But it would not be enough simply to repeal these laws from the statute books of the state; it will be necessary to accomplish the immensely more difficult task of repealing them from the human heart, where they were written long ago in anger, and hatred, and jealousy and cruelty and fear, that is in the heat of all the baser passions. What I am trying to say is that the first step in any reasonable and effective reform is an entire change of attitude on the subject, and about the only good to be expected from the agitation about white slavery, with all its preposterous exaggeration and absurd sensationalism is that it is perhaps making for a changed attitude, a new conception; if it will accomplish nothing more than to get the public mind--if there is a public mind, and not a mere public passion--to view the prostitute as a human being, very much like all the other human beings in the world, it will have been worth all it has cost in energy and emotion and credulity. If this sort of repeal can be made effective, if the prostitute can be assured of some chance in life outside the dead line which society so long ago drew for her, the first step will have been taken. The next step possibly will be the erection of a single standard of morals. And this cannot be done by passing a law, or by turning in an alarm for the police. That means thinking, too, and education, and evolution, and all the other slow and toilsome processes of which the off-hand reformers are so impatient. This single standard will have to be raised first in each individual heart; after that it will become the attitude of the general mind. And then the commerce in vice will have to be stopped. I do not mean prohibited by penal laws alone. Policemen cannot stop it, and policemen should have no more to do with it than firemen. In fact much of the commerce has proceeded from the fact that its regulation has been entrusted to the police. It should be a subject for the fiscal laws. It is, I assume, known by most persons that the owners of the dilapidated tenements in which for the most part prostitution is carried on, because of the “risk,” extort exorbitant rentals for them, and then on the ground that they can rent them to no one of respectability, they hold them to be so worthless that they pay little if any taxes on them. Our present tax laws of course have the effect of rewarding the slothful, the lazy and the idle, and of punishing the energetic and the enterprising producer in business, and it would be quite possible to revise the tax laws so that tenderloins would be economically impossible, because they would cease to be profitable.