raffic of a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional vice
is beyond all measurement.

The figures I have given are taken from the report. They are said to be
conservative. For the purposes of this discussion we could well lower the
27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned about is in arriving at a sense of
the enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil." For it is this that
the Commission proposes to repress, and ultimately to annihilate.

Lust has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the assignation
house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors,
Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking--the thing has woven
itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads,
everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city.
Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally
impossible to follow the myriad expressions it assumes.

The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A mass
of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what
extent lust finds its illicit expression. Deeper than this the report
does not go. The human impulses which create these social conditions, the
human needs to which they are a sad and degraded answer--this human
center of the problem the commission passes by with a platitude.

"So long as there is lust in the hearts of men," we are told, "it will
seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed
we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the Social Evil." But at the
head of the report in black-faced type we read:

"Constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method;
absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal."

I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in a verbal inconsistency. The
inconsistency is real, out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. Lust will
seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of men are changed." All
particular expressions are evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet
though you repress one form of lust, it will seek some other. Now, says
the Commission, in order to change the hearts of men, religion and
education must step in. It is their business to eradicate an impulse
which is constantly changing form by being "suppressed."

There is only one meaning in this: the Commission realized vaguely that
repression is not even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth
analyzing later, these r