction,
helping or injuring each individual of the 
community, as well as that collective mass of individuals
which we vaguely style the nation.
     No religious teacher any more than the (technically
styled) social reformer, can afford to ignore
this great subject of political economy. A knowledge
of its objects, and of the laws which must
govern industry, in its march to the promised land
of human welfare, constitute a Divine revelation.
It is a revelation gradually made through the honest
use of our intellectual faculties, and constantly
grows from imperfect beginnings, to clearer guidance
under an earnest search for truth.
     A distinct recognition of the different kinds of
wealth must precede any wise or efficient regulation
of trade and commerce; for the same method of
production and distribution cannot be applied to
all. We can neither produce air nor sunshine, nor
legitimately attempt to make them the subject of
trade, as, being essential to life, they are necessarily
supplied free to all. Neither can we produce earth
which (as far as it is essential to life) cannot be made
a subject of trade on exactly the same methods, as
products which can be indefinitely multiplied.


THE FOUNDATION OF TRADE     25
Neither can strength, energy, or character, which
constitute a valuable part of a nation's wealth, be
grown in a similar way to corn, or thrown off by
machinery like calico. Education is a different
process from printing, and if reduced to the mechanism 
of manufacture, or converted into a system
of money getting, is self-destructive, frustrating the
object of education-viz., the drawing out of the
infinity varied human faculties.
     The growth of reason and conscience in the leading
nations of the world is more and more differentiating
the various kinds of wealth; data are thus
being collected from which the progressive laws of
political economy can be deduced. By the leading
nations, of course, is here meant those communities
where a large number of unselfish and thoughtful
men inspired by truth, find their teaching accepted
by the uncorrupted through crude intelligence of a 
patient multitude. Unfortunately the so-called
ruling classes in these nations are now too often the
creators or the creatures of the barbarous and savage
hordes, which false methods of political economy
have produced in our midst. But the possession
of a band of honest truth-seekers with earnest
listeners eager to be guided, marks the really progressive
nation.
     It will be found that a true system of political
economy must rest upon a moral basis. Trust,
freedom, and gradually evolved sympathy, are the
foundations on which all systems of industry are
built up that permanently civilise races.26 PURCHASE OF WOMEN

Trust is the beginning of exchange. Nordenfeld, 
in his record of observation round the Arctic circle,
relates how money or articles were left in perfect
safety, and faithfully replaced by equivalent articles
in exchange. A striking instance of the necessity 
of recreating trust, as the foundation of industry,
where it has been lost by long-continued oppression,
is related by a gentleman who many years ago went 
as mineral viewer to the Nerbudda Valley. Almost 
alone, and far removed from the possibility of obtaining
white labour, the natives refused to dig for 
him. He felt compelled to capture a few men and 
enforce a day's work, which he at once honestly
paid for with the copper currency of the region.
But it seemed to the natives the grossest folly on
his part that, having gained the labour, he should 
pay for what he had already obtained, and feeling 
sure that he would not repeat such folly they hid
away on the following day. The capture had to be 
repeated during many successive days, and the 
heavy coin brought at great inconvenience for the 
daily payment, before the habit of trust could be
fairly established; then an oversupply of willing 
workers crowded round the encampment.

A great advance was made in the onward march
of humanity when the reasons for abolishing slavery
became clear to the conscience of the minority, in
those nations who lead the van of human progress.
The production and sale of human beings as articles
of merchandise can be made extremely profitable
as a money-making trade. It has been truly said


THE FOUNDATIONS OF TRADE 27

that "if the reproduction of capital is the one great
means of a nation's wealth"---if demand and supply,
the employment of labour by capital, and profits
limited only by the wages of maintenance, are laws
of political economy, and the right guides of industry
---"why should sentimental notions about justice and 
abstract rights of freedom interfere with the national 
good? Why not grow corn on the sweating system?
Why not be slaves? There is no reason, on so-called
economic grounds, why slaves should not be bred like
cattle, bred to the exact wants of the agriculturist,
and when no more wanted melted down in the sulphuric 
acid tank and drilled in with the root crops.
Any farmer who would have the courage to carry
on the economy of labour and the reproduction 
of capital in that way, would farm at a splendid 
profit."

