Kitabı oku: «The Task of Social Hygiene», sayfa 15

How large these sums are we may estimate by the investigation made by the Vice Commissioners of Chicago. They conclude after careful inquiry that the annual profits of prostitution in the city of Chicago alone amount to between fifteen to sixteen million dollars, and they regard this as "an ultra-conservative estimate." It is true that not all this actually passes through the women's hands and it includes the sales of drinks. If we confine ourselves strictly to the earnings of the girls themselves it is found to work out at an average for each girl of thirteen hundred dollars per annum. This is more than four times as much as the ordinary shop-girl can earn in Chicago by her brains, virtue, and other good qualities. But it is not too much for the prostitute's needs; she is compelled to earn so large an income because the active hostility of society, the law, and the police facilitates the task of all those persons—and they are many—who desire to prey upon her. Thus society, the law, and the police gain nothing for morals by their hostility to the prostitute. On the contrary, they give strength and stability to the very vice they nominally profess to fight against. This is shown in the vital matter of the high rents which it is possible to obtain where prostitution is concerned. These high rents are the direct result of legal and police enactments against the prostitute. Remove these enactments and the rents would automatically fall. The enactments maintain the high rents and so ensure that the mighty protection of capital is on the side of prostitution; the property brings in an exorbitant rate of interest on the capital invested, and all the forces of sound business are concerned in maintaining rents. So gross is the ignorance of the would-be moral legislators—or, some may think, so skilful their duplicity—that the methods by which they profess to fight against immorality are the surest methods for enabling immorality not merely to exist—which it would in any case—but to flourish. A vigorous campaign is initiated against immorality. On the surface it is successful. Morality triumphs. But, it may be, in the end we are reminded of the saying of M. Desmaisons in one of Remy de Gourmont's witty and profound Dialogues des Amateurs: "Quand la morale triomphe il se passe des choses très vilaines."

The reason why the "triumphs" of legislative and administrative morality are really such ignominious failures must now be clear, but may again be repeated. It is because on matters of morals there is no unanimity of opinion as there is in regard to crime. There is always a large section of the community which feels tolerant towards, and even practises, acts which another section, it may be quite reasonably, stigmatizes as "immoral." Such conditions are highly favourable for the exercise of moral influence; they are quite unsuitable for legislative action, which cannot possibly be brought to bear against a large minority, perhaps even majority, of otherwise law-abiding citizens. In the matter of prostitution, for instance, the Vice Commissioners of Chicago state emphatically the need for "constant and persistent repression" leading on to "absolute annihilation of prostitution." They recommend the appointment of a "Morals Commission" to suppress disorderly houses, and to prosecute their keepers, their inmates, and their patrons; they further recommend the establishment of a "Morals Court" of vaguely large scope. Among the other recommendations of the Commissioners—and there are ninety-seven such recommendations—we find the establishment of a municipal farm, to which prostitutes can be "committed on an indeterminate sentence"; a "special morals police squad"; instructions to the police to send home all unattended boys and girls under sixteen at 9 p.m.; no seats in the parks to be in shade; searchlights to be set up at night to enable the police to see what the public are doing, and so on. The scheme, it will be seen, combines the methods of Calvin in Geneva with those of Maria Theresa in Vienna. ²¹⁵

The reason why any such high-handed repression of immorality by force is as impracticable in Chicago as elsewhere is revealed in the excellent picture of the conditions furnished by the Vice Commissioners themselves. They estimate that the prostitutes in disorderly houses known to the police—leaving out of account all prostitutes in flats, rooms, hotels and houses of assignation, and also taking no note of clandestine prostitutes—receive 15,180 visits from men daily, or 5,540,700 per annum. They consider further that the men in question may be one-fourth of the adult male population (800,000 in the city itself, leaving the surrounding district out of the reckoning), and they rightly insist that this estimate cannot possibly cover all the facts. Yet it never occurs to the Vice Commissioners that in thus proposing to brand one-third or even only one quarter of the adult male population as criminals, and as such to prosecute them actively, is to propose an absurd impossibility.

