THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(5) COMMERCIALISED VICE
“And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’”
_The Mask of Anarchy_, P. B. SHELLEY.
Emil Reich, writing in 1908, said (_Woman through the Ages_, vol. ii.
p. 247): “The women of the East lie under an adamant yoke of complete
severity. It is in the West that the only movement comes, a movement—at
its mistaken best—which makes a crusade against prostitution, alcoholism,
and war; all of which must exist as hideous necessities and which, if
they could be swept away, would, in their disappearance, utterly upset
the balance of civilisation.” On the previous page he has asserted that
“the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of Empire.”
Many women will also see in the enslavement of women the chief cause
of the decay of Empires, and will hold that a civilisation which is
balanced on prostitution, alcoholism and war is in a state of unstable
equilibrium. They will be confirmed in this belief by the extraordinary
state of panic into which Imperialists so often get about the Empire,
which is so delicate that it must be sheltered from every breath of
popular opinion. A healthy Empire should normally be in a condition of
stable equilibrium, to which it returns after any shocks, and there is no
manner of doubt that women want to abolish the notoriously rickety three
legs of which Dr. Reich was so proud.
In themselves no one is found to recommend these three objects of man’s
solicitude. Even Dr. Reich calls them “hideous.” It is, then, merely the
impossibility of abolishing them that we are invited to accept, and it is
too much to ask energetic and active women to accept “hideous” things,
without ever having been given the chance of abolishing them, or even
seriously diminishing them, especially when it is women who bear by far
the greater weight of this hideous burden.
Now these three things are in their origin due to human appetites; these
appetites have, by indulgence, by stimulation, and by exploitation,
become lusts which, far more truly than any reform, do threaten the
extinction of the Empires which are allowing themselves to be eaten up
with them. It is with the stimulation and exploitation that this chapter
more especially deals. Natural appetite may be gross, may even be brutal,
but in simple communities where each individual must rely on his own
strength for his own livelihood, it tends to return to a norm which is
that of health. Appetite, stimulated with every artifice of advertisement
and allurement, exploited by every financial and commercial profiteer,
becomes in crowded communities a gnawing ulcer, destroying bone and
nerve and tissue, body and soul. To walk the streets and frequent the
amusements of any great modern town—London or Vienna or Paris—is to find
oneself in the midst of a perfect obsession of the lusts of the flesh. An
enormous amount of what passes for art has no design but that of inciting
appetite. Music halls and musical comedies, farces, picture-palaces,
advertisement posters, repeat the same tedious, banal, hideous assaults.
If you are incapable of responding, you are nauseated and bored beyond
expression; but it is clear that the jaded nerves of many people can be
whipped into response. There are many people who are so flaccid that they
invariably succumb to the fixed idea. The profiteer knows this, and the
idea is fixed by every device that capital can contrive.
Take the lust of alcoholism. What chance has the feeble will to escape
its lure? Have we not given “The Trade” a solidarity which must be the
envy of mere purveyors of necessities? (Mr. Justice Channell said
before the Jury Commission that a special jury very often consists
half of publicans.) Have we not connected light and entertainment and
conviviality with the vice of drunkenness? Have we not refused to allow
people even the right to protect themselves against the unwelcome
intrusion of the temptation into their neighbourhood? Do not our plays
exhibit drunkenness as laughable and lovable in men? (It is significant
that they are not so in women.) We have allowed the traffic in alcohol
to become a vested interest which controls the lives of the people,
and it is to the interest of this traffic that the people should not
become sober. Will the traffickers not use their control to prevent the
people becoming sober? “You cannot make men and women sober by Act of
Parliament?” Perhaps not. Need you give such vast power to those whose
profit lies in making men and women drunk?
Take the lust of sex. If alcoholism is stimulated in many ways, it is
as nothing compared with the incessant appeals to lust. We all hear of
the profits from the drink traffic. We are only beginning to hear of the
profits from the traffic in women, which are often closely bound up with
the profits of drink. But we must insist on knowing very much more than
we do about these profits. The Chicago Commission asserts that in their
belief Chicago “is far better proportionately to its population than most
of the other large cities of the country,” and this statement is based
upon a careful study of fifty-two of the largest cities. In this city of
Chicago (with a population of two millions) prostitution, they assert,
is a “Commercialised Business of large proportions with tremendous
profits of more than fifteen million dollars (over £3,000,000) per year,
controlled largely by men, not women. Separate the male exploiter from
the problem and we minimise its extent and abate its flagrant outward
expression. In addition we check an artificial stimulus which has been
given to the _business_ so that larger profits may be made by the men
exploiters.”
