Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/67

 Rh of what it really is: namely, a derivative. Like all symptoms, it is to be treated as a symptom, and removed by removing the causes. Neither homeopathic nor allopathic measure have had permanent remedial effect upon it. Yet, like all symptomatic phenomena, it has direct consequences, flowing from it rather than from its causes, and these consequences are probably both good and evil.

Prostitution has undoubtedly had some effect, and possibly a large effect, in checking the increase, if not in producing the decrease, of certain individual qualities which are deemed undesirable, either from the personal or the social point of view.

In its commenst form, prostitution is a means of limiting the sexual freedom of women, while extending the largest freedom to men compatible with such restriction upon the female. It provides, in other words, the greatest possible sexual liberty for male and the greatest possible limitation for women, which can coexist. A major distinction is thus created between the two classes of harlots and “virtuous women,” into which two classes all women are distributed if the system is perfectly carried out. As a matter of fact, in most social groups under the successive stages of civilization, there has been a “borderline” class, never