er became established among primitive peoples. Even
savage tribes designated the age at which their young men were permitted
to assume paternity because feeble children were a drag upon their
communal resources. As primitive control lessened with the disappearance
of tribal organization and later of the patriarchal family, a social
control, not less binding, was slowly established, until throughout the
centuries, in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass of men have
lived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements of
the state, and the surveillance of the community, if only because they
feared social ostracism. It is easy, however, to forget these men and
their prosaic virtues because history has so long busied herself in
recording court amours and the gentle dalliances of the overlord.

The great primitive instinct, so responsive to social control as to be
almost an example of social docility, has apparently broken with all the
restraints and decencies under two conditions: first and second, when
the individual felt that he was above social control and when the
individual has had an opportunity to hide his daily living. Prostitution
upon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for it
becomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that social
control may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feels
superior to it. When a city is so large that it is extremely difficult
to fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries was
considered the luxury of the king comes within the reach of every
office-boy, and that lack of community control which belonged only to
the overlord who felt himself superior to the standards of the people,
may be seized upon by any city dweller who can evade his acquaintances.
Against such moral aggression, the old types of social control are
powerless.

Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions which make moral isolation
possible, constantly tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the
mutual dependences of city life and its daily necessities. The city
itself socializes the very instruments that constitute the apparatus of
social control--Law, Publicity, Literature, Education and Religion.
Through their socialization, the desirability of chastity, which has
hitherto been a matter of individual opinion and decision, comes to be
regarded, not only as a personal virtue indispensable in women and
desirable in men, but as