Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/308

 to go on in sin to the end of days whose only mercy is that they are apt to be brief. No off-hand moralist, even by exercising his imagination to the last degree of cruelty, has ever been able to devise such a prison as that. White slave, indeed, shackled by the heaviest chains the Puritan conscience has yet been able to forge for others!

Strange, too, since the attitude is assumed by a civilization which calls itself Christian and preaches that the old law, with its eye for an eye and its tooth for a tooth, was done away with and lost in a new and beautiful dispensation. "Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more." If the world is ever to solve this problem, it must first of all apprehend the spirit of this simple and gracious expression, do away with its old laws, its old cruelties, its old brutalities, its old stupidities, and approach the problem in that human spirit which I suspect is so very near the divine. Once in this attitude, this spirit, society will be in position to learn something from history and from human experience, something from life itself, and what it will learn first is that Puritanical laws, the hounding of the police, and all that sort of thing have never lessened prostitution in the world, but on the contrary have increased it.

What! Let them go and not do anything to them? Well, yes, if we can't think of anything better to do to them than to hurt them a little more, push them a little farther along the road to that abyss toward which we have been hustling them. Why is it constantly necessary to do some