XLIX

It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I

suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere

a significance in the phrase “white slave,” when acted upon by minds

that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of

objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of

the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no

longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any

contact with the virtuous and respectable; she no longer occupied even

the sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and Lecky in our own

time figured her; she was not even that daughter of joy whose dalliance

is the secret despair of moralists too prudent to imitate her abandon;

she became the white slave, a shanghaied innocent kept under lock

and key. And thousands and thousands of her sisters were said to be

trapped every year in precisely the same way by the minions of a huge

system, organized like any modern combination of rapacity and evil,

with luxurious headquarters, presumably in some sky-scraper in New

York, and its own attorneys, agents, kidnappers, crimpers, seducers,

panderers and procuresses all over the land, a vast and complicated

organization, with baffling ramifications in all the high and low

places of the earth. The sensational newspapers referred to it as “the

white slave syndicate,” as though it were as authentic as the steel

trust or Standard Oil. It was even said that somewhere in New York

the trust conducted a daily auction! With such a bizarre notion, the

victims of their own psychic lasciviousness became obsessed. Raids and

“revivals” must be inaugurated, a body of new laws enacted, and a horde

of official inspectors, agents and detectives turned loose on the land,

empowered to arrest any man and woman traveling together, and hold the

man guilty of a felony.

To be sure, it was something to have the conception change. It was

something that the prostitute should at last be regarded with some

touch of human pity. And it was something, a great deal, indeed,

that there was, with all the fanatical and zealous law making, some

quiet study of the problem. The word “economic,” so long scorned

by the proponents of an absolute morality, somehow penetrated the

public consciousness, and at last it dawned on the human mind that

prostitution is related to economic pressure. But, unfortunately, by

the familiar human process, the mind leaped to extremes; it was assumed

that all prostitutes were girls who did not receive sufficient wages,

and the simple and all sufficient cure was to be the minimum wage;

instead of receiving eight dollars a week and going to the bad, all

working girls were to be paid nine dollars a week and remain virtuous.

And of course new work for the constable was cut out; if the employers

of girls did not pay them that much, they were all to go to jail, and

if the girls did not remain chaste after they had been assured of that

splendid income, they must go to the pillory for the godly to spit at.

This, with the laws against white slavery, was to be the panacea, and

prostitution, a problem which had perplexed the thoughtful for thirty

centuries, was to be solved before the autumn primaries, so that those

who solved it might get their political rewards promptly.

I used to wish, when it was presented to me as mayor, that some of

these cock-sure persons who would solve the problem off-hand by

issuing a general order to the police, could get themselves elected

to the opportunity. Of course I issued no general order on the

subject; perhaps I was too skeptical, too much lacking in faith in the

miraculous powers of the constabulary. Our city was like all cities;

there were prostitutes in brothels, prostitutes in saloons, prostitutes

in flats, prostitutes on the streets at night. There were, for

instance, a score or more of disorderly saloons where men and women

congregated. But we found that merely by posting a policeman in uniform

before such a place, its patronage was discouraged, and in a few days

discontinued. Of course it was a dangerous and preposterous power to

wield; in the hands of unscrupulous police it might have appalling

possibilities of evil. I had the idea of stationing a policeman before

a disorderly house from Tom Johnson, who told me he had it from his

father--who was Chief of Police in Louisville. And so we adopted it,

and after a while the wine rooms were no more. And that was something.

But the girls in them, of course, had to go somewhere, just as Jones

said.

Then we found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive

the girls off the streets. It seemed to me always a despicable sort

of business--the actions of the police I mean; I didn’t like to hear

the reports of it; I don’t like to think of it, or write of it even

now. It is not very creditable to make war on women, whatever the

Puritans may say. But the streets would show an improvement, even they

would admit; much as they might linger and loiter and leer, the most

seductively pure of them could not get himself “accosted” anywhere

down town at night. Of course, after a while, the poor things would

come back, or others exactly like them would come. Then the police

would have to practice their brutalities all over again. Perhaps they

were not brutal enough; I am not certain. To be sure they were not

as brutal as Augustus with his sumptuary laws, or as Theodosius, or

Valentinian, or Justinian, or Karl the Great, or Peter the Great, or

St. Louis, or Frederick Barbarossa, or the Empress Maria Theresa in

Vienna, or as John Calvin in Geneva, or Cotton Mather in Massachusetts,

with all their tortures and floggings and rackings and brandings

and burnings; or as the English Puritans who used to have bawds

whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned and for a second offense

