Publisher's Synopsis
"The two-fold object which we desire to attain in the following pages, and to which we earnestly entreat the attention of our readers, is the exposure and amendment of a vast social evil, which we have reason to believe has, to most reflecting men, become well nigh intolerable. It will be obvious that to bring this evil, with effect, to the bar of public opinion, we must probe it to the very core, and fearlessly unveil and drag into the light its indecent mysteries. In so doing we shall doubtless incur the censures of those easygoing people who agree with the poet that "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise;" who, like the bird of the desert, by hiding their heads deem their bodies out of danger; who, dead to all the generous sympathies which elevate man above the brute, would reduce the minds of others to their own dull and dreary level of stolid inanity; of those prudent persons who, closing their eyes to the lightning flash and their ears to the vollied thunder, sneak through the world by any side-path sooner than encounter a difficulty foot to foot and hand to hand; and, without pretending to any extraordinary knowledge of the human heart, we fear, of the majority of those women who have already sacrificed their modesty at the altar of custom; and, above all, of that class whose presumptuous charlatanism we desire to lay bare. But for all this we care not one jot, provided the mists of imposture be dispelled, and our countrywomen rescued from the disgrace and degradation of an odious system, which, originating in a dissolute age, has since been promoted and encouraged by self-interested empirics, and sanctioned by indifference, credulity, and error."
