famous
examples of drunkenness, violence, debauch, and murder. Yes, and too
frequently unnatural crimes at the tenderest age add to this
accumulation of horrors.

The rich may shroud their vices in shadow and mystery, and respect the
sanctity of the domestic hearth, but the most honest artisans, occupying
nearly always a single chamber with their family, are compelled, from
want of beds and space, to make their children sleep together, sons and
daughters, close to themselves, husbands and wives.

If we shudder at the fatal consequences of such necessity almost
inevitably imposed on poor, but honest artisans, what must it be with
workpeople depraved by ignorance or misconduct? What fearful examples do
they not present to unhappy children, abandoned, or rather excited, from
their tenderest youth to every brutal impulse and animal propensity?
Have they even the idea of what is right, decent, and modest? Must they
not be as strange to social laws as the savages of the New World? Poor
creatures! Corrupted at their very birth, who in the prisons, whither
their wanderings and idleness often lead them, are already stigmatised
by the coarse and terrible metaphor, "Graines de Bagne" (Seeds of the
Gaol)! and the metaphor is a correct one. This sinister prediction is
almost invariably accomplished: the Galleys or the Bridewell, each sex
has its destiny.

We do not intend here to justify any profligacy. Let us only compare the
voluntary degradation of a female carefully educated in the bosom of a
wealthy family, which has set her none but the most virtuous examples.
Let us compare, we say, this degradation with that of La Louve, a
creature, as it were, reared in vice, by vice, and for vice, and to whom
is pointed out, not without reason, prostitution as a condition
protected by the government! This is true. There is a bureau where she
is registered, certificated, and signs her name. A bureau where a
mother has a right to authorise the prostitution of her daughter; a
husband the prostitution of his wife. This place is termed the "Bureau
des Moeurs" (the Office of Manners). Must not society have a vice most
deeply rooted, incurable in the place of the laws which regulate
marriage, when power,--yes, power,--that grave and moral abstraction, is
obliged, not only to tolerate, but to regulate, to legalise, to protect,
to render it less injurious and dangerous, this sale of body and soul;
which, multiplied by the unbridled appetites of