ing a fictitious sense of activity. But the Ideal of
"annihilation'^ becomes an irrelevant and mean-
ingless phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men
and its only expression Is evil, I for one should
recommend a faith in the millennium. You can
put this Paradise at the beginning of the world
or the end of it. Practical difference there is
none.

No one can read the report without coming
to a definite conviction that the Commission re-
gards lust Itself as Inherently evil. The members
assumed without criticism the traditional dogma
of Christianity that sex in any manifestation out-
side of marriage is sinful. But practical sense
told them that sex cannot be confined within mar-
riage. It will find expression — "some method of
expression" they say. What never occurred to
them was that it might find a good, a positively
beneficent method. The utterly uncrltlclsed as-
sumption that all expressions not legalized are
sinful shut them off from any constructive answer
to their problem. Seeing prostitution or some-
thing equally bad as the only way sex can find an
expression they really set before religion and edu-
cation the impossible task of removing lust "from
the hearts of men." So when their report puts
at its head that absolute annihilation of prostitu-

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WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

tlon is the ultimate ideal, we may well translate
it into the real intent of the Commission. What
is to be absolutely annihilated is not alone pros-
titution, not alone all the methods of expression
which lust seeks out, but lust itself.

That this is what the Commission had in mind
is supported by plenty of "internal evidence."
For example: one of the most curious recom-
mendations made is about divorce — "The Com-
mission condemns the ease with which divorces
may be obtained in certain States, and recom-
mends a stringent, uniform divorce law for all
States."

What did the Commission have in mind? I
transcribe the paragraph which deals with di-
vorce: "The Vice Commission, after exhaustive
consideration of the vice question, records itself
of the opinion that divorce to a large extent is
a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of
this blight upon the social and moral life of the
country would be comprehensive without con-
sideration of the causes which lead to the applica-
tion for divorce. These are too numerous to
mention at length in such a report as this, but
the Commission does wish to emphasize the great
need of more safeguards against the marrying of
persons physically, mentally and morally unfit to

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

take up the responsibilities of family life, includ-
ing the bearing of children."

Now to be sure that paragraph leaves much to
be desired so far as clearness goes. But I think
the meaning can be extracted. Divorce is a con-
tributory factor to sexual vice. One way pre-
sumably is that divorced women often become
prostitutes. That is an evil contribution, unques-
tionably. The second sentence says that no study
of the social evil is complete which leaves out
the causes of divorce. One of those causes is,
I suppose, adultery with a prostitute. This evil
is totally different from the first: in one case
divorce contributes to prostitution, in the other,
prostitution leads to divorce. The third sentence
urges greater safeguards against undesirable mar-
riages. This prudence would obviously reduce
the need of divorce.

How does the recommendation of a stringent
and uniform law fit in with these three state-
ments? A strict divorce law might be like New
York's : it would recognize few grounds for a
decree. One of those grounds, perhaps the chief
one, would be adultery. I say this unhesitatingly
for in another place the Commission informs us
that marriage has in it "the elements of vested
rights."

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WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish
the number of ''divorced women," and perhaps
keep them out of prostitution. It does fit the
first statement — In a helpless sort of way. But
where does the difficulty of divorce affect the
causes of It? If you bind a man tightly to a
woman he does not love, and, possibly prevent him
from marrying one he does love, how do you
add to his virtue? And If the only way he can
free himself Is by adultery, does not your stringent
divorce law put a premium upon vice? The third
sentence would make it difficult for the unfit to
marry. Better marriages would among other
blessings require fewer divorces. But what of
those who are forbidden to marry? They are
unprovided for. And yet who more than they are
likely to find desire uncontrollable and seek some
other "method of expression"? With marriage
prohibited and prostitution tabooed, the Com-
mission has a choice between sterilization and —
let us say — other methods of expression.

Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent,
prostitution impossible — is there any doubt that
the leading idea is to confine the sex impulse
within the marriage of healthy, intelligent,
"moral," and monogamous couples? For all the
other seekings of that impulse what has the Com-

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

mission to offer? Nothing. That can be asserted
flatly. The Commission hopes to wipe out pros-
titution. But it never hints that the success of
its plan means vast alterations in our social life.
The members give the impression that they think
of prostitution as something that can be sub-
tracted from our civilization without changing the
essential character of its institutions. Yet who
that has read the report itself and put himself
into any imaginative understanding of conditions
can escape seeing that prostitution to-day is or-
ganic to our industrial life, our marriage sanc-
tions, and our social customs? Low wages,
fatigue, and the wretched monotony of the fac-
tory — these must go before prostitution can go.
And behind these stand the facts of woman's en-
trance into industry — facts that have one source
at least in the general poverty of the family. And
that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic
system under which we live. In the man's prob-
lem, the growing impossibility of early marriages
is directly related to the business situation. Nor
can we speak of the degradation of religion and
the arts, of amusement, of the general morale
of the people without referring that degradation
to industrial conditions.