It is not by any means only in the United States that an object lesson in the foolishness of attempting to make people moral by force is set up before the world. It has often been set up before, and at the present day it is illustrated in exactly the same way in Germany. Unlike as are the police systems and the national temperaments of Germany and the United States, in this matter social reformers tell exactly the same story. They report that the German laws and ordinances against immorality increase and support the very evil they profess to attack. Thus by making it criminal to shelter, even though not for purposes of gain, unmarried lovers, even when they intend to marry, the respectable girl is forced into the position of the prostitute, and as such she becomes subject to an endless amount of police regulation and police control. Landlords are encouraged to live on her activities, charging very high rates to indemnify themselves for the risks they run by harbouring her. She, in her turn, to meet the exorbitant demands which the law and the police encourage the whole environment to make upon her, is forced to exercise her profession with the greatest activity, and to acquire the maximum of profit. Law and the police have forged the same vicious circle. ²¹⁶

The illustrations thus furnished by Germany, Holland, England, and the United States, will probably suffice to show that there really is at the present time a wave of feeling in favour of the notion that it is possible to promote public morals by force of law. It only remains to observe that the recognition of the futility of such attempts by no means necessarily involves a pessimistic conservatism. To point out that prostitution never has been, and never can be, abolished by law, 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 object. In this matter Mr. Schroeder is simply the follower, at an interval, of St. Paul. We must work not on the object, but on the impure mind affected by the object. If the impure heart is not suppressed it is useless to suppress the impure object, while if the heart is renewed the whole task is achieved. Certainly there are books, pictures, and other things in life so unclean that they can never be pure even to the purest, but these things by their loathsomeness are harmless to all healthy minds; they can only corrupt minds which are corrupt already. Unfortunately, when ignorant police officials and custom-house officers are entrusted with the task of searching for the obscene, it is not to these things that their attention is exclusively directed. Such persons, it seems, cannot distinguish between these things and the noblest productions of human art and intellect, and the law has proved powerless to set them right; in all civilized countries the list is indeed formidable of the splendid and inspiring productions, from the Bible downwards, which officials or the law courts have been pleased to declare "obscene." So that while the task of moralizing the community by force must absolutely fail of its object, it may at the same time suffice to effect much mischief.

It is one of the ironies of history that the passion for extinguishing immorality by law and administration should have arisen in what used to be called Christendom. For Christianity is precisely the most brilliant proof the world has ever seen of the truth that immorality cannot so be suppressed. From the standpoint of classic Rome Christianity was an aggressive attack on Roman morality from every side. It was not so only in appearance, but in reality, as modern historians fully recognize. ²¹⁸ Merely as a new religion Christianity would have been received with calm indifference, even with a certain welcome, as other new religions were received. But Christianity denied the supremacy of the State, carried on an anti-military propaganda in the army, openly flouted established social conventions, loosened family life, preached and practised asceticism to an age that was already painfully aware that, above all things, it needed men. The fatal though doubtless inevitable step was taken of attempting to suppress the potent poison of this manifold immorality by force. The triumph of Christianity was largely due to the fine qualities which were brought out by that annealing process, and the splendid prestige which the process itself assured. Yet the method of warfare which it had so brilliantly proved to be worthless was speedily adopted by Christianity itself, and is even yet, at intervals, spasmodically applied.

That these attempts should have such results as we see is not surprising when we remember that even movements, at the outset, mainly inspired by moral energy, rather than by faith in moral legislation, when that energy becomes reckless, violent and intolerant, lead in the end to results altogether opposed to the aims of those who initiated them. It was thus that Luther has permanently fortified the position of the Popes whom he assailed, and that the Reformation produced the Counter-Reformation, a movement as formidable and as enduring as that which it countered. When Luther appeared all that was rigid and inhuman in the Church was slowly dissolving, certainly not without an inevitable sediment of immorality, yet the solution was in the highest degree favourable to the development of the freer and larger conceptions of life, the expansion of science and art and philosophy, which at that moment was pre-eminently necessary for the progress of civilisation, and, indirectly, therefore, for the progress of morals. ²¹⁹ The violence of the Reformation not only resulted in a new tyranny for its own adherents—calling in turn for fresh reformations by Puritans, Quakers, Deists, and Freethinkers—but it re-established, and even to-day continues to support, that very tyranny of the old Church against which it was a protest.

