orals on all other occasions. The
explanation is very simple. The profits of Mrs Warren's profession
are shared not only by Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts, but by the
landlords of their houses, the newspapers which advertize them, the
restaurants which cater for them, and, in short, all the trades to
which they are good customers, not to mention the public officials
and representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or
blackmail. Add to these the employers who profit by cheap female labor,
and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it [you find such people
everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in the highest places in
Church and State], and you get a large and powerful class with a
strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs Warren's profession, and a
correspondingly strong incentive to conceal, from their own consciences
no less than from the world, the real sources of their gain. These are
the people who declare that it is feminine vice and not poverty that
drives women to the streets, as if vicious women with independent
incomes ever went there. These are the people who, indulgent or
indifferent to aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against
performances of Mrs Warren's Profession, and drag actresses to the
police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for fulfilling
their engagements. For please observe that the judicial decision in New
York State in favor of the play does not end the matter. In Kansas City,
for instance, the municipality, finding itself restrained by the courts
from preventing the performance, fell back on a local bye-law against
indecency to evade the Constitution of the United States. They summoned
the actress who impersonated Mrs Warren to the police court, and offered
her and her colleagues the alternative of leaving the city or being
prosecuted under this bye-law.

Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who suddenly
displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre were either Mrs
Warren's landlords, or employers of women at starvation wages, or
restaurant keepers, or newspaper proprietors, or in some other more
or less direct way sharers of the profits of her trade. No doubt it
is equally possible that they were simply stupid men who thought that
indecency consists, not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have, however,
been myself a member of a municipal council, and have not found
municipal councillors quite so simple and inexper