w, is by
no means to affirm that it is an evil which must endure for ever and
that no influence can affect it. But we have to realize, in the first
place, that prostitution belongs to that sphere of human impulses in
which mere external police ordinances count for comparatively little,
and that, in the second place, even in the more potent field of true
morals, which has nothing to do with moral legislation, prostitution is
so subtly and deeply rooted that it can only be affected by influences
which bear on all our methods of thought and feeling and all our social
custom. It is far from being an isolated manifestation; it is, for
instance, closely related to marriage; any reforms in prostitution,
therefore, can only follow a reform in our marriage system. But
prostitution is also related to economics, and when it is realized how
much has to be altogether changed in our whole social system to secure
even an approximate abolition of prostitution it becomes doubtful
whether many people are willing to pay the price of removing the "social
evil" they find it so easy to deplore. They are prepared to appoint
Commissions; they have no objection to offer up a prayer; they are
willing to pass laws and issue police regulations which are known to be
useless. At that point their ardour ends.

If it is impossible to guard the community by statute against the
central evil of prostitution, still more hopeless is it to attempt the
legal suppression of all the multitudinous minor provocations of the
sexual impulse offered by civilization. Let it be assumed that only by
such suppression, and not by frankly meeting and fighting temptations,
can character be formed, yet it would be absolutely impossible to
suppress more than a fraction of the things that would need to be
suppressed. "There is almost no feature, article of dress, attitude,
act," Dr. Stanley Hall has truly remarked, "or even animal, or perhaps
object in nature, that may not have to some morbid soul specialized
erogenic and erethic power." If, therefore, we wish to suppress the
sexually suggestive and the possibly obscene we are bound to suppress
the whole world, beginning with the human race, for if we once enter on
that path there is no definite point at which we can logically stop. The
truth is, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder has so repeatedly insisted,[217] that
"obscenity" is subjective; it cannot reside in an object, but only in
the impure mind which is influenced by the obje