put to death. And even they were not brutal enough, it seems, since

prostitution went right on down the centuries to our times. I suppose

that we might have learned from their failures that prostitution could

not be ended by physical force and brutality. However, when the girls

were driven from the streets, inasmuch as the police did not despatch

them, they still had to go somewhere, and the brothels remained. They

had their own quarter and if it was not a segregated quarter it was

something very like it, since the police bent their efforts to rid

other portions of the city of such places. It was perhaps a tolerated

rather than a segregated district, and after a while the Director of

Public Safety wished to try the experiment of making it a regulated

district as well. I felt that the world was too old and I found myself

too much of its mood to hope that any good could come from any of the

efforts of policemen to dispose of such a problem, but I was glad of

any experiment conducted in sincerity that might make for the better,

and accordingly the Director of Safety put his scheme into operation.

It was not _reglementation_ in the exact European sense, since the

temper of our American people will not acquiesce in that, and, as

I discovered by some inquiries of my own in the principal cities of

Europe, it is not of very valid effect over there. But the Director

adopted most of the familiar requirements of the Parisian _reglement_,

except the examinations, and the registration of those not _en maison_;

he required the proprietresses to report at police headquarters the

presence of new inmates; he forbade them to have minors or male

parasites in the houses, and as far as possible he separated the

business from the saloon business. Any house which ignored his orders

found a policeman posted before it; then it came to time. The result

was, as Mr. Mooney could report in the course of a year, that the

number of brothels had been reduced from over two hundred to thirty and

the number of prostitutes of whom the police had any knowledge, in an

equal proportion. He was very proud when General Bingham complimented

his policemen and their policing, as he was at similar compliments from

the government’s white slave agents.

Superficially this was a very gratifying report, but only

superficially. Five-sixths of the brothels had been closed, but their

inmates had to go somewhere, just as Jones said, and the police found

that clandestine prostitution had proportionately increased; the women

had gone into flats, or hotels, or residences which on occasion could

be made to serve as assignation houses. It may perhaps have improved

the life of the prostitute, made it freer and more human, or perhaps it

indicated that prostitution in America is showing a decadent tendency

toward refinement. But while they had reduced the number of houses

of prostitution, the police discovered that they had not reduced

prostitution in the least, and when, after a trial of four years, I

asked the Director and the Chief of Police what the result of the

experiment had been, they said that, aside from the fact that it seemed

to make for order in the city, and simplified the work of policing, it

had done no good.

The experience was like that of Chicago, where after a police

order prohibiting the sale of liquor in houses of prostitution, it

was found--according to the report of the vice commission--to be

“undoubtedly true that the result of the order has been to scatter

the prostitutes over a wide territory and to transfer the sale of

liquor carried on heretofore in houses to the near-by saloon keepers,

and to flats and residential sections, but it is an open question

whether it has resulted in the lessening of either of the two evils of

prostitution and drink.”

The experience, I think, is probably universal. I used to hear the

systems of regulation used in European cities held up as models by the

pessimistic as the only practical method of dealing with the problem.

Paris was commonly considered as the ideal in this respect; latterly

it is apt to be Berlin. But the fact is that the _reglementation_

which for years and years has been in force in Paris is a failure; the

experience there was precisely what it was in our little city. And from

Berlin, which the well-known German genius for organization has made

the most efficiently governed city in the world, the same failure has

been reported.

In England, on the other hand, there is no regulation; any evening

along Piccadilly, one may see street walkers whom the police never

dream of molesting. It is in part due to the traditional Puritanic

attitude of our northern race, and partly to the respect for personal

liberty that exists in England. There the principle is much more

scrupulously respected than with us, with whom individual liberty

indeed, is hardly a principle at all. With us the phrase “personal

liberty” is regarded merely as a shibboleth of brewers and distillers,

an evidence on the part of him who employs it that he is a besotted

slave to drink and an unscrupulous minion of the rum power. The

interferences practiced daily by our policemen are unknown there,

and if, for instance, it should even be proposed that an enactment

like that in Oklahoma limiting the amount of liquor a man may keep in

his own house, and providing that agents of the state may enter his

domicile at will and make a search, and especially if in the remotest

region of the British Isles there should be an instance of what Walt

Whitman calls “the never ending audacity of elected persons,” such as

is of daily occurrence in that state where these agents enter railway

trains and slit open the valises of travelers in their quest of the

stuff, the whole of the question hour the next afternoon in the House

of Commons would be occupied with indignant interpellations of the home

secretary and the _Times_ could not contain all the letters that would

be written.

