problems not even stated? Where are the
doubts that should have honored these investigations, the frank statement
of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities in morals? Knowing
perfectly well that vice will not be repressed within a year or
prostitution absolutely annihilated in ten, it might, I should think,
have seemed more important that the issues be made clear and the thought
of the people fertilized than that the report should look very definite
and precise. There are all sorts of things we do not understand about
this problem. The opportunities for study which the Commissioners had
must have made these empty spaces evident. Why then were we not taken
into their confidence? Along what lines is investigation most needed? To
what problems, what issues, shall we give our attention? What is the
debatable ground in this territory? The Commission does not say, and I
for one, ascribe the silence to the American preoccupation with
immediate, definite, tangible interests.

Wells has written penetratingly about this in "The New Machiavelli." I
have called this fixation on the nearest object at hand an American
habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English one too. But in this
country we have a philosophy to express it--the philosophy of the
Reasonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate to import Mr.
Wells's observations: "It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men,
have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of the
purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves
to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the
perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the
stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good
intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought,
crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any
extension of social organization is at present achieved. Directly,
however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped, directly
the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental