In casting about for a concrete example to ill.u.s.trate some of the points under discussion I hesitated a long time before the wealth of material. No age has produced such a mult.i.tude of elaborate studies, and any selection was, of course, a limiting one. The Minority Report of the English Poor Law Commission has striking merits and defects, but for our purposes it inheres too deeply in British conditions. American tariff and trust investigations are ma.s.sive enough in all conscience, but they are so partisan in their origin and so pathetically unattached to any recognized ideal of public policy that it seemed better to look elsewhere. Conservation had the virtue of arising out of a provident statesmanship, but its problems were largely technical.
The real choice narrowed itself finally to the Pittsburgh Survey and the Chicago Vice Report. Had I been looking for an example of the finest expert inquiry, there would have been little question that the vivid and intensive study of Pittsburgh"s industrialism was the example to use. But I was looking for something more representative, and, therefore, more revealing. I did not want a detached study of some specially selected cross-section of what is after all not the typical economic life of America. The case demanded was one in which you could see representative American citizens trying to handle a problem which had touched their imaginations.
Vice is such a problem. You can always get a hearing about it; there is no end of interest in the question. Rare indeed is that community which has not been "Lexowed," in which a district attorney or a minister has not led a crusade. Muckraking began with the exposure of vice; men like Heney, Lindsey, Folk founded their reputations on the fight against it. It would be interesting to know how much of the social conscience of our time had as its first insight the prost.i.tute on the city pavement.
We do not have to force an interest, as we do about the trusts, or even about the poor. For this problem lies close indeed to the dynamics of our own natures. Research is stimulated, actively aroused, and a pa.s.sionate zeal suffuses what is perhaps the most spontaneous reform enthusiasm of our time. Looked at externally it is a curious focusing of attention. Nor is it explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social compa.s.sion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I do not press the point. It belongs to the a.n.a.lyst of motive.
We need only note the vast interest in the subject--that it extends across cla.s.s lines, and expresses itself as an immense good-will. Perhaps a largely unconscious absorption in a subject is itself a sign of great importance. Surely vice has a thousand implications that touch all of us directly. It is closely related to most of the interests of life--ramifying into industry, into the family, health, play, art, religion. The miseries it entails are genuine miseries--not points of etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice issues in pain. The world suffers for it. To attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a problem as any that we human beings face.
The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily measured problem before it. At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the number of prost.i.tutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public prost.i.tution is so varied that n.o.body can do better than estimate it roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates is the constant repression and the ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses discovery and measurement.
The report estimates that there are five thousand women in Chicago who devote their whole time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen million dollars a year. These figures are admittedly low for they leave out all consideration of occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prost.i.tution. It is only the nucleus that can be guessed at; the fringe which shades out into various degrees of respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet these suburbs of the Tenderloin must always be kept in mind; their population is shifting and very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe that it is the natural refuge of the "suppressed" prost.i.tute. Moreover it defies control.
The 1012 women recognized on the police lists are of course the most easily studied. From them we can gather some hint of the enormous bewildering demand that prost.i.tution answers. The Commission informs us that this small group alone receives over fifteen thousand visits a day--five million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012 women are only about one-fifth of the professional prost.i.tutes in Chicago. If the average continues, then the figures mount to something over 27,000,000. The five thousand professionals do not begin to represent the whole illicit traffic of a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional vice is beyond all measurement.
The figures I have given are taken from the report. They are said to be conservative. For the purposes of this discussion we could well lower the 27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned about is in arriving at a sense of the enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil." For it is this that the Commission proposes to repress, and ultimately to annihilate.
l.u.s.t has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the a.s.signation house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors, Turkish baths, ma.s.sage parlors, street-walking--the thing has woven itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads, everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city. Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally impossible to follow the myriad expressions it a.s.sumes.
The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A ma.s.s of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what extent l.u.s.t finds its illicit expression. Deeper than this the report does not go. The human impulses which create these social conditions, the human needs to which they are a sad and degraded answer--this human center of the problem the commission pa.s.ses by with a plat.i.tude.
"So long as there is l.u.s.t in the hearts of men," we are told, "it will seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the Social Evil." But at the head of the report in black-faced type we read:
"Constant and persistent repression of prost.i.tution the immediate method; absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal."
I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in a verbal inconsistency. The inconsistency is real, out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. l.u.s.t will seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of men are changed." All particular expressions are evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet though you repress one form of l.u.s.t, it will seek some other. Now, says the Commission, in order to change the hearts of men, religion and education must step in. It is their business to eradicate an impulse which is constantly changing form by being "suppressed."
There is only one meaning in this: the Commission realized vaguely that repression is not even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth a.n.a.lyzing later, these representative American citizens desired both the immediate taboo and an ultimate annihilation of vice. So they fell into the confusion of making immediate and detailed proposals that have nothing to do with the attainment of their ideal.
