legislation, prostitution is so subtly and deeply rooted that it can only be affected by influences which bear on all our methods of thought and feeling and all our social custom. It is far from being an isolated manifestation; it is, for instance, closely related to marriage; any reforms in prostitution, therefore, can only follow a reform in our marriage system. But prostitution is also related to economics, and when it is realized how much has to be altogether changed in our whole social system to secure even an approximate abolition of prostitution it becomes doubtful whether many people are willing to pay the price of removing the "social evil" they find it so easy to deplore. They are prepared to appoint Commissions; they have no objection to offer up a prayer; they are willing to pass laws and issue police regulations which are known to be useless. At that point their ardour ends.
If it is impossible to guard the community by statute against the central evil of prostitution, still more hopeless is it to attempt the legal suppression of all the multitudinous minor provocations of the sexual impulse offered by civilization.
Let it be assumed that only by such suppression, and not by frankly meeting and fighting temptations, can character be formed, yet it would be absolutely impossible to suppress more than a fraction of the things that would need to be suppressed.
"There is almost no feature, article of dress, attitude, act," Dr. Stanley Hall has truly remarked, "or even animal, or perhaps object in nature, that may not have to some morbid soul specialized erogenic and erethic power."
If, therefore, we wish to suppress the sexually suggestive and the possibly obscene we are bound to suppress the whole world, beginning with the human race, for if we once enter on that path there is no definite point at which we can logically stop.
The truth is, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder has so repeatedly insisted,