of decency. Go all the world over, and
you will see no such impudence as in the streets of London, which makes
many foreigners give our women in general a bad character, from the vile
specimens they meet with from one end of the town to the other. Our
sessions' papers are full of the trials of impudent sluts, who first
decoy men and then rob them; a meanness the courtesans of Rome and
Venice abhor.

How many honest women, those of the inferior sort especially, get
loathsome distempers from their husband's commerce with these creatures,
which distempers are often entailed on posterity; nor have we an
hospital separated for that purpose, which does not contain too many
instances of honest poor wretches made miserable by villains of
husbands.

And now I have mentioned the villany of some husbands in the lower state
of life, give me leave to propose, or at least to wish, that they were
restrained from abusing their wives at that barbarous rate, which is
now practised by butchers, carmen, and such inferior sort of fellows,
who are public nuisances to civil neighbourhoods, and yet nobody cares
to interpose, because the riot is between a man and his wife.

I see no reason why every profligate fellow shall have the liberty to
disturb a whole neighbourhood, and abuse a poor honest creature at a
most inhuman rate, and is not to be called to account because it is his
wife; this sort of barbarity was never so notorious and so much
encouraged as at present, for every vagabond thinks he may cripple his
wife at pleasure; and it is enough to pierce a heart of stone to see how
barbarously some poor creatures are beaten and abused by merciless dogs
of husbands.

It gives an ill example to the growing generation, and this evil will
gain ground on us if not prevented; it may be answered, the law has
already provided redress, and a woman abused may swear the peace against
her husband, but what woman cares to do that? It is revenging herself on
herself, and not without considerable charge and trouble.

There ought to be a shorter way, and when a man has beaten his wife,
which by the by is a most unmanly action, and great sign of cowardice,
it behoves every neighbour who has the least humanity or compassion, to
complain to the next justice of the peace, who should be empowered to
set him in the stocks for the first offence; to have him well scourged
at the whipping-post for the second; and if he persisted in his
barbarous abuse of the h