Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of EthicsDrake, Durant
Philosophy
Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of Ethics
Drake, Durant
Ethics
If the police are honest, they break up a disorderly house-and let the
inmates carry the lure of their trade elsewhere. The magistrates fine
them, or give them sentences just long enough to bring them needed
rest and nutrition, and send them back to their business. Or they drive
them out of town-to swell the numbers in the next town. Attempts at
legalization and localization are frank admissions of inability or
lack of desire to fight the evil; their effect is to make the way of
temptation easier for the youth. Compulsory medical inspection gives
a promise of immunity from disease which is largely illusory, and entices
men who are now restrained by prudential motives. There are, however,
many promising lines of attack:
(1) When women gain the vote, they can be counted on to fight the
evil. The prostitutes themselves, being mostly minors, and, in any case,
anxious to conceal their identity, seldom vote; and the remaining women
are almost en masse bitterly opposed to the trade. With women voting,
and an efficient political administration inaugurated in our cities, we
shall hope to witness the end of the scandalous nonenforcement of
existing laws.
(2) The abolishing of the liquor trade will take away the great
political ally of the trade in girlhood; and without the demoralizing
influence of alcohol fewer men will yield to their passions and
fewer girls be pliant thereto.
(3) The Rockefeller Commission disclosed majority of prostitutes are
almost wholly uneducated-about half of those questioned had not even
gone through the primary school, and only seven per cent had finished
the grammar-school work. Compulsory education, vigilantly enforced,
will greatly lessen the number of girls who will be willing to take
up the life of degradation, suffering, and premature death; especially
will this be the case if sex hygiene is properly taught. Approximately
a quarter of the girls studied were mentally defective; these should
have been detected in the schools and removed to the proper
institutions before they fell prey to the clever schemes of the
procurer.[Footnote: Of 647 wayward girls recently at the Bedford
Reformatory, over 300 were accounted mentally deficient.] For a
falling-off in this alarming number of mental defectives we must await
scientific eugenic laws to be discussed in chapter xxx.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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