e our daily life
is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it is in miniature the
goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to
ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left
would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry
over that jolly and redeeming coarseness.

What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to
abolish prostitution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to
stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of
business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with
frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with passions
which hold and suffuse the imagination.

It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be
done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change
in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman's
club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help
desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the
dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare
combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of
such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they
realize how deep and enormous is the task.

Many people have sought an analogy in our Civil War. They have said that
as "black slavery" went, so must "white slavery." In the various
agitations of vigilance committees and alliances for the suppression of
the traffic they profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists
began.

In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social Forces in American History"
much help can be found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished slavery at
an early date, and we have it on the authority of John Adams
that:--'argument might have had some weight in the abolition of slavery
in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring
white people, who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable
rivals so much to their injury.'" No one to-day doubts that white labor
in the North and slavery in the South were not due to the moral
superiority of the North. Yet just in the North we find the abolition
sentiment strongest. That the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
bad men is admitted by every reputable historian. The war