Other lands have made other experiments, but everywhere and in all

times the same failure has been recorded, from the efforts of Greece to

control the _hetaerae_ and _dicteriades_ and the severe regulations of

ancient Rome, down to the latest reform administration in an American

city. Nothing that mankind has ever tried has been of the slightest

avail. And now come the vice commissions with their pornographic

reports, and no doubt feeling that they have to propose something

after all the trouble they have gone to, when they have set forth in

tabulated statistics what everybody in the world already knows, they

repeat the old ineptitudes. That is, more law, more hounding by the

police.

The Chicago product is the classic and the model for all of these, and

as the latest and loftiest triumph of the Puritan mind in the realm of

morals and of law, a triumph for which three centuries of innocence

of nothing save humor alone could have prepared it, its own great

masterpiece in morals was at once forbidden circulation in the mails

because of its immorality!

The problem cannot be solved by policemen, even if--as is now

recommended--they be called “morals” police. The word has a reassuring

note of course, possibly by some confused with “moral” police, but

policemen are policemen still. I have seen the _police des moeurs_

in European cities, and they look quite like other policemen. And

all cities in America have had morals police; that is exactly what

our policemen have been, and that is exactly what is the matter with

them. That is, all cities have had detectives especially detailed to

supervise the conduct of the vicious, and they always fail. We had such

a squad in Toledo for years, though it was not called morals police.

It was composed of men, mere men, because we had nothing else but men

to detail to the work. They were honest, decent, self-respecting men

for the most part, who on the whole did very well considering the

salaries they were paid and the task imposed on them. They regulated

vice as well as anybody anywhere could regulate it. But of course they

failed to solve the problem, just as the world for thousands of years

has failed to solve it, with all the machinery of all the laws of all

the lawgivers in history. Solon in Athens tried every known device,

including segregation. He established a state monopoly of houses of

prostitution, confined the _dicteriades_ to a certain quarter of the

city, and compelled them to wear a distinctive dress, but all his

stringent laws had broken down long before Hyperides dramatically

bared the breast of Phryne to the Areopagus. In Rome there was the

most severe regulation in the ancient world and yet--it may be read in

Gibbon--the successive experiments of the law under Augustus, Tiberius,

Caligula, Valerian, Theodosius and Justinian were all failures, and

when the laws were most rigorous and the most rigorously enforced,

immorality was at its height. Charlemagne tried and failed, and though

the sentiment of the age of chivalry and the rise of Christianity

for a while softened the law, under the English Puritans, bawds were

whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned, and for a second offense

put to death. France was not behind; under Louis IX., prostitutes

were exiled, and in 1635 an edict in Paris condemned men concerned in

the traffic to the galleys for life, while the women and girls were

whipped, shaved and banished for life. Charles V. in the monastery

at Yuste, trying to make two clocks tick in union, found his efforts

no more vain than his attempts to regulate human conduct, and Philip

II. tried again to do what his father had been unable to accomplish.

Peter the Great was a grim enforcer of the laws, and in Vienna Maria

Theresa was most rigorous with prostitutes, putting them in a certain

garb, and then in handcuffs; she was almost as remorseless in her

treatment of them as was John Calvin in Geneva, which came to have more

prostitutes proportionately than any other city in Europe. Several

modern attempts at annihilation have been made. Saxony tried to do

away with prostitutes, but they exist in Dresden and other cities of

the Kingdom and Hamburg claims to have banished them, but in that Free

and Hanseatic city I was told by an American who was investigating the

subject that there were as many there as elsewhere.

L

And these laws have not only failed, they have not only stimulated and

intensified the evil, but they themselves have created a white slavery

worse than that of the preposterous tales and sentimental twaddle

that circulate among the neurotic, a white slavery worse than any ever

imagined by the most romanticistic of the dime novelists or by the most

superheated of the professional reformers. Every one of these laws has

been devised, written and enacted in the identical spirit with which

the Puritans in Massachusetts branded the red letter on the scarlet

woman. Every one of them is an element of that brutal and amazing

conspiracy by which society makes of the girl who once “goes wrong,”

to use the lightest of our animadversions, a pariah more abhorred and

shunned than if she were a rotting leper on the cliffs of Molokai. She

may be human, alive, with the same feelings that all the other girls

in the world have; she may have within her the same possibilities,

life may mean exactly the same thing to her, she may have youth with

all its vague and beautiful longings, but society thunders at her

such final and awful words as “lost,” “abandoned,” thrusts her beyond

its pale, and causes her to feel that thereafter forever and forever,

there is literally no chance of redemption for her; home, society,

companionship, hope itself, all shut their obdurate doors in her face.

In all the world there are just two places she may go, the brothel, or

the river, and even if she choose the latter, that choice, too, is a

sin. She is “lost” and the awful and appalling lie is thundered in her

astonished ears by the united voices of a prurient and hypocritical

society with such indomitable force and persistence that she must

believe it herself, and acquiesce in its dread finality. And there is

no course open to her but to go on in sin to the end of days whose

only mercy is that they are apt to be brief. No off-hand moralist,

even by exercising his imagination to the last degree of cruelty, has

ever been able to devise such a prison as that. White slave, indeed,

shackled by the heaviest chains the Puritan conscience has yet been

able to forge for others!

Strange, too, since the attitude is assumed by a civilization which

calls itself Christian and preaches that the old law, with its eye for

an eye and its tooth for a tooth, was done away with and lost in a new

and beautiful dispensation. “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no

more.” If the world is ever to solve this problem, it must first of

all apprehend the spirit of this simple and gracious expression, do

away with its old laws, its old cruelties, its old brutalities, its

old stupidities, and approach the problem in that human spirit which I

suspect is so very near the divine. Once in this attitude, this spirit,

society will be in position to learn something from history and from

human experience, something from life itself, and what it will learn

first is that Puritanical laws, the hounding of the police, and all

that sort of thing have never lessened prostitution in the world, but

on the contrary have increased it.

What! Let them go and not do anything to them? Well, yes, if we can’t

think of anything better to do to them than to hurt them a little

more, push them a little farther along the road to that abyss toward

which we have been hustling them. Why is it constantly necessary to do

something _to_ people? If we can’t do anything for them, when are we

going to learn to let them alone? Or must this incessant interference,

this meddling, this mauling and manhandling, go on in the world forever

and ever?

As to what is to be done about it, since all that ever has been

attempted has been so much worse in its effect than if we had never

done anything, I suppose I need not feel so very much ashamed of

confessing my ignorance and saying that I do not know. If it were left

to me I think the first thing I should do is to repeal all the criminal

laws on the subject, beginning with that most savage enactment the

Puritan conscience ever devised, namely, the law declaring certain

children “illegitimate,” a piece of stupid brutality and cruelty that

would make a gorilla blush with shame if it were even suggested in the

African jungle.

Yes, the first thing to do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the

subject. They do no good, and even when it is attempted to enforce

them, the result is worse than futile. I myself, with my own eyes, in

the old police court where I have witnessed so many squalid tragedies,

have seen a magistrate fine a street walker and then suspend the fine

so that, as he explained to her in all judicial seriousness, she

might go out and “earn” enough money to come back and pay it! And not

a person in the court room, so habituated and conventionalized are

we all, ever cracked a smile or apparently saw anything out of the

way--least of all the street walker!

But it would not be enough simply to repeal these laws from the

statute books of the state; it will be necessary to accomplish the

immensely more difficult task of repealing them from the human heart,

where they were written long ago in anger, and hatred, and jealousy and

cruelty and fear, that is in the heat of all the baser passions. What I

am trying to say is that the first step in any reasonable and effective

reform is an entire change of attitude on the subject, and about the

only good to be expected from the agitation about white slavery, with

all its preposterous exaggeration and absurd sensationalism is that

it is perhaps making for a changed attitude, a new conception; if it

will accomplish nothing more than to get the public mind--if there is

a public mind, and not a mere public passion--to view the prostitute

as a human being, very much like all the other human beings in the

world, it will have been worth all it has cost in energy and emotion

and credulity. If this sort of repeal can be made effective, if the

prostitute can be assured of some chance in life outside the dead line

which society so long ago drew for her, the first step will have been

taken.

The next step possibly will be the erection of a single standard of

morals. And this cannot be done by passing a law, or by turning in an

alarm for the police. That means thinking, too, and education, and

evolution, and all the other slow and toilsome processes of which the

off-hand reformers are so impatient. This single standard will have to

be raised first in each individual heart; after that it will become the

attitude of the general mind.

