A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil | Page 3

city, when
aroused to the truth, would instantly rebel against the social evil in all
its phases." A similar recommendation of ultimate abolition was
recently made unanimous by the Minneapolis vice commission after
the conversion of many of its members. Doubtless all of the national
societies have before them a task only less gigantic than that faced by
those earlier associations in America for the suppression of slavery,
although it may be legitimate to remind them that the best-known
anti-slavery society in America was organized by the New England
abolitionists in 1836, and only thirty-six years later, in 1872, was
formally disbanded because its object had been accomplished. The long
struggle ahead of these newer associations will doubtless claim its
martyrs and its heroes, has indeed already claimed them during the last
thirty years. Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood;
nevertheless, to paraphrase Lincoln's speech, if blood were exacted
drop by drop in measure to the tears of anguished mothers and enslaved
girls, the nation would still be obliged to go into the struggle.
Throughout this volume the phrase "social evil" is used to designate the
sexual commerce permitted to exist in every large city, usually in a
segregated district, wherein the chastity of women is bought and sold.
Modifications of legal codes regarding marriage and divorce, moral
judgments concerning the entire group of questions centring about
illicit affection between men and women, are quite other questions
which are not considered here. Such problems must always remain
distinct from those of commercialized vice, as must the treatment of an
irreducible minimum of prostitution, which will doubtless long exist,

quite as society still retains an irreducible minimum of murders. This
volume does not deal with the probable future of prostitution, and gives
only such historical background as is necessary to understand the
present situation. It endeavors to present the contributory causes, as
they have become registered in my consciousness through a long
residence in a crowded city quarter, and to state the indications, as I
have seen them, of a new conscience with its many and varied
manifestations.
Nothing is gained by making the situation better or worse than it is, nor
in anywise different from what it is. This ancient evil is indeed social in
the sense of community responsibility and can only be understood and
at length remedied when we face the fact and measure the resources
which may at length be massed against it. Perhaps the most striking
indication that our generation has become the bearer of a new moral
consciousness in regard to the existence of commercialized vice is the
fact that the mere contemplation of it throws the more sensitive men
and women among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt.
It is doubtless an instinctive shrinking from this emotion and an
unconscious dread that this modern sensitiveness will be outraged,
which justifies to themselves so many moral men and women in their
persistent ignorance of the subject. Yet one of the most obvious
resources at our command, which might well be utilized at once, if it is
to be utilized at all, is the overwhelming pity and sense of protection
which the recent revelations in the white slave traffic have aroused for
the thousands of young girls, many of them still children, who are
yearly sacrificed to the "sins of the people." All of this emotion ought
to be made of value, for quite as a state of emotion is invariably the
organic preparation for action, so it is certainly true that no profound
spiritual transformation can take place without it.
After all, human progress is deeply indebted to a study of imperfections,
and the counsels of despair, if not full of seasoned wisdom, are at least
fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur to action. Sympathetic
knowledge is the only way of approach to any human problem, and the
line of least resistance into the jungle of human wretchedness must
always be through that region which is most thoroughly explored, not

only by the information of the statistician, but by sympathetic
understanding. We are daily attaining the latter through such authors as
Sudermann and Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their readers to
comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful portrayal of
the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism has rescued
her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible Camille quite as
their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the weeping Amelias of
the Victorian period by reasonable women transcribed from actual life.
The treatment of this subject in American literature is at present in the
pamphleteering stage, although an ever-increasing number of short
stories and novels deal with it. On the other hand, the plays through
which Bernard Shaw constantly places the truth before the public in
England as Brieux is doing for