You cannot look at civilization as a row of
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WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

institutions each external to the other. They In-
terpenetrate and a change In one affects all the
others. To abolish prostitution would Involve a
radical alteration of society. Vice In our cities is
a form of the sexual impulse — one of the forms
it has taken under prevailing social conditions.
It is, if you please, like the crops of a rude and
forbidding soil — a coarse, distorted thing though
living.

The Commission studied a human problem and
left humanity out. I do not mean that the mem-
bers weren't deeply touched by the misery of these
thousands of women. You can pity the poor with-
out understanding them; you can have compassion
without insight. The Commissioners had a good
deal of sympathy for the prostitute's condition,
but for that *'lust in the hearts of men," and
women we may add, for that, they had no sym-
pathetic understanding. They did not place them-
selves within the Impulse. Officially they re-
mained external to human desires. For what
might be called the elan vital of the problem they
had no patience. Certain sad results of the par-
ticular "method of expression" It had sought out
in Chicago called forth their pity and their
horror.

In short, the Commission did not face the
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

sexual impulse squarely. The report is an at-
tempt to deal with a sexual problem by disregard-
ing its source. There are almost a hundred
recommendations to various authorities — Federal,
State,- county, city, police, educational and others.
I have attempted to classify these proposals under
four headings. There are those which mean
forcible repression of particular manifestations —
the taboos; there are the recommendations which
are purely palliative, which aim to abate some of
the horrors of existing conditions; there are a
few suggestions for further investigation; and,
finally, there are the inventions, the plans which
show some desire to find moral equivalents for
evil — the really statesmanlike offerings.

The palliative measures we may pass by quickly.
So long as they do not blind people to the neces-
sity for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire
would object to them. Like all intelligent chari-
ties they are still a necessary evil. But nothing
must be staked upon them, so let us turn at once
to the constructive suggestions : The Commission
proposes that the county establish a ^'Permanent
Committee on Child Protection." It makes no
attempt to say what that protection shall be, but
I think it is only fair to let the wish father the
thought, and regard this as an effort to give

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WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

children a better start In life. The separation of
delinquent from semi-delinquent girls is a some-
what similar attempt to guard the weak. Another
is the recommendation to the city and the nation
that it should protect arriving immigrants, and
If necessary escort them to their homes. This
surely is a constructive plan which might well be
enlarged from mere protection to positive hos-
pitality. How great a part the desolating loneli-
ness of a city plays In seductions the individual
histories in the report show. Municipal dance
halls are a splendid proposal. Freed from a cold
and over-chaperoned respectability they compete
with the devil. There, at least, is one method of
sexual expression which may have positively bene-
ficent results. A municipal lodging house for
women is something of a substitute for the
wretched rented room. A little suggestion to the
police that they send home children found on the
streets after nine o'clock has varied possibilities.
But there is the seed of an invention in it which
might convert the police from mere agents of re-
pression to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city.
The educational proposals are all constructive:
the teaching of sex hygiene is guardedly recom-
mended for consideration. That is entirely justi-
fied, for no one can quarrel with a set of men

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'A PREFACE TO POLITICS

for leaving a question open. That girls from
fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational
training in continuation schools; that social cen-
ters should be established in the public schools
and that the grounds should be open for children
— all of these are clearly additions to the positive
resource of the community. So is the suggestion
that church buildings be used for recreation. The
call for greater parental responsibility is, I fear,
a rather empty platitude, for it is not re-enforced
with anything but an ancient fervor.

How much of this really seeks to create a fine
expression of the sexual impulse? How many of
these recommendations see sex as an instinct which
can be transmuted, and turned into one of the
values of life? The dance halls, the social cen-
ters, the playgrounds, the reception of strangers
— these can become instruments for civilizing
sexual need. The educational proposals could
become ways of directing it. They could, but
will they? Without the habit of mind which sees
substitution as the essence of statecraft, without a
philosophy which makes the invention of moral
equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in
these recommendations anything more than a hap-
hazard shooting which has accidentally hit the
mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that

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WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

I have tried to read into the proposals more than
the Commission intended. Certainly these con-
structions occupy an insignificant amount of space
in the body of the report. On all sides of them
is a mass of taboos. No emotional appeal is
made for them as there is for the repressions.
They stand largely unnoticed, and very much un-
defined — poor ghosts of the truth among the
gibbets.

