which
can be transmuted, and turned into one of the values of life? The dance
halls, the social centers, the playgrounds, the reception of
strangers--these can become instruments for civilizing sexual need. The
educational proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but
will they? Without the habit of mind which sees substitution as the
essence of statecraft, without a philosophy which makes the invention of
moral equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in these
recommendations anything more than a haphazard shooting which has
accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have
tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended.
Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of space in
the body of the report. On all sides of them is a mass of taboos. No
emotional appeal is made for them as there is for the repressions. They
stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor ghosts of the
truth among the gibbets.

An inadvertent platitude--that lust will seek an expression--and a few
diffident proposals for a finer environment--the need and its
satisfaction: had the Commission seen the relation of these incipient
ideas, animated it, and made it the nerve center of the study, a genuine
program might have resulted. But the two ideas never met and fertilized
each other. Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together--the mass
of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the
marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each
of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed.

There is a special whack for each mosquito: the laws about excursion
boats should be enforced; the owners should help to enforce them; there
should be more officers with police power on these boats; the sale of
liquor to minors should be forbidden; gambling devices should be
suppressed; the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals practicing
abortions should be investigated; employment agencies should be watched
and investigated; publishers should be warned against printing suspicious
advertisements; the law against infamous crimes should be made more
specific; any citizen should have the right to bring equity proceedings
against a brothel as a public nuisance; there should be relentless
prosecution of professional procurers; there should be constant
prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners of bawdy houses; there
should