ulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any modification of the
relationship of men and women was immediately put out of consideration.
Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock Ellis make could, of
course, not even get a hearing.

With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice, but sex itself, becomes an
evil thing. Hence the hysterical and minute application of the taboo
wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform which would reabsorb
the impulse into civilized life, the Commissioners had no other course
but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this they were compelled to
discard the precious values of art, religion and social life of which
this superfluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of it as bad,
except for certain particular functions, they could, of course, not see
its possibilities. Hence the poverty of their suggestions along
educational and artistic lines.

A valuable contribution, we are told, must be _reasonable_ and
_practical_. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally.
"Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in
accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well one thinks of
"practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical
reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the
proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical
disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth
any great opposition; must look definite and immediate; must be tangible
like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance, or a policeman's
club. Above all a "reasonable and practical" proposal must not require
any imaginative patience. The actual proposals have all these qualities:
if they are "reasonable and practical" then we know by a good
demonstration what these terms meant to that average body of citizens.

To see that is to see exposed an important facet of the American
temperament. Our dislike of "talk"; the frantic desire to "do something"
without inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar standard; the
unwillingness to cast any bread upon the waters; our preference for a
sparrow in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naive inability to
understand the inner satisfactions of bankrupt poets and the
unworldliness of eccentric thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they
are pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure or unwillingness to
project the mind beyond the daily routin