For long ages the trade in human beings has been,
and is still, carried on. It has only very gradually
dawned upon human intelligence that short-sighted
trading customs, which destroy the conditions of 
human development, injure equally the sellers and 
the sold, and gradually degrade and destroy the 
societies that practise them. This second foundation 
of political economy---freedom--- still remains unrecognised
by the large majority of the human race.
But when the destructive character or essential 
wrong of human slavery was once thoroughly understood
by a portion of our nation, they never rested
from the fight until it was abolished. The abolition 
of slavery was the revolt of conscience and intelli-28     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
gence, against a false mercantile system which converts
everything into money value.
     The wisdom of Wilberforce and his heroic band
made a great step in advance by laying down a
permanent law for the guidance of human industry.
They saw that the human being belongs to a different
category of creation from the subjects of his industry,
and that he may not be made a thing of trade.
That he owes duties to himself and to his neighbours,
and that he can neither sell another adult, nor his
child, nor himself. That the purpose of human life
and the methods of attaining it, are both destroyed
when the condition of human freedom is violated
by converting human bodies into chattels. The
abolition of slavery forbade henceforward the purchase
or sale of any individual, whether adult or
child.
     The same uprising against injustice in the kindred
nation of the United States has produced a similar
advance in intelligent conscientiousness. However
much the American Revolution may be misunderstood,
the facts remain which prove the great moral
movement which preceded it. Two generations of
united and resolute lovers of freedom, although a
minority, had fought to the death for the cause of
justice, and prepared the way for the great Emancipation
Act of 1863.
     It could not be denied that temporary phases of
political economy were being set at nought by the
abolitionists. There was no flaw in the logic of
maintaining slavery as a money-making machine.


THE FOUNDATIONS OF TRADE     29
Vast tracts of land were to be cultivated, useful products
raised, craving desires satisfied, great profits
realised, and a clever energetic race was able to 
abuse a weak childish one. But the abolition of
slavery united the two leading branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race in setting a limit to trade. They
established the law that no human being may be
bought or sold. They recognized the fundamental
conditions of human industry, trust, and freedom,
and thus established that higher law that removes
human beings from the operations of a mercantile
system which measures all things by the standard
of money.
     Another great step in advance has  been made by
the dawn of the co-operative move against us.
As Abolition set a limit to the subject of trade;
Co-operation is setting a limit to its methods.
True co-operators clearly see that to arrest the slave
owner and the slave dealer by the strong arm of the
law is but a first step in human progress; it is only
compelling a necessary condition, not ensuring a
good end.
     But co-operation will secure gradually the third
necessary basis of progressive and durable human
industry-viz., sympathy.
     Doubtless this sympathy will at once bring to
mind, not only the selfish combinations of Civil
Service supply, but the multifarious quarrels and
departure from principle, in the great body of
working people distinctively called co-operators.
     Nevertheless the statement is true, the co-opera-
30     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
tion is a new development of practical Christianity,
which can introduce that essential element of true
political economy-sympathy-the hitherto missing
guide of human industry.
     The few friends who met in a small chamber in
1828, and initiated the Manchester and Salford Co-operative
Schools, were fired by enthusiasm. The
poor weavers of Toad Lane, who saved their hard-earned
pence and divided their first chest of tea
were filled with pity for their suffering brethren, and 
eagerly gave the poor room, the precious time, the
exhausting thought-all they had to give-to
establish the brotherly principle of mutual help.
And the large-hearted leaders of the movement, who
changed the name of Christian Socialist to Co-operator-
Maurice, Kingsley, Ludlow, Hughes, and 
many another of the first noble little band-laid
down a spiritual basis as the essential foundation of
durable material success.
     It has been said of the labouring classes that "they
are unfit for any order of things which would make
any considerable demand on either their intellect
or their virtue." The enlightened co-operator perceives
that this is true of all classes of men, rich
or poor, in a state of things where industry is ruled
by unlimited competition, and trade subjects everything
to the domination of money. Where all
restrictions are removed, but no sympathy developed,
new forms of oppression and revenge
arise.
     Co-operation, therefore, announces a fundamental


