There, in those dark haunts of licentiousness, man forgets how to love, loses the holy poetry of the heart and the mysterious quivers of sentiment, prostitutes the most gigantic forces of thought and affection. Without hunger, he partakes of savory food; thirstless, he becomes intoxicated; without the necessity of overcoming modesty, he obtains everything, and money levels all virtues and concedes the maddest polygamy; and there one sees the nude and chaste statue of Love dragged in the fetid bog by a frolicsome tipsy crowd. Such is the love that modern civilization offers to all those hundred thousand pariahs who cannot find the straw to weave the chaste nest of the family, to all those who cannot make a vow of chastity and do not wish to deceive an innocent maiden or steal another man's woman. Our civilized society can really be proud of this; the philanthropists with their tearful dirges, the economists with their wise reflections, the legislators with their elaborate codes, can join in a chorus to sing hosannas to this stupendous solution of the problem. Either a starving family or prostitution; either children cast into the depth of misery or faith betrayed in the house of a friend; proletariate or infamy; degradation or crime. Stupendous dilemmas that crown our society with numberless horns and sow deception, hunger and corruption everywhere. If a thick bark of hypocrisy did not cover the rotten trunk of our modern civilization, what a horrible spectacle should we behold! And when a sincere moralist or a true philosopher attempts to cut the bark away and show to us through a little fissure how deep the decay is, then we flee horrified and clamor against such impudence, such sacrilege! The government should, therefore, deal with prostitution as a malady to be treated, not because there is any hope of cure, but because society owes to every sick person a physician and a bed. It should not be permitted to grow, to spread, to parade its lurid sores, to cover itself with tinsel and paint; but it should be watched tenderly as in a hospital, so that in the passer-by it may awaken compassion rather than lechery. And while the state keeps a good vigil, writers and teachers should raise the level of general culture and teach the elect the paradise of chastity, which contains a treasure of delights for the future of him who waits (this, alas! the libertine will never be able to understand), and preserves for true love, which all may hope to attain, the infinite joys of a virgin voluptuousness. The sale of love should neither be proclaimed as a feast of the human family, nor officially suppressed, because it then overflows and inundates all the paths of society; it should be tolerated and pitied, as we already tolerate and pity many other maladies of our social organism.