Baltimore Evening Sun (7 November 1912): 6.

Dr. Donald R. Hooker, that earnest and romantic man, devotes an article in the Maryland Suffrage News of this week to a refutation of my occasional criticisms of the current Vice Crusade, in which he takes a part second only to that of Dr. Howard A. Kelly. Unluckily enough, Dr. Hooker does not quite understand what my objections are, perhaps because I have stated them with too great a regard for prudery, nor does he see clearly why I advocate some sort of segregation, i. e., some sort of frank recognition of the social evil.

Let me, therefore, be a bit more explicit, at the risk of boring the unregenerate and outraging the pure. I do not argue, nor do I believe, that segregation would reduce materially the total number of unchaste women in Baltimore, nor do I believe that it could ever be made so perfect as to bring all offenders within its areas, nor do I believe that, either with or without medical inspection, it would lead, in itself, to any very marked diminution of the so-called social diseases. All I argue for it is that it is honest, and all I argue against repression is that it is not honest.

Prostitution, in brief, is not a mere bugaboo, to be sent fleeing by wind music, but a highly material fact, and what is more, a fact that seems firmly rooted in ineradicable human weakness. I do not say that the world will never see the end of it, nor do I say that its good effects counterbalance its bad effects, nor that its abolition would work a genuine hardship on anyone. All I do say is that it will never disappear so long as human beings, in the mass, remain as weak as they are today, and human society retains its present constitution. And in support of that contention I point to its survival down to our own day, in spite of centuries of attack so influential and so furious that the current campaign in the United States seems puny and ridiculous by comparison. In brief, I do not believe that Dr. Hooker and his friends will succeed where popes and emperors have failed, and on that doctrine I hang my case.

But what, then, is to be done about it? The thing is undoubtedly evil, and in the presence of evil honest men do not like to sit silent. At the moment two divergent plans are proposed and behind them are two theories of morals. The theory of the Vice Crusaders is that the way to deal with prostitution is to drive it under cover, to make it furtive and an outlaw, to combat its appearance and conceal its substance, to give it, in brief, a specious and deceptive air of non-existence. The theory of less virtuous and more tough-minded men is that the right way is to admit the inevitable without parley, to keep the thing itself naked and unashamed, to take away from it all romantic glamour and mystery, to ameliorate as much as possible its bad effects upon the individual, to separate it from associated and contributory evils--in a word, to try to make the best of it.

I am well aware that the former theory appeals strongly to many pious men, who argue eloquently that all compromise with evil is wrong, but all the same I believe that it is unsound, pernicious and nonsensical. Say what you will against it, we must constantly compromise with evil in this imperfect world. In the presence of the bitter facts of life, all the more idealistic forms of piety go to pieces. Nothing has ever been accomplished in Christendom by proceeding upon the theory that sin is a purely volitional phenomenon, to be stamped out by invective. All the moral progress we have made has been based upon a frank acceptance of human frailty, and a common-sense endeavor to diminish the evil in its inevitable effects.

Here, I believe, is where the Vice Crusaders run aground. In so far as they confine themselves to combating the costly sequelæ of prostitution--for example, the physical damage to the individual--nobody, I take it, is against them. But when they pass from their purely remedial role to that of critics and doctors of human weakness, when they set out to destroy a cause as deeply rooted as the cause of life itself, then they pass from the field of practical reform and become tedious and irritating idealists, and dangerous to the public security. Whatever progress is ever made in reducing the evils of prostitution will be made by men who have intellectual courage enough to admit openly that the facts of life are such and so, and who do not waste their time figuring out how much nicer the world would be if human beings were not as they are.

To repeat, I do not think that the Vice Crusaders are honest, and by this I do not mean honest in the sense of sincere, but honest in the sense of accurate in observation and frank in report. The best that you can say for them is that it would be nice if what they prophesy could come true, but every time you say that you must also admit that the probabilities are overwhelmingly against it. Why waste time arguing for the unobtainable when effective work lies so close at hand? Why denounce the weather as immoral--as it undoubtedly is--when it is so much easier to build a house?

I have read the pamphlets of the Vice Crusaders with great care, and I have also listened to the arguments of their chosen spokesman. The result of this inquiry is positive amazement at the inaccuracy of their data on the one hand, and at the fallaciousness of their reasoning on the other. Not long ago I heard an earnest clergyman, prominent in the Crusade, give an account of the social evil in the Western district so full of false premises and ridiculous deductions that I almost slid under the table. It seemed truly incredible that any adult male, interested in the subject, should be so ignorant of the actual machinery of vice. And from time to time, more in sorrow than in anger, I have called attention to the intolerable inaccuracy of reports made by touring crusaders from other cities, and by the chief field agent of the local crusade. Not even the local optionists have manufactured facts more industriously, or shown a more pious delight in the business.

Again, the logic of the crusaders, from end to end, is full of holes. For example, Dr. Kelly, more frank than some of the others, is disposed to admit that the complete stamping out of prostitution is impossible, but yet maintains that the effort should go on. It is also impossible, he argues, wholly to stamp out murder, and yet who would repeal the laws against it? What is the fallacy here? Don't you see it in the vain attempt to range an act based upon a pathological state beside a weakness based upon a normal state? The two are no more related, in truth, than suicide and laugher, despite their artificial juxtaposition in morals, and no intelligible conclusion can be brought out of any assumption that they are.