THE FOUNDATIONS OF TRADE     31
law of durable political economy. It adopts mutual
aid instead of antagonism in industry, extends a 
share of the results of labour in equitable proportion
to all who produce them, and replaces competition
in money-getting by emulation in superiority of
production.
     Thus sympathy, the third necessary foundation
of industry and social union, is being slowly evolved
by the trials, the failures, but the ultimately assured
success, of the co-operative movement.
     This gradual recognition of the necessary bases of
progressive political economy-viz., trust, freedom,
and sympathy (here slightly hinted at)- is itself
founded upon a rock-viz., the immutability of the
Creator's law of Moral Government, the adaptation
of the human constitution to its surroundings, the
only method by which steady growth can be secured.
The waves of selfishness and false theories dash
themselves vainly against this rock, and race after
race perishes in the foolish attempt to set aside the
Moral Law.
     The hopeful light thrown upon the future by the
revelation of freedom and co-operative sympathy,
as fundamental laws of true political economy, can
only be fully perceived by those who have measured
the evils of slavery, and sounded the fearful depths
of misery produced by unlimited competition. The
revelations of the results of this phase of competition
in which we are living are all around us, in every
class of society, in every quarter of the globe. The
mercantile system, which makes wealth and money32     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
synonymous, and reduces every interest to a subject
of trade, spares no relation of life and desecrates
every rank of society. We need not go back to the 
crimes which Warren Hastings committed to fill his
treasury. The same methods of crushing the weak
for money, or bartering honour and conscience in the
lust of gain, are going on at this moment* in Asia
and Africa, in the islands of the Pacific, in uncontrolled
America, and enchained Russia. Its effects
are seen in the legislature and the courts of law,
in all professions and trades, in the mansion
and the lodging-house. Corruption and cruelty
inevitably resulting from a false system of political
economy, are barring the progress of the human race.
     In the present day we prostitute the superior
strength gained by us from the principles of Christianity
to the debasement of human beings. Money
being considered identical with wealth, sensuality
reigns supreme. Money having under this system become
the great means of gratifying material desires,
the strife to obtain it becomes even fiercer. The
statesman regards it as a highest duty to open new
channels of commerce for national activity, quite
regardless of the conditions of mutual freedom
and sympathy, which make commerce legitimate.
Whiskey, opium, and gunpowder bring rich returns
from the ignorant peoples to whom their use was
hitherto unknown; and this wicked abuse of our
superior intelligence is in strict accord with the short-sighted
teaching of the political economy accepted
*1886.


THE FOUNDATIONS OF  TRADE     33
by trade.* This species of trade carried on without
limitations, without the large intelligence of religious
insight, must produce a fall of any race equal to the
height of its development; for, although "Religion
without science is a purblind angel, science without
religion is a full-blown devil."
     It is into the last possible phase of limitless competition
in buying and selling, that our nineteenth
century has entered, by permitting one half the
race to become the merchandise of the other half.
     Under a spacious hypocrisy, falsely styled freedom
of contract, a modern phase of slavery is still
exercising its influence in our midst, for the slave-holding
principle that the human body may be an
article of merchandise is still applied to women, and
conscience is still dead to the essential principle of
freedom-viz., the sacredness of the human body,
through which the soul must grow.

*"At a meeting of the British Association, held September
7, 1886, the eminent African explorer, Mr. Joseph
Thomson, spoke boldly of the evil influence of Europeans
in Africa, remarking that it has been terrible, and that for
one negro influenced for good by missionaries there were a 
thousand who had been driven to deeper degradation. We 
supplied them still with an incredible quantity of gin, rum,
gunpowder, and guns, while our defective Government
brooded over then like an incubus. He was equally outspoken
in praise of the influence of Mohammedanism.
Whatever Islam might be elsewhere, it has in the Central
Soudan a powerful effect for good, being apparently adapted
to the negro, and likely to grapple with the gin trade 'which,
so far, has been our principal contribution to Africa.' Far
up beyond the flat delta lands a striking change for the
better appears in the country and in the people. Instead
of the unwashed barbarous sans-culottes of the coast region,
with fetishism, cannibalism, and the gin bottle in congenial
union, there dwelt a native people astir with religious activity
and wonderfully advanced in the arts and industries."
3CHAPTER II
Trade in Women.
It is necessary to define clearly the practical form of evil which is now under consideration, and to the effects of which the consciences of men and women must be roused. Ordinary immorality is not the demoralisation of the slums- that horrible result of monopoly and speculation in land, where human beings are herded together like pigs- a condition into which the bargains of trade hardly enter. Neither is it the practice of free lust- a practice where unlimited liberty is claimed by both men and women, to indulge the impulses of sexual caprice. Ordinary immorality is the distinct deliberate application to women, of the trading system of money values, governed by unlimited competition. In this system activity, opportunity, and cleverness carry the day; conscientiousness and spiritual aspiration are out of place; innocence and ignorance constitute weakness, and of course go to the wall.
Ordinary immorality or fornication, assuming the female body to be an article of merchandise, necessarily subjects this merchandise to those fluctuations of the market, those variations in demand and
34

