.
If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem.
If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and
turn your compassion to softening its effects."

That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of
the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square
with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not
square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the
top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be
constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence.
Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept
more comfortably in Procrustes' bed.

Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the
Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused
no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to
conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report,
and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent
hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too
shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be
understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report
offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them.

A valuable contribution, then, must be _moral_. There is no doubt that
the Commission means sexually moral. We Americans always use the word in
that limited sense. If you say that Jones is a moral man you mean that he
is faithful to his wife. He may support her by selling pink pills; he is
nevertheless moral if he is monogamous. The average American rarely
speaks of industrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it, but not with
that word. If he extends the meaning of immoral at all, it is to the
vices most closely allied to sex--drink and gambling.

Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined for the Commission. As we
have seen, it means that sex must be confined to procreation by a
healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple. All other sexual
expression would come under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do the
Commission no injustice. Now this limited conception of sex has had a
disastrous effect: it has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
imp