a man loves her and is
ready to marry her. It is damnably hard on men.

The truth in these matters is not often spoken. In spite of the
emancipation upon which they pride themselves, in spite even of much
precocious experience, almost all women lead a shielded life; vast
tracts of experience are usually outside their knowledge or their power
of comprehension. This explains, I think, their belief in the old
fiction that the seduction of men by women does not take place, but all
men know it goes on unceasingly. Women have been shielded by men to an
extent which few of them acknowledge. This is one reason why the best of
them find it so difficult now to face the woman's responsibility in
these problems of sex frankly and simply.

At one time this failure in feminine honesty on the part of so many
advanced women made me angry as it appeared to me to be a conscious
shirking. I know now I was wrong; this attitude is an unconscious one
and this makes it much more dangerous. I fear nothing can change it, at
least, for a very long time. As women's spiritual temperature rises,
their honesty tends to fall, so much sometimes as to freeze their
intelligence.

Women, even the fairest and most advanced, are willing to accept little
shame for a depravity which their sex shares equally with the
inescapable and surrendering enemy--man. Perhaps the position is
unavoidable. I am not certain, and it is very difficult to find the
truth. But no man, I think, could satisfy completely in woman the
craving for dominion, which the delusive humility of his desire awakens.
Then when a woman commits the error--from a womanly point of view--of
hunting down her man in haste for gain, instead of drawing and binding
him slowly and unconsciously by love, she awakens the same instinct for
dominion in the man. It is the lust to devour, to crush, quickened into
being by suggestion. It explains, perhaps, the cruelty of all wild-love.

The position now in relation to the problem we are considering, and
keeping in view these facts of the relationship of the woman and the
man, should be clearer: the spread of venereal disease must be attacked
by restricting the trade of the prostitute. Action must begin there.
Acknowledging frankly women's power over men and the magnitude of the
temptation they exercise, we must accept the best means to control it.
America has proved what can be done. We want strong restrictive laws to
prevent street soliciting and make pos