TRADE IN WOMEN     35
supply, and that tyranny of capital over labour which destroy freedom of contract.
It may be urged that women "consent" to be purchased, and that therefore there is a radical difference between the purchase of the bodies of men and women, which the anti-slavery movement has pronounced illegal, and the purchase of women by men which we are now considering. The sophistry of such evasion will be apparent if the question of "consent" and the specious hypocrisy generally involved in freedom of contract be closely examined. Freedom of contract can only take place between those who in certain essential particulars are equals. The parties to any contract must be so far equals in intelligence, that hey can equally understand any risks that may be run, and clearly foresee the probable results of the bargain; and they must be so far equals in social position, that neither party is compelled by the pressure of circumstances, or the fear of want, to accept conditions which are unjust or unwise. No freedom of contract is possible where this degree of intellectual and practical equality does not exist. Freedom implies responsibility. There is no freedom if both parties are not free. Any insistence upon consent to a bargain ignorantly or forcibly made is fraud. It is fraud darkened by varying degrees of cruelty, proportioned to the superiority of intelligence and independence possessed by the stronger party in the bargain.
The grave error of excusing purchase by the plea of consent, is fully shown when the relations of36      PURCHASE OF WOMEN

capital to labour in the present system of competitive
industry are understood.  We are now so far 
removed from the primitive trade of barter, where
values were determined by necessities, that first
principles are commonly lost sight of.  Generations
have passed during which ideas about wealth have
become confused through complicated exchanges,
stored-up labour inherited by those who no longer
labour, violent seizures in the past, or cunning ones 
in the present, with constantly changing standards or
ideals.  The quite new standard of converting everything
into a money value, and measuring its value 
by money, has taken the place of older methods. 
As a result, money has become the autocrat of industry.
Character, talent, activity, still possess 
their uses, but only as the servants of money or 
capital which have practically become interchangeable
terms.  People of quite inferior worth constantly,
and as a rule, rise into splendid material
position through the command of money; whilst
talent and invention, industry, activity, and noblest
natures, wear out their lives in drudgery, or sink
in despair from inability to command the money
which has become the condition of life and its
energies.  Thus the weaker portions of the human
race are every more and more deeply crushed down
by the misery of a limitless competitive system,
which is not based on the legitimate foundations of
trust, freedom, and sympathy, and which consequently,
by placing money as the irresponsible
governor of the industrial world, makes the hypocrisy


        TRADE IN WOMEN       37
of so-called "freedom of contract" the most
bitter mockery.
   It is necessary to realise the overwhelming and
illegitimate power of money in the present day, if
the condition of any trade is to be justly judged
and the responsibilities for the evils of a vicious 
trade rightly apportioned.  In the terrible trade
which converts the human body into a marketable
commodity, it is no figure of speech, but a very
weighty fact, that vicious men are the capitalists. The 
responsibility of that position must be recognised.
   In judging either of the parties concerned in the
trade, the question, "Who are the capitalists or
paymasters ?" is the point to be insisted on.  This
is the fundamental fact to be steadily borne in mind,
whether we consider the demoralised women who 
consent to the conversion of their bodies into merchandise;
or the wholesale traders who organise to 
meet a demand increasing beyond the power of
individuals to supply; or the State which connives
at the trade; or society which condones it.  The capital 
on which this nefarious traffic rests, is supplied 
by licentious men.  This is the great economic fact
on which the whole system rests.  All legislation 
and all benevolent effort that do not recognise this
fundamental fact, will hopelessly wander in the 
labyrinth of evil trade, with no clue to direct their
energies aright.  From this unnatural employment
of capital, two other economic evils directly arise -
vis., first, the discouragement of honest industry;
second, an unfair competition with male labour.38     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
     The discouragement of honest industry is a very
serious economic evil. Any discouragement to
patient industry, thrift, and self-control, is direct
encouragement to reckless improvidence, vicious indulgence,
and the creation of a dangerously increasing
predatory horde. Through obstacles to
honest labour, our prisons are now filled with
criminals, our streets with the vicious, and our workhouses
with paupers. The industrious workers are
taxed beyond endurance to support the institutions
rendered necessary by the suicidal policy of degrading
labour, and our free institution of citizen police
is being rapidly converted into a costly military
despotism to meet the imminent danger of revolutionary
outbreaks.
     The discouraging difficulties which now surround
all honest industry press with increased force upon
women's labour, and compel a moral heroism to
resist the special temptation which crowds upon
them.
     It is now a fact that in every large city no woman
with any pretension to natural attractiveness can
fail to meet a purchaser. The streets, the hotels
and lodging-houses-too many of our homes, also
-are filled with a mighty army of vicious men, who
think it neither shame nor wrong to purchase for
shillings or pounds, as the case may be, a temporary
physical gratification, without reflection upon the
inevitable results, individual and social, of their
temporary action. The knowledge that money may
be gained so easily, spreads from woman to woman.


