A NINETEENTH CENTURY SATIRE
7
An Age in which crimes of the deepest dye
Are dramatised to please the public eye;
Wherein low cunning, fraud, embezzlement
And vice are blent with sickly sentiment;
Whereby men seek to shine with borrowed rays,
Mere plagiarists, alike in plots and plays:
An Age, whose legislators are unjust
Towards the victims of a loathsome lust;[1]
NOTES
- ↑ Towards the victims of a loathsome lust;] It has been at various times a very easy matter to raise a gust of pharisaic indignation against the thousands of unfortunates in this vast city and elsewhere, who sell themselves for bread; against whom the rabid bowlings of some portions of the religious pressmen of the day have been the loudest. There are many such sanctimonious howlers in printer's ink, who look on such a fallen creature as but who have not sufficient Christian courage to raise a howl of juster indignation against the rich and titled wretches who entrapped such creatures into a life of infamy;—scoundrels who are experts in the business of seduction; who furnish funds and employment for the baby-farmer, foundlings for children's homes, and who drive many poor creatures,—once as virtuous as their own wives and sisters,—to commit the crime of child-murder, for which the seducer, and not the seduced ought to be exalted between e.irth and heaven by the professional hangman. It is high time that the seducer should be deemed lower in the scale of degradation than his victim; but while she is scorned, her betrayer holds his
'The worn out nuisance of the public streets'
