le texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
by some magic every taboo of the commission could be enforced the
abolition of sex slavery would not have come one step nearer to reality.
Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters and games, manners and
thought will have to be transformed before sex can find a better
expression. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must work that change.
The power of emancipation is in the social movements which alone can
effect any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has been with the negro.
I do not think the Abolitionists saw facts truly when they disbanded
their organization a few years after the civil war. They found too much
comfort in a change of legal status. Profound economic forces brought
about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery. But the reality of
freedom was not achieved by proclamation. For that the revolution had to
go on: the industrial life of the nation had to change its character,
social customs had to be replaced, the whole outlook of men had to be
transformed. And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual bondage,
the actual advance comes from substitutions injected into society by
dynamic social forces.

I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize the particular
problems. I am not engaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction
or in telling just what should be done. Only the co-operation of expert
minds can do that. The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere. If
these essays succeed in suggesting a method of looking at politics, if
they draw attention to what is real in social reforms and make somewhat
more evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical approach,
they will have done their work. That the report of the Chicago Vice
Commission figures so prominently in this chapter is not due to any
preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and
nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of
the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human
impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human
nature; its false interest in a particular expression of
sex--vice--caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability
to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove
it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of
our age shut off the motive power for any reform.

The Co