TRADE IN WOMEN     39
The contrast between the ease with which the wages
of sin may be gained, and the laborious, even
crushing, methods of honest industry, becomes an
ever present and burning temptation to all working
women.
     It is undoubtedly true that the numerical excess
of women in Great Britain, with other economic
facts, intensify most heavily upon woman the grinding
pressure of our present industrial system. All
rescue workers seeking to help their fallen sisters
are constantly confronted with the appalling answer,
"Give me work, I cannot starve." The awful extent
of woman's industrial misery would now be more
fully realised, had not well-meant benevolent efforts
called in the harsh land of the police to suppress
begging, and thus crush it out of sight.
     The increasing and perplexing flood of women in
the streets, begging to be brought, is a strange commentary
on the effect of the stern repression of
begging for alms. If in the future, in addition to
the suppression of ordinary begging by men and 
women, another edict goes forth forbidding women
to present themselves for sale, but not forbidding
men to purchase them, gross injustice to women
will be added to a cruel abuse of power, and fresh
impulse given to male vice. Certainly if it were
in the nature of women to become murderous
criminals, any increasingly harsh and unjust attempts
to crush their misery and degradation out of sight
would drive them into violent crime.
     But it is not the seamstress slowly starving in40     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
her garret, nor the mass of struggling poverty,  that
is alone, or even chiefly, beset by the fiery temptations
of gain, and the enticing pleasures which money
can provide. The deterioration of character, which
is the gravest result of a false system of political
economy, extends to much wider circles of society.
This serious fact is sufficient to prove  the error or
those who look to the industrial independence of
women, as the chief means of destroying licentiousness.
Although freedom to obtain decent remunerative
employment will secure an important condition
for checking social evil, it will be a means
only, it can never attain the end.
     The great army of servants, whether in public or
private dwellings, are surrounded by constant
temptations to supplement their wages or relieve
their monotonous labour by selling themselves.
When we remember the conditions under which the
vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures
and privations of their homes, their undeveloped
mental state in relation to social duties, the exhausting
work upon which the majority of them enter
in hotels, lodging-houses, struggling households-or
the special danger of rich, careless establishments;
and then realise both the condition under which their
service drags on and the natural instincts of the
human being, it is easy to understand why to a 
frightfully increasing extent they yield to the solicitations
to which they are exposed. The five shillings
secretly gained at night becomes an important
addition to scanty wages, the stolen pleasures an


TRADE IN WOMEN     41
intoxicating relief to drudgery. The economic effect
of thus bringing the lightly-earned wages of vice into
competition with the hard-earned wages of honest
industry, is to discredit the latter, and to produce
discontent and careless unwilling service in industries
for which women are naturally better fitted
than men; for the same state of things that is injuring
domestic service, exists in dress-making, millinery,
and all peculiarly feminine industries.
     If we take the wider range of labour in which
women compete more directly with men in the
labour market, it will be found that this practice
of purchasing women introduces an unfair element
into the remuneration of labour. The introduction
of the slave principle (the purchase of the human
body) in cheapening women's labour has a formidable
effect in depressing the wages of working-men.
In all systems of industry carried on by slaves the
cost of maintenance is as a rule the limit of expenditure-
the equivalent of wages. Also in the industrial
systems of so-called free industry the maintenance
of the labourer again forms a limit beyond
which profit cannot be extracted, for no man will
consent to labour for less wages than will keep him
alive. But this is not the case in regard to women's
labour. As was proved a generation ago in France,
and can be amply verified in other civilised countries,
women's wages are forced down below subsistence
point.
     This important fact, with its cause, has evidently
not been fully realised, even by so close and impartial42    PURCHASE OF WOMEN

an observer as Mill. He says, "The wages at least
of single women must be equal to their support; but
need not be more than equal to it; the minimum, in
their case, is the pittance absolutely requisite for the
sustenance of one human being. Now, the lowest
point to which the most superabundant competition
can permanently depress the wages of a man is
always somewhat more than this. The ne plus ultra
of low wages can hardly occur in any occupation
which the person employed has to live by, except the
occupation of a woman." Mill is evidently uncertain
as to the causes of the underpayment of women in
cases of equal efficiency with men, and is inclined
to attribute it to injustice, and to overcrowding in
a few employments. He remarks: "When the
efficiency is equal but the pay unequal, the ony
explanation that can be given is custom, which,
making almost every woman an appendage of some
man, enables men to take the lion's share of whatever
belongs to both."
     But in this generation, which has thrown open
the broad gates of education to women, and which has
enormously extended the range of employments into
which they are invited to enter, the causes which
Mill suggests (overcrowding, injustice, etc.) do not
seem to give a sufficient economic reason. One
powerful and growing cause of derangement in the
natural rewards of labour has been overlooked-viz.,
the unequal competition with male labour which
must result, when the wages given by vice are allowed
to supplement the underpayment for honest work,


