"It is well that we should understand clearly the illegal character of the Acts we oppose. I have been the more deeply impressed with the importance of this aspect of the matter, by reading the almost universal and powerful testimony of our great lawyers and historians to the danger of introducing, in any single instance, a lax, vicious, or unjust principle into our criminal code, and to the moral and social evils which such an introduction necessarily involves. Niebuhr, De Tocqueville, Guizot, Hallam, Lieber, Creasy, Mackintosh, Blackstone, and a host of others, have again and again pointed out that upon the justice and purity of the penal legislation of a country the political wellbeing of that country mainly depends. [...] ...when it comes to a matter of such awful seriousness as that of a woman’s honour, involving loss of character, which character is often, to a poor woman, her sole earthly property, her only possession and capital; involving, moreover, the penalties of personal assault, of a nature inadmissible hitherto in law even in the case of proved outrageous guilt; of imprisonment and of public registration as an infamous person; when it comes to this, I say, it is an awful thing to put the accusation in the power of the executive — that executive being the secret police, paid by the State, for the sole business of detecting and hunting down suspected or unchaste women. Again, the evil is aggravated by the fact that no other witness to the guilt of the woman is required, except the government spy, and that he, by this law, is not required to bring forward any overt act on the part of his prisoner, or one iota of positive proof, but is only required to believe and swear that the woman has a certain purpose or intention."