The San Francisco Call - Monday, April 8, 1895

THE WILDE CASE.

It is to be regretted we cannot have a wall of protection around the United States that would not only guard American industry from the competition of the underpaid labor of Europe, but American homes from the contamination of Europe's aristocratic scandals. Certainly the ill effects that flow from the competition of the starving workingmen of Manchester are hardly to be accounted worse than the vile abominations that emanate from every new disclosure of the debasing sensuality of the so-called upper classes.

The telegraphic dispatches sent to this country in regard to the Oscar Wilde libel suit are among the worst offenses of the time. They reek with vileness and it is only by the most careful editing that even the substance of them can be reproduced in a newspaper that makes any pretenses to decency. That some American journals have been so eager for sensations as to make these telegrams the chief news of the day and emphasize them with conspicuous headlines is an evidence of their corrupting influence, and if the tone of American society were not healthy, wholesome and moral to the core the evil might have been much greater than it has been.

To the American mind nothing conceivable can be more abhorrent and disgusting than the revelations made in this case. Had the foul story been raked up from the slums of London, where the offscourings of humanity are dumped to fester in their own filth, it would have been bad enough, but coming, as it does, from the aristocratic quarter of Mayfair, and involving a peer of the realm, a millionaire, and an author who for years has posed as the oracle of a literary cult and a fastidious society, the abomination of it passes beyond the measure of ordinary words, and one can only borrow the language of Parson Brownlow and declare that if a thousand tons of tartar emetic were poured down the throat of hell it could not vomit forth a fouler crowd than this.

Few people will care to moralize on a subject of such foulness, and yet the reflecting mind can hardly fail to discern in it an evidence that a great historic society is rotting to decay. While the British empire still stands in outward majesty seemingly strong the Wilde case and the Cleve-land-street scandal give evidence of an internal corruption that is destroying the fabric from within. Never since the decadence of the Roman empire has manhood sunk so low as in modern London. In that great capital among men and women of rank and station there has been disclosed a depravity as low as that of Chinatown, and in that lowest depth, a deeper depth penetrated by Wilde, to which even Chinatown affords no parallel.

To rightly picture the debasement of humanity in decaying London, Dean Swift would have to be born again to write his story of the Yahoos and write it worse. Perhaps some attempt at picturing it might be useful in England as a warning to the luxurious, the voluptuous and the sensual, of the depths to which they are swiftly descending. In this country, however, we do not need it. The very suggestion of it is abhorrent to every American instinct, and the only sentiment felt here in regard to it is one of indignation that its indecencies should have been telegraphed here at all.