TRADE IN WOMEN     43
and the street-dor key makes up for the deficient
salary. Whilst the phase of human slavery exists
and the female body remains an article of merchandise,
the increasing competition with male labour will
make itself more severely felt, as wider fields of
industry are extended to women, and they develop
increasing ability to enter them. The wages of 
women can never permanently rise to a just scale
of labour value, until this slavish principle is eliminated,
because this purchase introduces an uneconomical
element into the remuneration of labour,
which destroys any legitimate effect of demand and
supply. It enables competitive employers, solely
intent on profit, to beat down the price of male as 
well as female labour indefinitely. Indeed, we have
by no means reached the limits of this injustice.
The practice of purchase is still more dangerous in
an economic point of view, because whilst the labour
of all women tends to sink to the lowest point of
\remuneration, this lowest point can be reached in the
labour of  the young and strong, who are the most
eagerly sought for as merchandise.
     The increasing employment of less remunerated
female labour, while male labour stands idle is an
alarming fact. The family is barely held together
by the earnings of a daughter, whilst father and 
brother lounge about the pot-house. The results of
any sudden stoppage of a factory where large
amounts of this cheap labour has been employed
(as in the Barking jute factory, where 800 girls
were suddenly thrown out of employment) is an44 
PURCHASE OF WOMEN
object-lesson in the suicidal policy of degrading women.
The natural order of industry by which the man is the chief material support of the family, is disturbed and destroyed by this unnatural practice.
The purchase of young women adds cruelty to fraud Youth must always fail to realise results which are only known through the experience of age. No amount of cautions or theoretic teaching given to the young, can ever place them on an equality with the experienced adult. Moreover, it is Nature's law of youth, that sexual attraction is quite out of the proportion to intellectual development. The fact of this great natural law of slower mental growth, is the Creator's imperative command, laid upon the older generation, to protect and guide the young of both sexes. The corruption of the young by the adult is not only fraud- it is dastardly cruelty.
Moreover, Nature has laid upon women the more important share in the great work of continuing the race. It is not therefore pity, but justice, which requires that reverent and grateful aid should be rendered by men, in the grand duty of creating an ever nobler race.
Trust, freedom, and sympathy, form the bases of true relations between men and women, as they are also the moral foundations of political economy. 
The depth of that sin against human nature-fornication, or purchase- is seen in the results which follow from tempting women away from the paths

45
TRADE IN WOMEN
of honest industry. These effects necessarily extend to the whole position and character of one half the race, when any portion of women are turned into human merchandise. They are seen by a careful study of those reckless or hardened ones who have become so direful a problem in all our large towns. How is that growing army of shameless women created, who, with their companions, so fearfully avenge all social injustice to our boys and girls, and to our young men and maidens?
It is well known that there are thousands of "fallen women" in London. What does this general statement in relation to women mean in detail? What is involved in living by the sale of the human body? The woman, however "fallen," is still a human being with its desperate clinging to life. Let it be realised what is involved in thousands of women living to the age of three score years and ten, who must feed themselves three times a day, and provide lodging, clothing, and the satisfaction of all human needs by the repeated sale of their bodies. Thousands of women, with all the craving and ever active necessities of the human being, bodies and souls to be kept alive by the money of their buyers, and who are compelled to use every art of corruption, to find the fresh purchasers through whom they have learned to live. Women to whom lust and drink rapidly become a second nature, and sloth and falsehood habitual. Women driven on by ceaseless material needs to lower and lower phases of misery and vice, in whom a bitterness in engendered that46     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
revenges itself on the weakness and innocence of
youth, tempting the lad when the adult ceases to
purchase. Women who, terrible fact, finally losing
their own marketable value, and scourged by their
own daily recurring needs, throw away the last
remnants of womanly instinct, and drag down young
girls into their hell of life!
     The grave fact must be borne in mind that each
one of these hundred thousand marketable women-
although once an innocent infant-now forms a 
centre of ever-widening corrupt influence in the
varied relations of life. Each one, with father and 
mother, brothers and sisters, friends and acquaintances,
servants, and tradespeople, is exercising a
fatal influence; desecrating the sanctity of sexual
relations, proving the ease with which the rewards
of vice are gained, bewildering the conscience of the
innocent, and transmitting sensual tendencies to
their descendants.
     From these bought women come those enemies
of social progress who enslave our young men of the
higher classes, our future statesmen, those who
should be the leaders of the nation. From Skittles
to Cora Pearl our generation has witnessed the enslaving
power of these tyrants of lust. They have
dried up the generous enthusiasm of our youth, and
destroyed those principles of trust, freedom, and 
sympathy, which should guide our domestic and
foreign policy. From these purchased women-
this human merchandise-come the frenzied menads
of bloody revolution, human tigers who delight in


