A Selfless Reformer
SOME sixty years ago Josephine Butler (whose centenary is now being celebrated at the Central Hall and at Westminster Abbey) began her public work for social amelioration. It is perhaps not too much to say that all public efforts, national and international, to abolish the White Slave trade owe their origin to her.
' Her point of attack was the " State Regulation of Vice " in England. She founded her work upon certain moral and religious principles, which ran counter to the conventional conviction of the day because they appeared incompatible with expediency. She had as her opponents not only the great mass of thoughtless pleasure-lovers and careless cynics, but a number of very good and anxious men and women—distrustful of what seemed to them sentimental theory and ardently wishing well to the world. During the first years of her struggle she had but a small backing of evidence to support the faith which was in her. " My appeal is to Christ and to Christ alone," she said. The evidences she lacked have since been marshalled and expediency has been found to be on her side. Safety for the individual, physical health and strength for the race, would appear to be the result of the practice of the principles she advocated. Apart, therefore, from its details her work has a philosophic value of no slight kind.
Christianity sanctions no such expression as " human dregs," she asserted, and it suggests no double code of morals for the two sexes. For seventeen years (from 1869 to 1886) Josephine Butler gave her whole heart and soul, her whole influence and eloquence, to get English Law changed in regard to " Licensed Houses " wherein women who were certified as free from disease (after compulsory surgical examination), together with those who ran such houses, were legally protected in the carrying on of their trade. The fall of the Licensed House here shook opinion on the Continent. The movement started by a small committee of men and women was felt all over Europe, for many years without much legal effect, but not without great influence for good.
To-day the League of Nations Report on The Traffic in Women and Children confirms in every direction what Josephine Butler and her colleagues never ceased to proclaim : that " Regulation promotes national and even 'international traffic and commerce in prostitutes." The experts who prepared the Report pay honour to the memory of the woman who first began to undermine the system and call attention to the marked influence on public opinion abroad, which resulted from the long controversy she inaugurated. It is not too much to say that Josephine Butler changed the whole outlook of the Western World on the matter of sex morality.
What sort of personality had this great reformer ?
A good deal has-been written about her, many friends have attempted to describe her, yet the outlines 'of der' personality are not very easy to decipher. Richmond painted her, Mrs. Fawcett wrote a whole book aboitt her, a good deal of autobiographical matter was gatherid ' from letters and her own life of her husband, and put together in a Memoir by G. W. and A. L. Johnson.
Most of her friends seem to have 'been quite dazzled by her goodness and count up her virtues in the style of the professed hagiographer. The reader is left to form his judgment upon what she said of herself. She was, she writes, " a convinced Christian of the evangelical type." It is a type now gone, and in its last phases the living flame of the spiritual life of its professors was somewhat obscured by its phraseology. It came easily to Josephine Butler to speak of her soul, but somehow we do not see it at all plainly, except in a moment of agony when her child died. Nevertheless, it is obvious that from her religion she drew her commanding force of Will.
Belonging to the Northumbrian Greys, she had always something about her of the great lady. For her publicity had neither temptation nor terror. On several occa. sions, when (to quote a simple friend), she " had the mob after her" and she was in imminent danger of hei life, she remained without resentment or fear. Physical danger left her as calm as did the almost inconceivable insults heaped upon her by the Press and in the House of Commons. It was " all in the day's work." She had social charm, and the fine carriage of a woman of her standing ; always beautifully dressed, and always serene. But it is as difficult to account for the devotion she inspired as for the exasperation that she created.
She was, as it were, in advance of her time, yet she does not belong to to-day. Her few remaining friends lament that the world at large has forgotten her. Perhaps she was too selfless to be long remembered. She raised a storm by breaking conventions which have ceased to exist. It was heroically done, but every silly woman is at liberty to do it now. She had the power to impart enthusiasm for a cause. The cause lives—but the enthu- siasts whom she informed with her fervour are for the most part gone. She herself died years before the War, quietly, in her sleep. Among her great gifts (if it is not a contradiction in terms to say soy was a certain imper- sonality. It is a gift not rarely found, amongthose.designed by the Great Maker of instruments for the performance of specially hard and apparently unsuitable tasks.
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