Page:Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama - 1914.djvu/165

 sir, that that should be allowed ? Aren't there enough police to prevent children of fifteen from being seduced like that? I ask, is it right?

The poor man, in his ignorance, did not know that "these women" are the most victimized, as demonstrated by the doctor himself in the case of the poor girl of the street. She was both ignorant and innocent when she found a place as domestic servant and was seduced by her master. Then she was kicked out into the street, and in her endless search for work found every door closed in her face. She was compelled to stifle her feeling of motherhood, to send her baby to a foundling asylum, and finally, in order to exist, become a street-walker. If in return she infected the men who came to her, including her erstwhile seducer, she was only paying back in a small measure what society had done to her,-the injury, the bitterness, the misery and tears heaped upon her by a cruel and self- satisfied world.

It is to be expected that a political representative of the people like Loche should suggest the same stereotyped measures as his predecessors: legal enactments, prosecution, imprisonment. But the doctor, a real social student, knows that "the true remedy lies in a change of our ways."

Doctor. Syphilis must cease to be treated like a mysterious evil, the very name of which cannot be pronounced. . ..