he police and the doctors, but it may
suggest to a much larger number hitherto unknown paths of viciousness.
The average New Yorker would hear with surprise from the Rockefeller
Report on Commercialized Prostitution in New York City that the
commission has visited in Manhattan a hundred and forty parlour
houses, twenty of which were known to the trade as fifty-cent houses,
eighty as one-dollar houses, six as two-dollar houses, and
thirty-four as five-and ten-dollar houses. Yet the chances are great
that essentially persons with serious interests in social hygiene turn
to such books of sober study. But to cry out such information to those
Broadway crowds which seek a few hours' fun before they go to the next
lobster palace or to the nearest cabaret cannot possibly serve social
hygiene.

Worst of all, the theatre, more than any other source of so-called
information, has been responsible for the breakdown of the barriers of
social reserve in sexual discussions, and that means ultimately in
erotic behaviour. The book which the individual man or woman reads at
his fireside has no socializing influence, but the play which they see
together is naturally discussed, views are exchanged, and all which in
old-fashioned times was avoided, even in serious discussion, becomes
daily more a matter of the most superficial gossip. When recently at a
dinner party a charming young woman whom I had hardly met before asked
me, when we were at the oysters, how prostitution is regulated in
Germany, and did not conclude the subject before we had reached the
ice cream, I saw the natural consequences of this new era of theatre
influence. Society, which with the excuse of philanthropic sociology
favours erotically tainted problems, must sink down to a community in
which the sexual relations become chaotic and turbulent. Finally, the
theatre is not open only to the adult. Its filthy message reaches the
ears of boys and girls, who, even if they take it solemnly, are forced
to think of these facts and to set the whole mechanism of sexual
associations and complex reactions into motion. The playwriters know
that well, but they have their own theory. When I once remonstrated
against the indecencies which are injected into the imagination of the
adolescent by the plays, Mr. Bayard Veiller, the talented author of
"The Fight," answered in a Sunday newspaper. He said that he could not
help thinking of the insane man who objected to throwing a bucket of
sal