Social customs are instituted so slowly and even imperceptibly, so far
as the conforming individual is concerned, that the mass of men submit
to control in spite of themselves, and it is therefore always difficult
to determine how far the average upright living is the result of
external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn. This is especially
true of domestic life. Even the sordid marriages in which the senses
have forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family
affection. The young couple who may have been brought together in
marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work
in meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many
mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfolded
lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of
children. They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation which
falls to the lot of the majority of men and women, with its high rewards
and painful sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints of
family life are denied to the soldier. A somewhat similar situation is
found in every large construction camp, and in the crowded city
tenements occupied by thousands of immigrant men who have preceded their
families to America.
In the light of the history of prostitution in relation to militarism,
nothing could be more absurd than the familiar statement that virtuous
women could not safely walk the streets unless opportunity for secret
vice were offered to the men of the city. It is precisely the men who
have not submitted to self-control who are dangerous and they only, as
the court records themselves make clear.
In addition to the large social movements for the betterment of Public
Health, for the establishment of Temperance, for the promotion of Equal
Suffrage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitration is the
world-wide organization and active propaganda of International
Socialism. It has always included the abolition of this ancient evil in
its program of social reconstruction, and since the publication of
Bebel's great book, nearly thirty years ago, the leaders of the
Socialist party have never ceased to discuss the economics of
prostitution with its psychological and moral resultants. The Socialists
contend that commercialized vice is fundamentally a question of poverty,
a by-product of despair, which will disappear only with the abolition of
poverty itself; that it persists not primarily from inherent weakness in
human nature, but is a vice arising from a defective organization of
social life; that with a reorganization of society, at least all of
prostitution which is founded upon the hunger of the victims and upon
the profits of the traffickers, will disappear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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