What the commission saw and described were the particular forms which a great human impulse had a.s.sumed at a specific date in a certain city. The dynamic force which created these conditions, which will continue to create them--l.u.s.t--they refer to in a few pious sentences. Their thinking, in short, is perfectly static and literally superficial. In outlining a ripple they have forgotten the tides.
Had they faced the human sources of their problem, had they tried to think of the social evil as an answer to a human need, their researches would have been different, their remedies fruitful. Suppose they had kept in mind their own statement: "so long as there is l.u.s.t in the hearts of men it will seek out some method of expression." Had they held fast to that, it would have ceased to be a plat.i.tude and have become a fertile idea. For a plat.i.tude is generally inert wisdom.
In the sentence I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it, and they pa.s.sed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the hints it unfolds.
If l.u.s.t will seek an expression, are all expressions of it necessarily evil? That the kind of expression which the Commission describes is evil no one will deny. But is it the only possible expression?
If it is, then the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining a fict.i.tious sense of activity. But the ideal of "annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If l.u.s.t 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 regards l.u.s.t itself as inherently evil. The members a.s.sumed without criticism the traditional dogma of Christianity that s.e.x in any manifestation outside of marriage is sinful. But practical sense told them that s.e.x cannot be confined within marriage. 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 uncriticised a.s.sumption that all expressions not legalized are sinful shut them off from any constructive answer to their problem. Seeing prost.i.tution or something equally bad as the only way s.e.x can find an expression they really set before religion and education the impossible task of removing l.u.s.t "from the hearts of men." So when their report puts at its head that absolute annihilation of prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tution, not alone all the methods of expression which l.u.s.t seeks out, but l.u.s.t itself.
That this is what the Commission had in mind is supported by plenty of "internal evidence." For example: one of the most curious recommendations made is about divorce--"The Commission condemns the ease with which divorces may be obtained in certain States, and recommends a stringent, uniform divorce law for all States."
What did the Commission have in mind? I transcribe the paragraph which deals with divorce: "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 s.e.xual vice. No study of this blight upon the social and moral life of the country would be comprehensive without consideration of the causes which lead to the application 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 take up the responsibilities of family life, including 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 contributory factor to s.e.xual vice. One way presumably is that divorced women often become prost.i.tutes. That is an evil contribution, unquestionably. 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 prost.i.tute. This evil is totally different from the first: in one case divorce contributes to prost.i.tution, in the other, prost.i.tution leads to divorce. The third sentence urges greater safeguards against undesirable marriages. This prudence would obviously reduce the need of divorce.
How does the recommendation of a stringent and uniform law fit in with these three statements? 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."
A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish the number of "divorced women," and perhaps keep them out of prost.i.tution. 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 prost.i.tution tabooed, the Commission has a choice between sterilization and--let us say--other methods of expression.
Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent, prost.i.tution impossible--is there any doubt that the leading idea is to confine the s.e.x impulse within the marriage of healthy, intelligent, "moral," and monogamous couples? For all the other seekings of that impulse what has the Commission to offer? Nothing. That can be a.s.serted flatly. The Commission hopes to wipe out prost.i.tution. 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 prost.i.tution as something that can be subtracted from our civilization without changing the essential character of its inst.i.tutions. Yet who that has read the report itself and put himself into any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape seeing that prost.i.tution to-day is organic to our industrial life, our marriage sanctions, and our social customs? Low wages, fatigue, and the wretched monotony of the factory--these must go before prost.i.tution can go. And behind these stand the facts of woman"s entrance 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 problem, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, of the general morale of the people without referring that degradation to industrial conditions.
You cannot look at civilization as a row of inst.i.tutions each external to the other. They interpenetrate and a change in one affects all the others. To abolish prost.i.tution would involve a radical alteration of society. Vice in our cities is a form of the s.e.xual 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 coa.r.s.e, distorted thing though living.
The Commission studied a human problem and left humanity out. I do not mean that the members weren"t deeply touched by the misery of these thousands of women. You can pity the poor without understanding them; you can have compa.s.sion without insight. The Commissioners had a good deal of sympathy for the prost.i.tute"s condition, but for that "l.u.s.t in the hearts of men," and women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic understanding. They did not place themselves within the impulse. Officially they remained external to human desires. For what might be called the elan vital of the problem they had no patience. Certain sad results of the particular "method of expression" it had sought out in Chicago called forth their pity and their horror.
