Part 20
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.
LI
In taking the present occasion to say so much about the work in morals which a mayor is expected to perform, I have a disquieting sense that I have fallen into a tone too querulous for the subject, and perhaps taken a mean advantage of the reader in telling of my troubles. It is rather a troubled life that a mayor leads in one of these turbulent American cities, since so much of his time is taken up by reformers who seem to expect him somehow to do their holy work for them, and yet that is doubtless the business of reformers in this world, and since it is their mission to trouble someone, perhaps it is the business of a mayor to be troubled by them in his vicarious and representative capacity. I should not deny reformers their rights in this respect, or their uses in this world, and I should be the last to question their virtues. John Brown was beyond doubt a strong character and an estimable man, who did a great and heroic work in the world, even if he did do it in opposition to the law, and by the law was killed at last for doing it, but by all accounts he must have been a terrible person to live with, and I have often been glad that I was not mayor of Ossawattomie when he was living and reforming there. I would as soon have had Peter the Hermit for a constituent.
I shall not go quite so far as to admit that our reformers were as strong in character as either of these great models I have mentioned, but they were as persistent, or in combination they were as persistent; when one tired or desisted, another promptly took his place; there were so many that they could spell each other, and work in relays, and thus keep the torch ever alive and brandishing. It was not only the social evil with which they were concerned, but the evil of drink, and the evil of gambling, and the evil of theaters, and the evil of moving pictures, and post cards, and of the nude in art, and of lingerie in show windows, and of boys swimming in the river, and playing in the streets, and scores of other conditions which seemed to inspire in them the fear or the thought of evil.
With the advent of spring, the mayor must put a stop to lovers wandering in the parks; when summer comes he must put an end instantly to baseball; in the winter he must close the theaters and the dance halls; in short, as I said before, whenever it was reported from any quarter that there were people having fun, the police must instantly be despatched to put a stop to it.
And strangely enough, even when we did succeed in doing away with some of the evils of the town, when we closed the saloons promptly at midnight, the hour fixed by ordinance, when we did away with many evil resorts, when wine rooms were extirpated, and the number of _maisons de tolerance_ were reduced by eighty-five per cent., when gambling was stamped out, their complaints did not subside, but went on, unabated, the same as before. They could not be satisfied because the whole of their impossible program was not adopted, and more because there was no public recognition of their infallibility and no admission of their righteousness. What that type of mind desires is not, after all, any reasonable treatment of those conditions, or any honest and sincere endeavor to deal with them. It demands intellectual surrender, the acknowledgment of its infallibility, and a protesting hypocrite can more easily meet its views than anyone else.
No wonder then that even such a strong man as Tom Johnson, one evening, when the day was done, should fling himself back in the motor car, with the dark shadow of utter weariness and despair on his face, and say:
“I wish I could take a train to the end of the longest railway in the world, then go as far as wagons could draw me and then walk and crawl as far as I could, and then in the midst of the farthest forest lie down and rest.”
We all have such moments, of course, but we should have fewer of them if we had a national trait of which I have read, in a book by Mr. Fielding Hall in relation to Burma. He says the Burmese have a vast unwillingness to interfere in other people’s affairs.
“A foreigner may go and live in a Burman village,” he says, “may settle down there and live his own life and follow his own customs in perfect freedom; may dress and eat and drink and pray and die as he likes. No one will interfere. No one will try to correct him; no one will be forever insisting to him that he is an outcast, either from civilization or from religion. The people will accept him for what he is and leave the matter there. If he likes to change his ways and conform to Burmese habits and Buddhist forms, so much the better; but if not, never mind.”
What a hell Burma would be for the Puritan! And what a heaven for everybody else! Perhaps we would all better go live there.
These things, however, should be no part of a mayor’s business, and perhaps I may justify my speaking of them by saying that I spoke of them principally to make that point clear. They and some other problems that may or may not be foreign to his duties, have the effect of keeping a mayor from his real work which is or should be, the administration of the communal affairs of the city, and not the regulation of the private affairs of the people in it. It is quite impossible to imagine any work more delightful than this administration. Hampered in it as one is by politicians, who regard every question from the viewpoint of the parish pump, it is nevertheless inspiring to be concerned about great works of construction regarding the public comfort and convenience, the public health and the public amenities. It is in such work that one may catch a glimpse of the vast possibilities of our democracy, of which our cities are the models and the hope.
I have observed in Germany that the mayors of the cities there are not burdened by these extraneous issues, and I think that that is the reason the German cities are the most admirably administered in the world. Perhaps I should say governed, too, though that is hardly correct, since the governing there is done by the state through its own officials. I have not been in Germany often enough or remained long enough to be able to assert that government, in its effect for good, is quite as much a superstition as it is everywhere; mere political government, I mean, which seems to be so implicitly for the selfish benefit of those who do the governing. But the administration of public affairs is so entirely another matter, that it is as beautiful, at least in its possibilities as government is ugly in its actualities, and it is precisely because there has been so much insistence on government in our cities that there is as yet so little administration, and that so inefficient.