e
time) only fifty years ago, there are now _twenty_.

240. And who can say how far the employment of _men_, in the cases
alluded to, may have _assisted_ in producing this change, so disgraceful
to the present age, and so injurious to the female sex? The prostitution
and the swarms of illegitimate children have a natural and inevitable
tendency to lessen that respect, and that kind and indulgent feeling,
which is due from all men to virtuous women. It is well known that the
unworthy members of any profession, calling, or rank in life, cause, by
their acts, the whole body to sink in the general esteem; it is well
known, that the habitual dishonesty of merchants trading abroad, the
habitual profligate behaviour of travellers from home, the frequent
proofs of abject submission to tyrants; it is well known, that these may
give the character of dishonesty, profligacy, or cowardice, to a whole
nation. There are, doubtless, many men in Switzerland, who abhor the
infamous practices of men _selling themselves_, by whole regiments, to
fight for any foreign state that will pay them, no matter in what cause,
and no matter whether against their own parents or brethren; but the
censure falls upon the _whole nation_: and '_no money, no Swiss_,' is a
proverb throughout the world. It is, amidst those scenes of prostitution
and bastardy, impossible for men in general to respect the female sex to
the degree that they formerly did; while numbers will be apt to adopt
the unjust sentiment of the old bachelor, POPE, that '_every woman is,
at heart, a rake_.'

241. Who knows, I say, in what degree the employment of _men_-operators
may have tended to produce this change, so injurious to the female sex?
Aye, and to encourage unfeeling and brutal men to propose that the dead
bodies of females, if _poor_, should be _sold_ for the purpose of
exhibition and dissection before an audience of men; a proposition that
our '_rude_ ancestors' would have answered, not by words, but by blows!
Alas! our women may talk of 'small-clothes' as long as they please; they
may blush to scarlet at hearing animals designated by their sexual
appellations; it may, to give the world a proof of our excessive modesty
and delicacy, even pass a law (indeed we have done it) to punish 'an
_exposure of the person_'; but as long as our streets swarm with
prostitutes, our asylums and private houses with bastards; as long as we
have _man_-operators in the delicate cases alluded to