Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/62

46, therefore, only after the attainment of complete liberty and after the just regulation of the social conditions, of which we shall speak farther on. But pious vulgarity and the moral police are of a different opinion. They think that they stifle prostitution at its source if they drive the unhappy inmates of houses of ill-fame out of town with police force or throw them into prison. It is dreadful that history necessitates more victims of ignorance than enlightenment, when at last attained, is able to make happy beings. How many millions will have perished in misery and degradation before the knowledge has at last been reached that neither the police nor church discipline are able to banish an evil which is the necessary result of legal and economic conditions! And what is easier than this knowledge if we are willing to abandon the obstinacy of our egotism with the slothfulness of our thinking?