White, between 1867 and 1870, launched various attacks upon these ludicrous gossamers of speech, and particularly upon /enceinte/, /limb/ and /female/, but only /female/ succumbed. The passage of the notorious Comstock Postal Act, in 1873, greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms. Once that act was upon the statute-books and Comstock himself was given the amazingly inquisitorial powers of a post-office inspector, it became positively dangerous to print certain ancient and essentially decent English words. To this day the effects of that old reign of terror are still visible. We yet use /toilet/ and /public comfort station/ in place of better terms,[38] and such idiotic forms as /red-light district/, /disorderly-house/, /blood-poison/, /social-evil/, /social disease/ and /white slave/ ostensibly conceal what every flapper is talking about. The word /cadet/, having a foreign smack and an innocent native meaning, is preferred to the more accurate /procurer/; even prostitutes shrink from the forthright /pimp/, and employ a characteristic American abbreviation, /P. I./--a curious brother to /S. O. B./ and /2 o'clock/. Nevertheless, a movement toward honesty is getting on its legs. The vice crusaders, if they have accomplished nothing else, have at least forced the newspapers to use the honest terms, /syphilis/, /prostitute/, /brothel/ and /venereal disease/, albeit somewhat gingerly. It is, perhaps, significant of the change going on that the /New York Evening Post/ [Pg128] recently authorized its reporters to use /street-walker/.[39] But in certain quarters the change is viewed with alarm, and curious traces of the old prudery still survive. The Department of Health of New York City, in April, 1914, announced that its efforts to diminish venereal disease were much handicapped because "in most newspaper offices the words /syphilis/ and /gonorrhea/ are still tabooed, and without the use of these terms it is almost impossible to correctly state the problem." The Army Medical Corps, in the early part of 1918, encountered the same difficulty: most newspapers refused to print its bulletins regarding venereal disease in the army. One of the newspaper trade journals thereupon sought the opinions of editors upon the subject, and all of them save one declared against the use of the two words. One editor put the blame upon the Postoffice, which still cherishes the Comstock tradition. Another reported that "at a recent conference of the Scripps Northwest League editors" it was decided that "the use of such terms as /gonorrhea/, /syphilis/, and even /venereal diseases/ would not add to the tone of the papers, and that the term /vice diseases/ can be readily substituted."[40] The Scripps papers are otherwise anything but distinguished for their "tone," but in this department they yield to the Puritan habit. An even more curious instance of prudery came to my notice in Philadelphia several years ago. A one-act play of mine, "The