And then the commerce in vice will have to be stopped. I do not mean

prohibited by penal laws alone. Policemen cannot stop it, and policemen

should have no more to do with it than firemen. In fact much of the

commerce has proceeded from the fact that its regulation has been

entrusted to the police. It should be a subject for the fiscal laws. It

is, I assume, known by most persons that the owners of the dilapidated

tenements in which for the most part prostitution is carried on,

because of the “risk,” extort exorbitant rentals for them, and then

on the ground that they can rent them to no one of respectability,

they hold them to be so worthless that they pay little if any taxes on

them. Our present tax laws of course have the effect of rewarding the

slothful, the lazy and the idle, and of punishing the energetic and

the enterprising producer in business, and it would be quite possible

to revise the tax laws so that tenderloins would be economically

impossible, because they would cease to be profitable.

In the next place, or some place in the program, there should be some

sort of competent and judicious sex education. I do not know just who

would impart it, since no one as yet knows very much about it, but with

the earnest, sincere and devoted work that is being carried on all over

the world by the scientific men and women who are studying eugenics and

social hygiene, there is hope in this direction, even if it is probable

that the world will not be saved by the new race of athletes that are

scientifically to be bred, and may still have some use in its affairs

for the minds of its cripples who in all times have contributed so much

to its advancement.

The marvelous phenomenon known as the feminist movement which the

students and historians of the next two hundred years will be busy

elucidating will play its part, too, for in its vast impulse toward the

equality of the sexes it must not only bring the single standard of

morals, but it should somehow be the means of achieving for women their

economic independence. This perhaps would be the most important of all

the steps to be taken in the solution of the problem. The economic

environment of course is in the lives of many girls a determining

factor and in this connection the minimum wage indeed has its bearing.

The old Puritan laws were conceived in minds intensely preoccupied

with the duty of punishing people for their sins. Prostitutes were

prostitutes because they were “bad,” and when people were bad they must

be punished. But now we see, or begin to see, if vaguely, that, except

in metaphysics, there is no such thing in our complex human life as an

absolute good or an absolute bad; we begin to discern dimly the causes

of some of the conduct called bad, and to the problem of evil we begin

to apply the conception of economic influences, social influences,

pathological influences, and other influences most of us know little or

nothing about.

Thus we begin to see that a girl’s wages, for instance, may have

something to do with what we call her morals; not everything, but

something. The wages of a girl’s father have something to do with

them, too, and the wages of her great grandfather for the matter of

that. So the dividends on which live the delicate and charming ladies

she beholds alighting from their motor cars every morning in the

shopping district may have something to do with them, though she is as

unconscious and as innocent of the relation as they, as ignorant as all

of us are. Rents have something to do with them, and so do taxes.

But after the whole economic system has been re-adjusted and perfected

and equalized, after we have the minimum wage, and the single tax, and

industrial democracy, and every man gets what he produces, and economic

pressure has been as scientifically adjusted as the atmospheres

in a submarine torpedo boat, there is always the great law of the

contrariety of things to be reckoned with, according to which the

more carefully planned the event, the less it resembles the original

conception. The human vision is so weak, and the great circle of

life so prodigious! The solution will come, if it ever comes at all,

by slow, patient, laborious, drudging study, far from the midnight

session of the legislature, far from the ear and the pencil of the

eager reporter, far from the platform of the sweating revivalist, far

from the head office of the police. Our fondly perused pornography

might expose the whole of the underworld to the light of day, the

general assembly might enact successive revisions of the revised

statutes for a hundred years, we might develop the most superb police

organization in all history, achieving the apotheosis of the Puritan

ideal with a dictagraph in every bedroom and closet in the town, and

it all would be of no avail. The study must survey the whole field

of social and domestic relations, until the vast mystery of life is

understood, and the relation between its wide antitheses established

as Tolstoy presents them in his story of the poor mother who took her

daughter to the public house in the village, and the rich mother who,

at the same time, took her daughter to the court at St. Petersburg.

It will be found perhaps in the long run, for which so few are ever

willing to remain, that the eradicable causes of prostitution are

due to involuntary poverty, and the awful task is to get involuntary

poverty out of the world. It is a task which has all the tremendous

difficulties of constructive social labor and it is as deliberate as

evolution itself. And even if it is ever accomplished, there will

remain a residuum in the problem inhering in the mysteries of sex,

concerning which even the wisest and most devoted of our scientists

will confess they know very little as yet and have not much to tell us

that will do us any good.