Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors.  Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society.  It is less venial than murder; and the punishment which is inflicted on her who destroys her child to escape reproach is lighter than the life of agony and disease to which the prostitute is irrecoverably doomed.  Has a woman obeyed the impulse of unerring nature;—­society declares war against her, pitiless and eternal war:  she must be the tame slave, she must make no reprisals; theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance.  She lives a life of infamy:  the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her from all return.  She dies of long and lingering disease:  yet SHE is in fault, SHE is the criminal, SHE the froward and untamable child,—­and society, forsooth, the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from her undefiled bosom!  Society avenges herself on the criminals of her own creation; she is employed in anathematizing the vice to-day, which yesterday she was the most zealous to teach.  Thus is formed one-tenth of the population of London:  meanwhile the evil is twofold.  Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of chastity from the society of modest and accomplished women, associate with these vicious and miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness.  Their body and mind alike crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiocy and disease become perpetuated in their miserable offspring, and distant generations suffer for the bigoted morality of their forefathers.  Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law.  A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result.  I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous:  on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion.  But this is a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss.  That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude:  the genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed book of God ere man can read the inscription on his heart.  How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the mirror of nature!—­