aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the
unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are
free from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of
resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast
majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, not
to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably
upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish experimentalists,
precisely, who throng the midway at a world's fair, and go to smutty
shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of books that our
vice crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the charms of
carnality, and to help out their somewhat sluggish imaginations by
actual peeps at it, but when it comes to taking a forthright header into
the sulphur they usually fail to muster up the courage. For one clerk
who succumbs to the houris of the pave, there are five hundred who
succumb to lack of means, the warnings of the sex hygienists, and their
own depressing consciences. For one "clubman"--i.e., bagman or suburban
vestryman--who invades the women's shops, engages the affection of some
innocent miss, lures her into infamy and then sells her to the Italians,
there are one thousand who never get any further than asking the price
of cologne water and discharging a few furtive winks. And for one
husband of the Nordic race who maintains a blonde chorus girl in
oriental luxury around the corner, there are ten thousand who are as
true to their wives, year in and year out, as so many convicts in
the death-house, and would be no more capable of any such loathsome
malpractice, even in the face of free opportunity, than they would be of
cutting off the ears of their young.

I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particular, I am sorry for the
suffragettes who specialize in the double standard, for when they get
into pantaloons at last, and have the new freedom, they will discover
to their sorrow that they have been pursuing a chimera--that there is
really no such animal as the male anarchist they have been denouncing
and envying--that the wholesale fornication of man, at least under
Christian democracy, has little more actual existence than honest
advertising or sound cooking. They have followed the porno maniacs in
embracing a piece of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it
will turn to ashes in their arms.

Their error, as I say, li