In short, the Commission did not face the s.e.xual impulse squarely. The report is an attempt to deal with a s.e.xual problem by disregarding its source. There are almost a hundred recommendations to various authorities--Federal, State, county, city, police, educational and others. I have attempted to cla.s.sify 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 pa.s.s by quickly. So long as they do not blind people to the necessity for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire would object to them. Like all intelligent charities 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 children a better start in life. The separation of delinquent from semi-delinquent girls is a somewhat 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 hospitality. How great a part the desolating loneliness of a city plays in seductions the individual histories in the report show. Munic.i.p.al 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 s.e.xual expression which may have positively beneficent results. A munic.i.p.al lodging house for women is something of a subst.i.tute 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 repression to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city. The educational proposals are all constructive: the teaching of s.e.x hygiene is guardedly recommended for consideration. That is entirely justified, for no one can quarrel with a set of men for leaving a question open. That girls from fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational training in continuation schools; that social centers 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 plat.i.tude, 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 s.e.xual impulse? How many of these recommendations see s.e.x as an instinct which can be trans.m.u.ted, and turned into one of the values of life? The dance halls, the social centers, the playgrounds, the reception of strangers--these can become instruments for civilizing s.e.xual need. The educational proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but will they? Without the habit of mind which sees subst.i.tution 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 haphazard shooting which has accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended. Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of s.p.a.ce in the body of the report. On all sides of them is a ma.s.s of taboos. No emotional appeal is made for them as there is for the repressions. They stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor ghosts of the truth among the gibbets.
An inadvertent plat.i.tude--that l.u.s.t will seek an expression--and a few diffident proposals for a finer environment--the need and its satisfaction: 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 ma.s.s of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the marsh. The evils of prost.i.tution 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 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; employment agencies should be watched and investigated; publishers should be warned against printing suspicious advertis.e.m.e.nts; 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 public nuisance; there should be relentless prosecution of professional 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 prost.i.tutes in the state courts; instead of fines, prost.i.tutes 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 prost.i.tutes in saloons, against wine-rooms and stalls in saloons, against communication between 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 discharged; 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 a.s.sociation should discipline law-breaking saloon-keepers: licenses should be permanently revoked 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 public dance; there should be a munic.i.p.al detention home for women, with probation officers; police inspectors who fail to report law-violations should be dismissed; a.s.signation houses should be suppressed as soon as they are reported; there should be a "special morals police squad"; recommendation IX "to the Police" says they "should wage a relentless warfare against houses of prost.i.tution, immoral flats, a.s.signation rooms, call houses, and disorderly saloons in all sections of the city"; parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly policed; dancing pavilions should exclude professional prost.i.tutes; soliciting in parks should be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a searchlight; 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, munic.i.p.al. Note how vague and general are the chance constructive suggestions; 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 prost.i.tution has nothing to expect from the concrete proposals that were made. The millennial goal was one thing; the immediate method quite another. 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 civilization leans upon, surely the police is the frailest. Anyone who has had the smallest experience of munic.i.p.al 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 strict law enforcement against saloons, brothels, and gambling houses would not stop vice, but would corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle 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 recommendations 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 Commission 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 prost.i.tutes in rear rooms and on the streets, selling tickets at dances frequented by professional and semi-professional prost.i.tutes; protecting "cadets," prost.i.tutes and saloon-keepers of disorderly 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 special morals police squad; hence the investigation 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 commission" 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 Commission didn"t prosecute hard enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an interesting question. With federal, state, and munic.i.p.al authorities in existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps 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 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 watching him. What is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate 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. n.o.body"s heart is in the work very long; n.o.body"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 ma.s.s of men is soon bored by intricate rules and tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real life--interesting, but easily forgotten.
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 superst.i.tions. You must never let it reach any public a.n.a.lysis. For it will fail, it will 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, unnatural 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 effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks, it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning and makes obedience a habit. Let that infallibility come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day, and natural impulses rea.s.sert 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 that of organized money, and that sovereignty is too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent 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 disappointment 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 attempt to make republics act like old-fashioned monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind it a trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government" clubs are little would-be oligarchies.
When the ma.s.s 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 att.i.tude. 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.
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 order 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 creation 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 suggested in the industrial conditions they face; plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been collected for trans.m.u.ting the s.e.x impulse into art, into social endeavor, into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious intention was to down s.e.x with religion. What was not realized, it seems, is that this very s.e.x impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of the psychologists, the students of religion, the aestheticians or even of Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of s.e.x through the imagination, we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the most precious implements for ministering to life"s highest needs. There is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their companions to be "in love" if his fancy is occupied by the image of a single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young people, easily ill.u.s.trates the possibility and value of diffusion."
It is then not only impossible to confine s.e.x to mere reproduction; it would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat s.e.x with dignity and joy. For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects. The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they are some of those "other methods of expression which l.u.s.t can seek." It is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in America.
Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice and its misery cannot be trans.m.u.ted by policemen and Morals Commissions, the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer: "so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago."
But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed, and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless, beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where our daily life is furtive; work a craft; art a partic.i.p.ation--it is in miniature the goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry over that jolly and redeeming coa.r.s.eness.
What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to abolish prost.i.tution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with pa.s.sions which hold and suffuse the imagination.
It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman"s club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they realize how deep and enormous is the task.