t and Leader of Fashion--The Charm of
Vulgarity.

IV. _The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:_--The Decay of the
Brothel--The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution--The Monetary
Aspects of Prostitution--The Geisha--The Hetaira--The Moral Revolt
Against Prostitution--Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue--The Ordinary
Attitude Towards Prostitutes--Its Cruelty Absurd--The Need of Reforming
Prostitution--The Need of Reforming Marriage--These These Two Needs
Closely Correlated--The Dynamic Relationships Involved.

_I. The Orgy_.

Traditional morality, religion, and established convention combine to
promote not only the extreme of rigid abstinence but also that of reckless
license. They preach and idealize the one extreme; they drive those who
cannot accept it to adopt the opposite extreme. In the great ages of
religion it even happens that the severity of the rule of abstinence is
more or less deliberately tempered by the permission for occasional
outbursts of license. We thus have the orgy, which flourished in mediaeval
days and is, indeed, in its largest sense, a universal manifestation,
having a function to fulfil in every orderly and laborious civilization,
built up on natural energies that are bound by more or less inevitable
restraints.

The consideration of the orgy, it may be said, lifts us beyond the merely
sexual sphere, into a higher and wider region which belongs to religion.
The Greek _orgeia_ referred originally to ritual things done with a
religious purpose, though later, when dances of Bacchanals and the like
lost their sacred and inspiring character, the idea was fostered by
Christianity that such things were immoral.[107] Yet Christianity was
itself in its origin an orgy of the higher spiritual activities released
from the uncongenial servitude of classic civilization, a great festival
of the poor and the humble, of the slave and the sinner. And when, with
the necessity for orderly social organization, Christianity had ceased to
be this it still recognized, as Paganism had done, the need for an
occasional orgy. It appears that in 743 at a Synod held in Hainault
reference was made to the February debauch (_de Spurcalibus in februario_)
as a pagan practice; yet it was precisely this pagan festival which was
embodied in the accepted customs of the Christian Church as the chief orgy
of the ecclesiastical year, the great Carnival prefixed to the long fast
of Lent. The celebration on Shr