An inadvertent platitude — that lust will seek
an expression — and a few diflident proposals for
a finer environment — the need and its satisfac-
tion: had the Commission seen the relation of
these incipient ideas, animated it, and made it the
nerve center of the study, a genuine program
might have resulted. But the two ideas never
met and fertilized each other. Nothing dynamic
holds the recommendations together — the mass
of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mos-
quito and ignore the marsh. The evils of pros-
titution are seen as a series of episodes, each of
which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and
jailed.

There is a special whack for each mosquito:
the laws about excursion boats should be enforced;
the owners should help to enforce them; there
should be more officers with police power on these

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

boats; the sale of liquor to minors should be
forbidden; gambling devices should be suppressed;
the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals
practicing abortions should be Investigated; em-
ployment agencies should be watched and inves-
tigated; publishers should be warned against
printing suspicious advertisements; the law against
infamous crimes should be made more specific;
any citizen should have the right to bring equity
proceedings against a brothel as a publlcjiuisance;
there should be relentless prosecution of pro-
fessional procurers; there should be constant
prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners
of bawdy houses; there should be prosecution of
druggists who sells drugs and "certain appliances"
illegally; there should be an Identification system
for prostitutes in the state courts; instead of fines,
prostitutes should be visited with Imprisonment
or adult probation; there should be a penalty for
sending messenger boys under twenty-one to a
disorderly house or an unlicensed saloon; the law
against prostitutes In saloons, against wine-rooms
and stalls in saloons, against communication be-
tween saloons and brothels, against dancing In
saloons — should be strictly enforced; the police
who enforce these laws should be carefully
watched, grafters amongst them should be dis-

140



WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

charged; complaints should be investigated at
once by a man stationed outside the district; the
pressure of publicity should be brought against
the brewers to prevent them from doing business
with saloons that violate the law; the Retail
Liquor Association should discipline law-breaking
saloon-keepers : licenses should be permanently re-
voked for violations; no women should be allowed
in a saloon without a male escort; no professional
or paid escorts should be permitted; no soliciting
should be allowed in saloons; no immoral or
vulgar dances should be permitted in saloons; no
Intoxicating liquor should be allowed at any pub-
lic dance; there should be a municipal detention
home for women, with probation officers; police
inspectors who fail to report law-violations should
be dismissed; assignation houses should be sup-
pressed as soon as they are reported; there should
be a "special morals police squad"; recommenda-
tion IX *'to the Police" says they "should wage
a relentless warfare against houses of prostitu-
tion, Immoral flats, assignation rooms, call houses,
and disorderly saloons in all sections of the city";
parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly
policed; dancing pavilions should exclude pro-
fessional prostitutes; soliciting in parks should
be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

search-light; there should be no seats in the
shadows. . . .

To perform that staggering list of things that
"should" be done you find — what? — the police
power, federal, state, municipal. Note how
vague and general are the chance constructive sug-
gestions; how precise and definite the taboos.
Surely I am not misstating its position when I say
that forcible suppression was the creed of this
Commission. Nor is there any need of insisting
again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating pros-
titution has nothing to expect from the concrete
proposals that were made. The millennial goal
was one thing; the immediate method quite an-
other. For ideals, a pious phrase ; in practice, the
police.

Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot
depend upon the men appointed to protect their
property, and to maintain order, then chaos and
disorganization resulting in vice and crime must
follow?** Yet of all the reeds that civihzation
leans upon, surely the police is the frailest. Any-
one who has had the smallest experience of
municipal politics knows that the corruption of
the police is directly proportionate to the severity
of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom Johnson
saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that

14^



WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

Strict law enforcement against saloons, brothels,
andgambling houses would not stop vice, but would
corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spec-
tacle in New York where the most sensational
raider of gambling houses has turned out to be
in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I
suggest as a hint that the Commission's recom-
mendations enforced for one year will lay the
foundation of an organized system of blackmail
and ''protection," secrecy and underground
chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet
seen. But the Commission need only have read
its own report, have studied its own cases. There
is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil
and the Police." In the summary, the Commis-
sion says that "officers on the beat are bold and
open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons
while in uniform, ignoring the solicitations by
prostitutes in rear rooms and on the streets, sell-
ing tickets at dances frequented by professional
and semi-professional prostitutes; protecting
'cadets,' prostitutes and saloon-keepers of disor-
derly places."

Some suspicion that the police could not carry
the burden of suppressing the social evil must have
dawned on the Commission.