When we try to regulate the morals of men on the same uniform pattern we have to remember that we are touching the most subtle, intimate, and incalculable springs of action. It is useless to apply the crude methods of "suppression" and "annihilation" to these complex and indestructible forces. When Charles V retired in weariness from the greatest throne in the world to the solitude of the monastery at Yuste, he occupied his leisure for some weeks in trying to regulate two clocks. It proved very difficult. One day, it is recorded, he turned to his assistant and said: "To think that I attempted to force the reason and conscience of thousands of men into one mould, and I cannot make two clocks agree!" Wisdom comes to the rulers of men, sometimes, usually when they have ceased to be rulers. It comes to the moral legislators not otherwise than it comes to the immoral persons they legislate against. "I act first," the French thief said; "then I think."

It seems to some people almost a paradox to assert that immorality should not be encountered by physical force. The same people would willingly admit that it is hopeless to rout a modern army with bows and arrows, even with the support of a fanfare of trumpets. Yet that metaphor, as we have seen, altogether fails to represent the inadequacy of law in the face of immorality. We are concerned with a method of fighting which is not merely inadequate, but, as has been demonstrated many times during the last two thousand years, actually fortifies and even dignifies the foe it professes to attack. But the failure of physical force to suppress the spiritual evil of immorality by no means indicates that a like failure would attend the more rational tactics of opposing a spiritual force by spiritual force. The virility of our morals is not proved by any weak attempt to call in the aid of the secular arm of law or the ecclesiastical arm of theology. If a morality cannot by its own proper virtue hold its opposing immorality in check then there is something wrong with that morality. It runs the risk of encountering a fresh and more vigorous movement of morality. Men begin to think that, if not the whole truth, there is yet a real element of truth in the assertion of Nietzsche: "We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, everything wicked, tyrannical, predatory and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite." ²²⁰ To ignore altogether the affirmation of that opposing morality, it may be, would be to breed a race of weaklings, fatally doomed to succumb helplessly to the first breath of temptation.

Although we are passing through a wave of moral legislation, there are yet indications that a sounder movement is coming into action. The demand for the teaching of sexual hygiene which parents, teachers, and physicians in Germany, the United States and elsewhere, are now striving to formulate and to supply will, if it is wisely carried out, effect far more for public morals than all the legislation in the world. Inconsistently enough, some of those who clamour for moral legislation also advocate the teaching of sexual hygiene. But there is no room for compromise or combination here. A training in sexual hygiene has no meaning if it is not a training, for men and women alike, in personal and social responsibility, in the right to know and to discriminate, and in so doing to attain self-conquest. A generation thus trained to self-respect and to respect for others has no use for a web of official regulations to protect its feeble and cloistered virtues from possible visions of evil, and an army of police to conduct it homewards at 9 p.m. Nor, on the other hand, can any reliable sense of social responsibility ever be developed in such an unwholesome atmosphere of petty moral officialdom. The two methods of moralization are radically antagonistic. There can be no doubt which of them we ought to pursue if we really desire to breed a firmly-fibred, clean-minded, and self-reliant race of manly men and womanly women.

X
THE WAR AGAINST WAR

Why the Problem of War is specially urgent To-day—The Beneficial Effects of War in Barbarous Ages—Civilization renders the Ultimate Disappearance of War Inevitable—The Introduction of Law in disputes between Individuals involves the Introduction of Law in disputes between Nations—But there must be Force behind Law—Henry IV's Attempt to Confederate Europe—Every International Tribunal of Arbitration must be able to enforce its Decisions—The Influences making for the Abolition of Warfare—(1) Growth of International Opinion—(2) International Financial Development—(3) The Decreasing Pressure of Population—(4) The Natural Exhaustion of the Warlike Spirit—(5) The Spread of Anti-military Doctrines—(6) The overgrowth of Armaments—(7) The Dominance of Social Reform—War Incompatible with an Advanced Civilization—Nations as Trustees for Humanity—The Impossibility of Disarmament—The Necessity of Force to ensure Peace—The Federated State of the Future—The Decay of War still leaves the Possibilities of Daring and Heroism.

There are, no doubt, special reasons why at the present time war and the armaments of war should appear an intolerable burden which must be thrown off as soon as possible if the task of social hygiene is not to be seriously impeded. But the abolition of the ancient method of settling international disputes by warfare is not a problem which depends for its solution on the conditions of the moment. It is implicit in the natural development of the process of civilization. At one stage, no doubt, warfare plays an important part in constituting states and so, indirectly, in promoting civilization. But civilization tends slowly but surely to substitute for war in the later stages of this process the methods of law, or, in any case, methods which, while not always unobjectionable, avoid the necessity for any breach of the peace. ²²¹ As soon, indeed, as in primitive society two individuals engage in a dispute which they are compelled to settle not by physical force but by a resort to an impartial tribunal, the thin end of the wedge is introduced, and the ultimate destruction of war becomes merely a matter of time. If it is unreasonable for two individuals to fight it is unreasonable for two groups of individuals to fight. ²²²

The difficulty has been that while it is quite easy for an ordered society to compel two individuals to settle their differences before a tribunal, in accordance with abstractly determined principles of law and reason, it is a vastly more difficult matter to compel two groups of individuals so to settle their differences. A large part of the history of all the great European countries has consisted in the progressive conquest and pacification of small but often bellicose states outside, and even inside, their own borders. ²²³ This is the case even within a community. Hobbes, writing in the midst of a civil war, went so far as to lay down that the "final cause" of a commonwealth is nothing else but the abolition of "that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe." Yet we see to-day that even within our highly civilized communities there is not always any adequately awful power to prevent employers and employed from engaging in what is little better than a civil war, nor even to bind them to accept the decision of an impartial tribunal they may have been persuaded to appeal to. The smallest state can compel its individual citizens to keep the peace; a large state can compel a small state to do so; but hitherto there has been no guarantee possible that large states, or even large compact groups within the state, should themselves keep the peace. They commit what injustice they please, for there is no visible power to keep them in awe. We have attained a condition in which a state is able to enforce a legal and peaceful attitude in its own individual citizens towards each other. The state is the guardian of its citizens' peace, but the old problem recurs: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

It is obvious that this difficulty increases as the size of states increases. To compel a small state to keep the peace by absorbing it if it fails to do so is always an easy and even tempting process to a neighbouring larger state. This process was once carried out on a complete scale, when practically the whole known world was brought under the sway of Rome. "War has ceased," Plutarch was able to declare in the days of the Roman Empire, and, though himself an enthusiastic Greek, he was unbounded in his admiration of the beneficence of the majestic Pax Romana, and never tempted by any narrow spirit of patriotism to desire the restoration of his own country's glories. But the Roman organization broke up, and no single state will ever be strong enough to restore it.

Any attempt to establish orderly legal relationships between states must, therefore, be carried out by the harmonious co-operation of those states. At the end of the sixteenth century a great French statesman, Sully, inspired Henry IV with a scheme of a Council of Confederated European Christian States; each of these states, fifteen in number, was to send four representatives to the Council, which was to sit at Metz or Cologne and regulate the differences between the constituent states of the Confederation. The army of the Confederation was to be maintained in common, and used chiefly to keep the peace, to prevent one sovereign from interfering with any other, and also, if necessary, to repel invasion of barbarians from without. The scheme was arranged in concert with Queen Elizabeth, and twelve of the fifteen Powers had already promised their active co-operation when the assassination of Henry destroyed the whole plan. Such a Confederation was easier to arrange then than it is now, but probably it was more difficult to maintain, and it can scarcely be said that at that date the times were ripe for so advanced a scheme. ²²⁴

To-day the interests of small states are so closely identified with peace that it is seldom difficult to exert pressure on them to maintain it. It is quite another matter with the large states. The fact that during the past half century so much has been done by the larger states to aid the cause of international arbitration, and to submit disputes to international tribunals, shows how powerful the motives for avoiding war are nowadays becoming. But the fact, also, that no country hitherto has abandoned its liberty of withdrawing from peaceful arbitration any question involving "national honour" shows that there is no constituted power strong enough to control large states. For the reservation of questions of national honour from the sphere of law is as absurd as would be any corresponding limitation by individuals of their liability for their acts before the law; it is as though a man were to say: "If I commit a theft I am willing to appear before the court, and will probably pay the penalty demanded; but if it is a question of murder, then my vital interests are at stake, and I deny altogether the right of the court to intervene." It is a reservation fatal to peace, and could not be accepted if pleaded at the bar of any international tribunal with the power to enforce its decisions. "Imagine," says Edward Jenks, in his History of Politics, "a modern judge 'persuading' Mr. William Sikes to 'make it up' with the relatives of his victim, and, on his remaining obdurate, leaving the two families to fight the matter out." Yet that is what was in some degree done in England until medieval times as regards individual crimes, and it is what is still done as regards national crimes, in so far as the appeal to arbitration is limited and voluntary. The proposals, therefore—though not yet accepted by any Government—lately mooted in the United States, in England, and in France, to submit international disputes, without reservation, to an impartial tribunal represent an advance of peculiar significance.