TRADE IN WOMEN     47
destruction and torture. They are growing up
amongst us here, as elsewhere, moral dynamite ready
for explosion.
     Who is guilty of this appalling conversion of
women into demons; this contagion of evil which in
ever-widening circles is destroying our moral health,
and injuring the modesty, freedom, and dignity of
all womanhood? The immediate cause is the man,
whether prince or peasant, who purchases a woman
for the gratification of lust. It is this purchase
which draws women into the clutches of a godless
money-making machine, which never loosens its hold
of the feeble creature, until the essential features
of womanhood are crushed out of recognition.
The irresponsible polyandry of prostitution with
its logical acceptance and regulation of brothels, has
replaced in the West the polygamy of the East. In
both, degradation, discouragement of marriage, and 
injustice to women, create a fatal barrier to permanent
national progress. But there is a more
insidious source of evil than the direct purchaser.
The conversion of women into merchandise, whilst
it produces a dangerous deterioration of female
character, unavoidably reacts upon male character.
This evil tends in women to produce the vices of the
slave-viz., deceit, falsehood, and servility; in men
it tends to foster the vices of the slave-holder,
arrogance, selfishness, and cruelty. In both it
engenders that deadly sin-hypocrisy. (Matt. xxiii.)
     Hypocrisy is the vice which, above all others, our
Lord denounces with the most awful condemna-48
PURCHASE OF WOMEN
tion; raising the drunkard and the harlot, with his far-seeing, merciful purity, and thrusting the scribe and Pharisee- secret fornicators- into their place: "He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone." Hypocrisy is the vice which distinguishes in the most marked degree those nations which dare to call themselves Christian, but who practically deny every principle of Christ's teaching in the conduct of public and, to a great extent, private affairs. It is under this reign of hypocrisy that a more dangerous condition of sexual evil has grown up amongst us than has ever existed amongst heathen nations. When a savage tribe enslaves its enemies and trades in human flesh, it does not trade against its conscience. In its rudimentary condition of slow emergence from brutish ignorance, it knows no higher standard than a savage display of muscular force. When a polygamous nation buys both men and women, or endeavours to enforce the physical chastity of women by harem imprisonment, it obeys the highest authority it knows of, its religion, believed in, although erroneous in its teaching. The bitterest hatred and undying hostility felt by Mohammedan as well as savage communities to their Western invaders is due to the violation of their women, and the treatment of those women according to the demoniacal and hypocritical customs of their lustful conquerors. However false the standard of the savage or semi-barbarous people may be, they possess one, and strive to realise it. But the corruption which is the latest and intensest phase

49
TRADE IN WOMEN
of competitive money values has introduced into the most enlightened nations, is unexampled in the history of the race. The deliberate reasoning out, and justification of the conversion of women into things, is the abuse of our highest faculties, our power of reason and conscience. Moral hypocrisy, founded on intellectual dishonesty, is the most dangerous disease that can afflict the human race.
The cruel vice of fornication, protected by hypocrisy, is sowing moral scrofula broadcast, and like an insidious poison producing generations of feeble rickety wills, and maniacal monsters. It is the degeneracy of the race! The palliation of this vice is shaking the foundation of our civilisation, by destroying the moral basis on which alone progressive society can rest. The purchaser of a woman is directly guilty, but a deeper source of evil influence is the man or the woman who excuses and sanctions the purchase of women, by upholding a double standard of morality for the sexes. In the present age, whilst the actively licentious are following evil customs like sheep, their intellectual and spiritual leaders are throwing a veil of hypocrisy over these customs. The God-given faculties for creating literature, investigating science, and promoting religion, are being perverted to the justification or palliation of lust.
Our Brothers have hitherto been the rough and active pioneers of human progress; first moulding the material framework of society, then becoming its leaders and teachers; teachers of those funda-
4
50
PURCHASE OF WOMEN
mental moral relations on which human society rests.
But a time has come in the development of the race, when much of the teaching and judgement formed by one half the race alone, is seen to be liable to error, and requires to be weighed and approved by the other half of mankind. 
The woman half is necessarily slower in development from being appointed to bear that great altruistic burden - maternity. But the very shackles or sufferings thus undergone for the sake of the race, tend gradually to produce in women special adaptations to the higher spiritual ends of creation.
When we now inquire into and weigh the value of the teachings offered to women as the guide of their human relationship to men, we are struck with its amazing contradictions. All classes and sections bring forth their varying opinions.  The scientist and the theologian, the physician and the comtist, the lawyer and the journalist, the literary and the business man, the official and the man of leisure, are all seen carrying their load of heterogeneous materials to help build up the Babel of advice to women. All assert their knowledge of "Nature and Instinct," of "Science and History," or the tragical plea of material necessity, to justify opinions founded on misunderstood data. But the sectional opinions of a portion of the race must necessarily be either imperfect, arrogant or sentimental, and God confounds the Tower which foolish mortals strive to

