precise.

3. _The Moral Justification of Prostitution_.--There are and always have
been moralists--many of them people whose opinions are deserving of the
most serious respect--who consider that, allowing for the need of
improved hygienic conditions, the existence of prostitution presents no
serious problem for solution. It is, at most, they say, a necessary evil,
and, at best, a beneficent institution, the bulwark of the home, the
inevitable reverse of which monogamy is the obverse. "The immoral guardian
of public morality," is the definition of prostitutes given by one writer,
who takes the humble view of the matter, and another, taking the loftier
ground, writes: "The prostitute fulfils a social mission. She is the
guardian of virginal modesty, the channel to carry off adulterous desire,
the protector of matrons who fear late maternity; it is her part to act as
the shield of the family." "Female Decii," said Balzac in his _Physiologie
du Mariage_ of prostitutes, "they sacrifice themselves for the republic
and make of their bodies a rampart for the protection of respectable
families." In the same way Schopenhauer called prostitutes "human
sacrifices on the altar of monogamy." Lecky, again, in an oft-quoted
passage of rhetoric,[191] may be said to combine both the higher and the
lower view of the prostitute's mission in human society, to which he even
seeks to give a hieratic character. "The supreme type of vice," he
declared, "she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But
for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be
polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity,
think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of
remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are
concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She
remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal
priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."[192]

I am not aware that the Greeks were greatly concerned with the moral
justification of prostitution. They had not allowed it to assume very
offensive forms and for the most part they were content to accept it. The
Romans usually accepted it, too, but, we gather, not quite so easily.
There was an austerely serious, almost Puritanic, spirit in the Romans of
the old stock and they seem sometimes to have felt the need to assure
themselves that prostitution really was