by persistent ostracism. Prostitution was not so great an evil
when it was not thought so great, yet even at its best it was a
real evil, a melancholy and sordid travesty of sincere and
natural passional relations. It is an evil which we are bound to
have with us so long as celibacy is a custom and monogamy a law."
It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a
system which makes venal love possible. "The time has gone past,"
the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony
can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed
into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual
connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to
humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much
as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law.
If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as
a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of
moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a
different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute
wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to
the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors."

The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and
first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of
prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social
relationships of life, was James Hinton. More than thirty years
ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since
he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous
and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea. It may
be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton's MSS.:
"I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of
human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will
rule also in human life.... There is a tension, a crushing of the
soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to
a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves.
It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms.... Keeping a
portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage
means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man's
mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of
all pure love or