51
TRADE IN WOMEN
raise to Heaven. All those, both men and women, who retain their reverence for sex, turn away from this unseemly Babel of conceit and short-sightedness, and ponder these things in hearts earnestly seeking truth.
The great question now at issue is the Unity of the Moral Law. This unity is being attacked by the intellectual short-sightedness, or unconsciousness intellectual dishonesty of those who should be its most enlightened upholders. One of our leading family journals has lately stated that "the modern notion of equality impairs the responsibility of special classes for special virtues." There is a sense in which special classes may be said to hold special responsibility. Women who are so vitally affected by the relations of the sexes, are especially called on to strengthen and guide the sexual virtue of a people. they must consider the conditions essential to such virtue, and when they clearly see the truth, an army of noble men will zealously help in shaping truth into practice. The great truth which women are now learning is the necessity that every man should be chaste. this is the truth so long unrecognised, but at last discovered as the solution of the great social problem. Without male chastity female chastity is impossible.
Virtue is not self-righteousness. It is unconscious of itself, because it has become a mode of individual existence, and it maintains its vitality by care for others. A chaste woman does not think of her own purity, she thinks of the poor girl drudging in cellars.52     PURCHASE OF WOMEN
or hurrying at night, waylaid by tempters, to her
poor home, or "drilled" in the rich man's shop; she
thinks of her cherished sons with their noble and 
innocent young manhood exposed to the influence
of the corrupt adult. Woman's responsibility for
the purity of society commands her to announce
the conditions of purity, and unmask with a relentless
justice-which is now the truest mercy-those
destroyers of national purity, the upholders of a 
double standard of sexual morality. The fact that
so many cultivated intellects resort to fallacy or
metaphysical abstraction, to palliate the destructive
abuse of our sexual powers, is a direct call on
women to help in spreading truth.
     There cannot be one moral law for human beings
which is at the same time of unequal application to
them. Moral law is not the creation of mediaeval
art, which, substituting a symbol for entity, represents
the Great Creator as an aged man, with long
grey beard, seated upon clouds. The moral law is
not the arbitrary dictum of a man. The authority
of the moral law springs from its adaptation by the
Creator, to the nature of the beings subjected to it.
It is the guide to the highest end of that nature, the 
necessary method by which its welfare is secured.
Its authority is absolute, not relative, because it
is the method of highest growth. Divine law admits
of no exception, it cannot contradict itself. It is
equally binding on the weakest, as on the strongest;
on the man as on the woman-or it is not law. If
man are so constituted that they can grow to the


TRADE IN WOMEN     53
full stature of manhood without obedience to the
law of purity, then the moral law of purity does not
exist for them, because it is not a necessary method
of growth to their highest human development;
their nature is not adapted by the Creator to the
moral law; its influence over them is thus weakened,
its absolute authority destroyed.
     To profess to accept the Unity of the Moral Law,
but at the same time seek to avoid its consequences,
is hypocrisy. The moral law cannot be evaded by
any metaphysical creation of "noble moral paradoxes."*
Any attempt to define purity as unequally
binding on the sexes by being "more for women, but
not less for men," is worse than nonsense, it is dangerous
sophistry. It is a confusion of right and 
wrong, placing men and women on diverging paths
which will lead them ever farther apart. It is a 
strange spectacle the nineteenth century Adam
cowering under the overpowering justice of the
moral law, seeking refuge behind a paradox! But
the weak and erring children of one Great Creator,
bound to live together and help or injure one another,
must not be turned away from each other by the
arrogance or ignorance of any portion of the race.
What mortal can determine the varying kind and 
quality of temptations which assail another mortal
life? Who shall dare to say to another, You are
not tempted as I am? Who can measure the weakness
or the strength of another soul, and measure
out judgment by shifting standards of right and
* See the Spectator, July 31, 1886.54
PURCHASE OF WOMEN
wrong? Only by humility can we gain wisdom. Only by doing the will of the Creator shall we learn the doctrine of Truth.

On a future occasion it will be necessary to dwell on those differences of adaptation in men and women which are now so widely misunderstood, and which therefore produce discord instead of harmony in human life. It will then be seen that the cruel and destructive practice of purchase can and will be entirely abolished. By the triumphant vindication of the unity of the moral law, which underlies equally political economy and all departments of social life, our race will enter upon a new and hopeful stage of future progress.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND.