Strange, too, since the attitude is assumed by a civilization which calls itself Christian and preaches that the old law, with its eye for an eye and its tooth for a tooth, was done away with and lost in a new and beautiful dispensation. “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.” If the world is ever to solve this problem, it must first of all apprehend the spirit of this simple and gracious expression, do away with its old laws, its old cruelties, its old brutalities, its old stupidities, and approach the problem in that human spirit which I suspect is so very near the divine. Once in this attitude, this spirit, society will be in position to learn something from history and from human experience, something from life itself, and what it will learn first is that Puritanical laws, the hounding of the police, and all that sort of thing have never lessened prostitution in the world, but on the contrary have increased it. What! Let them go and not do anything to them? Well, yes, if we can’t think of anything better to do to them than to hurt them a little more, push them a little farther along the road to that abyss toward which we have been hustling them. Why is it constantly necessary to do something _to_ people? If we can’t do anything for them, when are we going to learn to let them alone? Or must this incessant interference, this meddling, this mauling and manhandling, go on in the world forever and ever? As to what is to be done about it, since all that ever has been attempted has been so much worse in its effect than if we had never done anything, I suppose I need not feel so very much ashamed of confessing my ignorance and saying that I do not know. If it were left to me I think the first thing I should do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the subject, beginning with that most savage enactment the Puritan conscience ever devised, namely, the law declaring certain children “illegitimate,” a piece of stupid brutality and cruelty that would make a gorilla blush with shame if it were even suggested in the African jungle. Yes, the first thing to do is to repeal all the criminal laws on the subject. They do no good, and even when it is attempted to enforce them, the result is worse than futile. I myself, with my own eyes, in the old police court where I have witnessed so many squalid tragedies, have seen a magistrate fine a street walker and then suspend the fine so that, as he explained to her in all judicial seriousness, she might go out and “earn” enough money to come back and pay it! And not a person in the court room, so habituated and conventionalized are we all, ever cracked a smile or apparently saw anything out of the way--least of all the street walker!