It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

Special morals police squad; hence the investiga-
tion of the police of one district by the police
from another; and hence, in type as black as that
of the ideal itself and directly beneath it, the
call for "the appointment of a morals commis-
sion" and "the establishment of a morals court."
Now this commission consists of the Health
Officer, a physician and three citizens who serve
without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and
approved by the City Council. Its business is to
prosecute vice and to help enforce the law.

Just what would happen if the Morals Com-
mission didn't prosecute hard enough I do not
know. Conceivably the Governor might be in-
duced to appoint a Commission on Moral Com-
missions in Cities. But why the men and women
who framed the report made this particular rec-
ommendation is an interesting question. With
federal, state, and municipal authorities in ex-
istence, with courts, district attorneys, police all
operating, they create another arm of prosecu-
tion. Possibly they were somewhat disillusioned
about the present Instruments of the taboo; per-
haps they imagined that a new broom would
sweep clean. But I suspect an Inner reason. The
Commission may have imagined that the four
appointees — unpaid — would be four men like



WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

themselves — who knows, perhaps four men from
among themselves? The whole tenor of their
thinking Is to set somebody watching everybody
and somebody else to w^atching him. What is
more natural than that they should be the Ulti-
mate Watchers?

Spying, informing, constant investigations of
everybody and everything must become the rule
where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the
work very long; nobody's but those fanatical and
morbid guardians of morality who make it a
life's specialty. The aroused public opinion which
the Commission asks for cannot be held if all it
has to fix upon Is an elaborate series of taboos.
Sensational disclosures will often make the public
flare up spasmodically; but the mass of men is
soon bored by intricate rules and tangles of red
tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melo-
drama of real life — interesting, but easily for-
gotten.

The method proposed ignores the human
source: by a kind of poetic justice the great
crowd of men will ignore the method. If you
want to impose a taboo upon a whole community,
you must do It autocratically, you must make it
part of the prevailing superstitions. You must

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

never let It reach any public analysis. For it
will fall, It win receive only a shallow support
from what we call an ''enlightened public
opinion." That opinion Is largely determined by
the real Impulses of men; and genuine character
rejects or at least rebels against foreign, un-
natural Impositions. This Is one of the great
virtues of democracy — that It makes alien laws
more and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant
can use the taboo a thousand times more effec-
tively than the citizens of a republic. When he
speaks. It Is with a prestige that dumbs question-
ing and makes obedience a habit. Let that in-
falllblHty come to be doubted, as In Russia to-day,
and natural Impulses reassert themselves, the
great Impositions begin to weaken. The methods
of the Chicago Commission would require a
tyranny, a powerful, centralized sovereignty
which could command with majesty and silence the
rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such
power exists. The strongest force we have Is
i that of organized money, and that sovereignty Is
too closely connected with the social evil, too de-
pendent upon It In a hundred different ways, to
undertake the task of suppression.

For the purposes of the Commission democracy
is an Inefficient weapon. Nothing but dlsappolnt-

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WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING

ment is In store for men who expect a people to
outrage its own character. A large part of the
unfaith In democracy, of the desire to ignore
*'the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power
to the few Is the result of an unsuccessful at-
tempt to make republics act like old-fashioned
monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves be-
hind it a trail of yearning royalists; many ''good-
government" clubs are little would-be oligarchies.
When the mass of men emerged from slavish
obedience and made democracy inevitable, the
taboo entered upon its final Illness. For the more
self-governing a people becomes, the less possible
It is to prescribe external restrictions. The gap
between want and ought, between nature and
ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical
ideals In a democracy are a fine expression of
natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly
Greek attitude. But I learned It first from the
Bowery. Chuck Connors is reported to have said
that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever
he wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went
straight to the heart of that democratic morality
on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest.
His gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and
prohibitions ; In him impulses flow freely through
beneficent channels.

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase:
"government must serve the people/* That
means a good deal more than that elected officials
must rule for the majority. For the majority in
these semi-democratic times is often as not a
cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives
who "serve" some majorities may in reality or-
der the nation about. To serve the people means
to provide it with services — with clean streets and
water, with education, with opportunity, with
beneficent channels for its desires, with moral
equivalents for evil. The task is turned from
the damming and restricting of wants to the crea-
tion of fine environments for them. And the
environment of an impulse extends all the way
from the human body, through family life and
education out into the streets of the city.

Had the Commission worked along democratic
lines, we should have had recommendations about
the hygiene and early training of children, their
education, the houses they live in and the streets
in which they play; changes would have been sug-
gested in the industrial conditions they face; plans
would have been drawn for recreation; hints