THERE'LL ALWAYS BE AN...

THE morals of the British have always intrigued and baffled foreigners. For centuries, Europeans visiting that cold, controlled country have discovered to their amazement--and frequent envy--that the abundance, subtlety and variety of sexual sport in London's demimonde make continental capitals seem parochial. Until recent years, it was impossible to go to dinner at London's most fashionable clubs or private houses without passing swarms of well-turned-out and sometimes handsome streetwalkers standing guard on the sidewalk. Like many another foreign analyst of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, French Diarist Hippolyte Taine, visiting London in the mid 19th century, could not comprehend how the English could sustain the "vehemence and pungency of their passions" against "the harsh, though silent, grinding of their moral machinery."

There is a widespread feeling that Britain's moral machinery is not grinding as harshly as it used to. Much in English life today suggests decadence and dissolution. Since the girls were driven off the streets four years ago, they have taken to advertising their services in shop windows as "masseuses," "models," or "French teachers." London's booming striptease parlors offer some of the crudest live pornography to be seen publicly in Europe. Its parks in summer are pre-empted by couples who aren't just necking. One third of all teen-age brides in Britain are already pregnant. Innumerable scandals preceding the Profumo case suggest considerable promiscuity, along with sexual arrangements infinitely more complex than the old-fashioned triangle. And, as everyone knows, homosexuality is "the English vice." Psychologist G. M. Carstairs commented recently: "Popular morality is now a wasteland, littered with the debris of broken conventions. Concepts such as honor, or even honesty, have an old-fashioned sound, but nothing has taken their place."

Getting Caught. This harsh judgment may overlook the fact that Britain was never the sort of place Victorian morality pretended it was. If London today resembles Babylon-on-Thames, it is little more than a de luxe model of the brutal, carnal 18th century city whose brothels, boudoirs and gin shops ("Drunk for a Penny, Dead Drunk for Tuppence") were pictured by Hogarth, Richardson and Fielding.

Says Malcolm Muggeridge: "There's always been a lot of high-grade whoring in this country," and there is a lot of past evidence to prove him right. George IV had his queen tried publicly for infidelity; in the early 18th century, an Archbishop of York maintained a harem at his palace. The 18th century Christine Keeler was a Miss Chudleigh, who had been the mistress of three peers when George II spotted her at a costume ball, cunningly disguised in a transparent gown. Her Georgian era came between two noble marriages (one bigamous). In the 18th century phrase, borrowed from nautical terminology, Miss Chudleigh had "bottom," or what it takes.

Indeed, the British reserve a special Order of Venery for distinguished doxies such as Emma Hamilton, the onetime streetwalker who for years was civilly shared by her ambassador husband, Sir William, and Admiral Lord Nelson, the father of her daughter. One of the most successful of all high-society hustlers was Harriette Wilson, a Regency beauty whose guest register would have read like Burke's Peerage; when she started publishing her memoirs, she managed to collect double dividends from many former patrons who preferred not to be immortalized. But not the iron Duke of Wellington, who, when told by Harriette that she planned to chronicle his indiscretions, roared: "Publish and be damned!" She did.

Since the mid-19th century, sin for a politician has , meant getting caught at it. At least three officially virtuous Prime Ministers, Lord Palmerston, Arthur Balfour and Lloyd George, were inveterate adulterers.

Thus the state of sexual morality in Britain today is probably no worse than it ever was, and there is much evidence that it is better. Britain may not be a moral wasteland but a battleground in which a more realistic, less hypocritical generation is attempting to win legal and social recognition of the facts of everyday life.

Sparing the Horses. With the loss of empire and the decline of the church as an influence in society, Britons have tempered their old moral certitudes. Author James Morris fears that his compatriots are becoming "congenitally incapable of disregarding the opposite point of view, are constantly groping toward some general synthesis of everybody's point of view on everything." But the stir created by the Profumo case suggests that there is still a lot of power left in the "moral machinery."

What has really changed in Britain are matters of style and outlook, of class and economic structure. Fornication has always seemed more spectacular in the upper and lower reaches of society. But now, says D. W. Brogan, "It may well be that the middle classes are taking up the vices of their betters and also of their inferiors."

If there is no longer real poverty in Britain, the affluent society has been even kinder to the new-rich. It is at this level that life in Britain often seems tasteless, aimless and immoral. A new twist to a Victorian music hall ballad--"It's the rich wot gets the pleashoor, it's the poor wot gets the blyme"--was added recently by Minister of Housing Sir Keith Joseph, who said earnestly: "It is harder for the rich or the relatively secure to be pure." And yet too much can be blamed on economic factors, leading to what the Economist calls "the untenable implication that adultery would have been less rampant if only the country had been decent enough to stay poor."

Decency is often a question of style. Many Britons feel that there was nothing wrong, or at least new, in a Cabinet minister having a mistress. But there is a slightly snobbish feeling that Christine Keeler and her set really were a bit too casual. Although in Britain the official mistress has never quite reached the glittering status she has in France, the great and small affairs of the past were more likely to be quiet, settled, near-permanent arrangements. A new factor, says Daily Mail Columnist Anne Scott-James, is the "sleaziness of the crowd with which the War Minister mixed." Says Muggeridge: "Fifty years ago people would have gone to Maida Vale and patronized one of the grandes cocottes. If there is anything new in this, it is the overlapping of the social life of Cliveden and of Ward." In short, Britain may be in danger of abandoning Actress Mrs. Pat Campbell's celebrated axiom about Edwardian London: "You can do anything you please here, so long as you don't do it on the street and frighten the horses."

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