A Committee of Fourteen, which made inquiry in New York City, declared:
“Some of the profit-sharers must be dispensed with through the force
of public opinion or by means of heavy penalties, before the growth of
vice can be checked. These include those who profit off the place—the
landlord, agent, janitor, amusement dealer, brewer, and furniture dealer;
those who profit off the act—the keeper, procurer, druggist, physician,
midwife, police officer, and politician; those who profit off the
children—employers, procurers, and public service corporations; those
who deal in the futures of vice—publishers, manufacturers, and vendors
of vicious pictures and articles; those who exploit the unemployed—the
employment agent and employers; a group of no less than _nineteen_,
middle-men, who are profit-sharers in vice.” It is evident that if
so many people can make a profit, this constitutes a temptation to
exploiters, and if the business could be made unprofitable, it would be
greatly reduced. Demand creates supply. Some of the demand comes from the
natural lustfulness of men. But this is immensely stimulated by those
who make profits, and the supply is secured very largely by fraud and
deception, by persistent siege, by the ruining of girls under promise of
marriage. In Chicago the average wage of a shop girl is six dollars a
week; it takes at least eight dollars a week to support life there; the
prostitute can make twenty-five dollars a week. Yet even so, she could
not be secured in sufficient numbers without the carefully calculated
traffic. A prominent social worker in Chicago said in his evidence: “A
lot can be done, if we believe that a very large percentage of those who
pass through a period of prostitution are capable of climbing upward
instead of downward by the momentum of their own better nature. We will
have to change our theory about the woman criminal, if we are going to
save her. And if the woman is a prostitute, it is only through (1) the
uncontrolled passion of youth, and (2) financial stress. To my mind
she can fight both of these, but she can’t fight those and the added
damnation of the saloon and the cool, sagacious business man, who simply
stands by and drains her for profit. She could break through the economic
dangers and the physical temptations if you will give her a chance, but
when you make her fight alcohol and capitalisation, she has no show.”
We see from these accounts, then, that the demand comes from men, and
that the supply is largely procured by men for business purposes. In
England when a procurer is caught, he or she is sent to jail, but the men
who finance the procurer and the men who are her clients are shielded.
Who can doubt that when women know these things and are admitted to full
citizenship, there will be a change of public opinion all along the lines
that feed the supply—economic and educational? The Chicago Commission
in apportioning the blame, says: “The Commission has refrained from
unnecessary criticism of public officials. Present-day conditions are
better in respect to open vice than the city has known in many years.
But they are by no means a credit to Chicago. However, this must be
remembered, they are not unique in the history of the city. Present-day
public officials are no more lax in their handling of the problem than
their predecessors for years; as a matter of fact, the regulations
respecting flagrant and open prostitution under the present police
administration, are more strict in tone, and repressive in execution
than have been issued or put in operation for many years. Public opinion
has made no united demand for a change in the situation. The Commission
feels, therefore, that all public officials who are equally responsible
for the present conditions are equally open to criticism. Further,
that _the greatest criticism is due the citizens of Chicago_ (italics
mine), first, for the constant evasion of the problem, second, for their
ignorance and indifference to the situation, and third, for their lack
of united effort in demanding a change in the intolerable conditions as
they now exist.” If ignorance and indifference in the mass of citizens
are the ultimate causes, may we not find in the fact that only men are
citizens one of the causes of this ignorance and indifference? You can
rouse the country on an election cry of “slavery,” if it is the slavery
of men. The far worse slavery of women is no profitable election cry. Do
our anti-suffrage politicians never think of the reason for this? It is a
fine commentary on the “Chivalry” of which they prate.
And, lastly, we come to the traffic in war. The recent exposure in
Germany of such traffic among armament manufacturers—an international
traffic like that in women—has reminded us of the extraordinary folly
of allowing private firms to manufacture the actual implements of war.
Of course there are many other necessities of war over which it is
impossible to have control, but at least the manufacture of warships and
guns and ammunition should not be let out of the hands of the government.
Here again the sovereign remedy, as in so many other matters, is light,
knowledge. When the working man, who is regarded as food for powder,
knows in whose interests wars are made, how contrived, financed, and
timed, it will not be so easy to catch him with the bait of rhetoric. It
will be still less easy to catch women. In the _Labour Leader_ of 24th
July 1913 there appeared an article giving a list of thirty-five aviation
companies, many of which expect to share in the boom that will be given
to the trade by orders from the war-departments of various governments.
Here we have a baby industry reposing most of its hopes of profit not on
the use men may make of this wonderful discovery for the enlargement of
life, but for the spreading of death. Truly it looks as if the glorious
inventions of the sovereign mind of man would continue to be accursed
until man acknowledges his fellow-sovereign.