an give us hope. That
prostitution should simply cease, leaving everything else as it
is, would be disastrous if it were possible. But it is not
possible. The weakness of all existing efforts to put down
prostitution is that they are directed against it as an isolated
thing, whereas it is only one of the symptoms proceeding from a
common disease."

Ellen Key, who during recent years has been the chief apostle of
a gospel of sexual morality based on the needs of women as the
mothers of the race, has, in a somewhat similar spirit, denounced
alike prostitution and rigid marriage, declaring (in her _Essays
on Love and Marriage_) that "the development of erotic personal
consciousness is as much hindered by socially regulated
'morality' as by socially regulated 'immorality,'" and that "the
two lowest and socially sanctioned expressions of sexual dualism,
rigid marriage and prostitution, will gradually become
impossible, because with the conquest of the idea of erotic unity
they will no longer correspond to human needs."

We may sum up the present situation as regards prostitution by saying that
on the one hand there is a tendency for its elevation, in association with
the growing humanity and refinement of civilization, characteristics which
must inevitably tend to mark more and more both those women who become
prostitutes and those men who seek them; on the other hand, but perhaps
through the same dynamic force, there is a tendency towards the slow
elimination of prostitution by the successful competition of higher and
purer methods of sexual relationship freed from pecuniary considerations.
This refinement and humanization, this competition by better forms of
sexual love, are indeed an essential part of progress as civilization
becomes more truly sound, wholesome, and sincere.

This moral change cannot, it seems probable, fail to be accompanied by the
realization that the facts of human life are more important than the
forms. For all changes from lower to higher social forms, from savagery to
civilization, are accompanied--in so far as they are vital changes--by a
slow and painful groping towards the truth that it is only in natural
relations that sanity and sanctity can be found, for, as Nietzsche said,
the "return" to Nature should rather be called the "ascent." Only so can
we achieve the final elimination from our hearts of that clinging
tradition tha