Then there is Dr. Hooker, with his magnificent argument, in this week’s Suffrage News, that the social evil is not necessary, that its absolute abolition would not do material damage to anyone. A beautiful demonstration--as any self-evident demonstration must be. But physiological necessity, it must be obvious, is by no means the only causative agent behind the acts of man. In point of fact, it is a good deal less potent, in the everyday affairs of the world, than mere caprice and weakness--and it is precisely upon such weakness that the social evil is grounded. I do not say that it is good and I do not say that it is necesary. All I do say is that it is, that the weakness underlying it is. And while deploring that weakness as much as any other hypocrite, I do not carry my objections to it to the point of making impertinent protests against the laws of nature. I am a critic here of men, and not of the Creator.

So much of the causes of prostitution. Its effects, on the one side, at least, are a part of its causes, and hence equally immutable. It uses up, so to speak, a certain number of human beings every year. Innocent girls have to be debauched in order to supply it with recruits. Well, so far as tht attack upon virtue is real all decent men are against it, if only because of their general detestation of deceit. But to what extent is it real? Perhaps to one-fiftieth of one per cent. As for the rest, it is the weakness of the so-called victim far more than the rascality of the seducer that diminishes so lamentably the average virtue of the world.

In other words, the current talk about the White Slave Trade is nine-tenths buncombe. All of the evidence pro is supplied by fanatics whose habit of magnifying small facts is almost pathological and who usually have a personal and financial interest in scaring the public to death. The evidence con you can get from any intelligent policeman. He will tell you, first, that not one prostitute in a thousand is under the slightest duress, physical or psychic, and, secondly, that not one in a hundred labors under any pressing sense of degradation. The vast majority of them, in truth, are women who would go wrong under any conceivable state of society, however benign, and many of them actually made a step upward when they adopted the life so copiously wept over by persons who are themselves sweetly caressed by fate and so can't understand the temptations and motives of the chandala.

Such persons have little understanding of the world's unfortunates and little genuine sympathy for them. On the one hand they picture the Magdalen as a helpless victim of human treachery, and on the other hand they picture her as the worst of criminals. As a matter of fact, she is neither. If she is helpless, it is only in the sense that all of us are helpless. Her inherent character and her early environment, working together, have cast her for a degraded role in life, just as the character and environment of certain Vice Crusaders have fitted them for the parts of Tartuffe and Sganarelle. Her means of escape are many, despite the efforts of the bombardiers of virtue, and whenever she is so inclined she duly escapes. In romantic literature she dies horribly, after five short years of repining. In real life she often marries.

But meanwhile, she does damage to civilization, and the effort of every good citizen must be to reduce that damage to a minimum. In this work the physician, of course, must be to the fore, for it is the physical ripple from her noisome bog that goes furthest and splashes most innocent persons. What is to be done here? The answer is simple enough. It is the duty of the physician, in his laboratory and in his practice, to combat all of the so-called social diseases, intelligently and unemotionally, until they yield to his science and are stamped out. And the very first condition of that combat, if it is ever to be successful, is that he put aside, as irrelevant, all thought of their moral implications and confine himself wholly to their aspect as purely physical phenomena.

Dr. Kelly, Dr. Hooker and other such earnest men frequently make mention of that revolution in medicine which has substituted the prevention of disease for its cure, and they commonly defend their vain effort to stamp out the social evil on the ground that it is genuinely prophylactic, that its high aim is prevention. But let them not forget, in the midst of all this fine enthusiasm, another and more important revolution in medicine. I mean that revolution which finally separated, I hope for all time, the physician and the moralist. No change ever made in human thought and custom was of more value to humanity. No divorce has ever done more to augment the prosperity and respectability of both parties.

The function of the physician of today is to relieve human suffering, and not to fix the moral blame for it. His business is with the facts before him and not with theories of human conduct. Once he essays to divide his patients into the just and unjust, he will find, if he pushes the inquiry honestly, that two-thirds of all who come to him belong to the latter category, that two-thirds of all human ills are the product of human weakness and error, that it is civilization and self-indulgence that fill our hospitals. But when he goes beyond the physical cause, he goes beyond his province, and when he does it habitually, he works a greater damage to sound and humane medical progress than the worst quack unhung.

But why segregation, admittedly imperfect? To repeat again, simply because of the two plans now before the public of this town, it is vastly the more honest. Simply because it admits frankly a condition we cannot wholly remedy, and seeks to make the best of it. Simply because it tends to destroy that romantic glamour, that alluring mystery, that charm of the forbidden, which is the chief attraction and danger of furtive, outlaw vice. Simply because it is grounded upon the facts of life as they are, and not upon some fanciful dream of life as it should be.

“The Vice Crusaders,” said Rabbi Rubenstein at Har Sinai Temple the other day, “will end by scattering broadcast an evil which today we can at least locate, and against which we can yet, in a measure, guard the young and innocent.” And as they scatter it thus, they will increase its enchantment tenfold, and so multiply enormously its menace tomorrow. The open brothel, however red its lights, offers little temptation to any save very young, or very lonely, or very drunken men. But the clandestine prostitute, detached from her proper and disgusting stage settings and taking on thereby the charm of the difficult and romantic, is a temptation to all men, old and young, drunk and sober, vicious and decent.