e at least in the general poverty of
the family. And that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic system
under which we live. In the man's problem, the growing impossibility of
early marriages is directly related to the business situation. Nor can we
speak of the degradation of religion and the arts, of amusement, of the
general morale of the people without referring that degradation to
industrial conditions.

You cannot look at civilization as a row of institutions each external to
the other. They interpenetrate and a change in one affects all the
others. To abolish prostitution would involve a radical alteration of
society. Vice in our cities is a form of the sexual impulse--one of the
forms it has taken under prevailing social conditions. It is, if you
please, like the crops of a rude and forbidding soil--a coarse, distorted
thing though living.

The Commission studied a human problem and left humanity out. I do not
mean that the members weren't deeply touched by the misery of these
thousands of women. You can pity the poor without understanding them; you
can have compassion without insight. The Commissioners had a good deal of
sympathy for the prostitute's condition, but for that "lust in the hearts
of men," and women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic
understanding. They did not place themselves within the impulse.
Officially they remained external to human desires. For what might be
called the _elan vital_ of the problem they had no patience. Certain sad
results of the particular "method of expression" it had sought out in
Chicago called forth their pity and their horror.

In short, the Commission did not face the sexual impulse squarely. The
report is an attempt to deal with a sexual problem by disregarding its
source. There are almost a hundred recommendations to various
authorities--Federal, State, county, city, police, educational and
others. I have attempted to classify these proposals under four headings.
There are those which mean forcible repression of particular
manifestations--the taboos; there are the recommendations which are
purely palliative, which aim to abate some of the horrors of existing
conditions; there are a few suggestions for further investigation; and,
finally, there are the inventions, the plans which show some desire to
find moral equivalents for evil--the really statesmanlike offerings.

The palliative measures we may pass by quickly. So long as they do not
blind peo