The abolition of collective fighting is so desirable an extension of the abolition of individual fighting, and its introduction has waited so long the establishment of some high compelling power—for the influence of the Religion of Peace has in this matter been less than nil—that it is evident that only the coincidence of very powerful and peculiar factors could have brought the question into the region of practical politics in our own time. There are several such factors, most of which have been developing during a long period, but none have been clearly recognized until recent years. It may be worth while to indicate the great forces now warring against war.

(1) Growth of International Opinion. There can be no doubt whatever that during recent years, and especially in the more democratic countries, an international consensus of public opinion has gradually grown up, making itself the voice, like a Greek chorus, of an abstract justice. It is quite true that of this justice, as of justice generally, it may be said that it has wide limits. Renan declared once, in a famous allocution, that "what is called indulgence is, most often, only justice," and, at the other extreme, Remy de Gourmont has said that "injustice is sometimes a part of justice;" in other words, there are varying circumstances in which justice may properly be tempered either with mercy or with severity. In any case, and however it may be qualified; a popular international voice generously pronouncing itself in favour of justice, and resonantly condemning any Government which clashes against justice, is now a factor of the international situation. It is, moreover, tending to become a factor having a certain influence on affairs. This was the case during the South African War, when England, by offending this international sense of justice, fell into a discredit which had many actual unpleasant results and narrowly escaped, there is some reason to believe, proving still more serious. The same voice was heard with dramatically sudden and startling effect when Ferrer was shot at Barcelona. Ferrer was a person absolutely unknown to the man in the street; he was indeed little more than a name even to those who knew Spain; few could be sure, except by a kind of intuition, that he was the innocent victim of a judicial murder, for it is only now that the fact is being slowly placed beyond dispute. Yet immediately after Ferrer was shot within the walls of Monjuich a great shout of indignation was raised, with almost magical suddenness and harmony, throughout the civilized world, from Italy to Belgium, from England to Argentina. Moreover, this voice was so decisive and so loud that it acted like those legendary trumpet-blasts which shattered the walls of Jericho; in a few days the Spanish Government, with a powerful minister at its head, had fallen. The significance of this event we cannot easily overestimate. For the first time in history, the voice of international public opinion, unsupported by pressure, political, social, or diplomatic, proved potent enough to avenge an act of injustice by destroying a Government. A new force has appeared in the world, and it tends to operate against those countries which are guilty of injustice, whether that injustice is exerted against a State or even only against a single obscure individual. The modern developments of telegraphy and the Press—unfavourable as the Press is in many respects to the cause of international harmony—have placed in the hands of peace this new weapon against war.

(2) International Financial Development. There is another international force which expresses itself in the same sense. The voice of abstract justice raised against war is fortified by the voice of concrete self-interest. The interests of the propertied classes, and therefore of the masses dependent upon them, are to-day so widely distributed throughout the world that whenever any country is plunged into a disastrous war there arises in every other country, especially in rich and prosperous lands with most at stake, a voice of self-interest in harmony with the voice of justice. It is sometimes said that wars are in the interest of capital, and of capital alone, and that they are engineered by capitalists masquerading under imposing humanitarian disguises. That is doubtless true to the extent that every war cannot fail to benefit some section of the capitalistic world, which will therefore favour it, but it is true to that extent only. The old notion that war and the acquisition of territories encouraged trade by opening up new markets has proved fallacious. The extension of trade is a matter of tariffs rather than of war, and in any case the trade of a country with its own acquisitions by conquest is a comparatively insignificant portion of its total trade. But even if the financial advantages of war were much greater than they are, they would be more than compensated by the disadvantages which nowadays attend war. International financial relationships have come to constitute a network of interests so vast, so complicated, so sensitive, that the whole thrills responsively to any disturbing touch, and no one can say beforehand what widespread damage may not be done by shock even at a single point. When a country is at war its commerce is at once disorganized, that is to say that its shipping, and the shipping of all the countries that carry its freights, is thrown out of gear to a degree that often cannot fail to be internationally disastrous. Foreign countries cannot send in the imports that lie on their wharves for the belligerent country, nor can they get out of it the exports they need for their own maintenance or luxury. Moreover, all the foreign money invested in the belligerent country is depreciated and imperilled. The international voice of trade and finance is, therefore, to-day mainly on the side of peace.