CHAPTER XI THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM

(5) Commercialised Vice
“And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I am God, and King, and Law!’”
The Mask of Anarchy, P. B. Shelley.

Emil Reich, writing in 1908, said (Woman through the Ages, vol. ii. p. 247): “The women of the East lie under an adamant yoke of complete severity. It is in the West that the only movement comes, a movement—at its mistaken best—which makes a crusade against prostitution, alcoholism, and war; all of which must exist as hideous necessities and which, if they could be swept away, would, in their disappearance, utterly upset the balance of[118] civilisation.” On the previous page he has asserted that “the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of Empire.” Many women will also see in the enslavement of women the chief cause of the decay of Empires, and will hold that a civilisation which is balanced on prostitution, alcoholism and war is in a state of unstable equilibrium. They will be confirmed in this belief by the extraordinary state of panic into which Imperialists so often get about the Empire, which is so delicate that it must be sheltered from every breath of popular opinion. A healthy Empire should normally be in a condition of stable equilibrium, to which it returns after any shocks, and there is no manner of doubt that women want to abolish the notoriously rickety three legs of which Dr. Reich was so proud.

In themselves no one is found to recommend these three objects of man’s solicitude. Even Dr. Reich calls them “hideous.” It is, then, merely the impossibility of abolishing them that we are invited to accept, and it is too much to ask energetic and active women to accept “hideous” things, without ever having been given the chance of abolishing them, or even seriously diminishing them, especially when it is women who bear by far the greater weight of this hideous burden.

Now these three things are in their origin due to human appetites; these appetites have, by indulgence, by stimulation, and by exploitation, become lusts which, far more truly than any reform, do threaten the extinction of the Empires which[119] are allowing themselves to be eaten up with them. It is with the stimulation and exploitation that this chapter more especially deals. Natural appetite may be gross, may even be brutal, but in simple communities where each individual must rely on his own strength for his own livelihood, it tends to return to a norm which is that of health. Appetite, stimulated with every artifice of advertisement and allurement, exploited by every financial and commercial profiteer, becomes in crowded communities a gnawing ulcer, destroying bone and nerve and tissue, body and soul. To walk the streets and frequent the amusements of any great modern town—London or Vienna or Paris—is to find oneself in the midst of a perfect obsession of the lusts of the flesh. An enormous amount of what passes for art has no design but that of inciting appetite. Music halls and musical comedies, farces, picture-palaces, advertisement posters, repeat the same tedious, banal, hideous assaults. If you are incapable of responding, you are nauseated and bored beyond expression; but it is clear that the jaded nerves of many people can be whipped into response. There are many people who are so flaccid that they invariably succumb to the fixed idea. The profiteer knows this, and the idea is fixed by every device that capital can contrive.

Take the lust of alcoholism. What chance has the feeble will to escape its lure? Have we not given “The Trade” a solidarity which must be the envy of mere purveyors of necessities? (Mr.[120] Justice Channell said before the Jury Commission that a special jury very often consists half of publicans.) Have we not connected light and entertainment and conviviality with the vice of drunkenness? Have we not refused to allow people even the right to protect themselves against the unwelcome intrusion of the temptation into their neighbourhood? Do not our plays exhibit drunkenness as laughable and lovable in men? (It is significant that they are not so in women.) We have allowed the traffic in alcohol to become a vested interest which controls the lives of the people, and it is to the interest of this traffic that the people should not become sober. Will the traffickers not use their control to prevent the people becoming sober? “You cannot make men and women sober by Act of Parliament?” Perhaps not. Need you give such vast power to those whose profit lies in making men and women drunk?

Take the lust of sex. If alcoholism is stimulated in many ways, it is as nothing compared with the incessant appeals to lust. We all hear of the profits from the drink traffic. We are only beginning to hear of the profits from the traffic in women, which are often closely bound up with the profits of drink. But we must insist on knowing very much more than we do about these profits. The Chicago Commission asserts that in their belief Chicago “is far better proportionately to its population than most of the other large cities of the country,” and this statement is based upon a[121] careful study of fifty-two of the largest cities. In this city of Chicago (with a population of two millions) prostitution, they assert, is a “Commercialised Business of large proportions with tremendous profits of more than fifteen million dollars (over ￡3,000,000) per year, controlled largely by men, not women. Separate the male exploiter from the problem and we minimise its extent and abate its flagrant outward expression. In addition we check an artificial stimulus which has been given to the business so that larger profits may be made by the men exploiters.”

A Committee of Fourteen, which made inquiry in New York City, declared: “Some of the profit-sharers must be dispensed with through the force of public opinion or by means of heavy penalties, before the growth of vice can be checked. These include those who profit off the place—the landlord, agent, janitor, amusement dealer, brewer, and furniture dealer; those who profit off the act—the keeper, procurer, druggist, physician, midwife, police officer, and politician; those who profit off the children—employers, procurers, and public service corporations; those who deal in the futures of vice—publishers, manufacturers, and vendors of vicious pictures and articles; those who exploit the unemployed—the employment agent and employers; a group of no less than nineteen, middle-men, who are profit-sharers in vice.” It is evident that if so many people can make a profit, this constitutes a temptation to exploiters, and if the[122] business could be made unprofitable, it would be greatly reduced. Demand creates supply. Some of the demand comes from the natural lustfulness of men. But this is immensely stimulated by those who make profits, and the supply is secured very largely by fraud and deception, by persistent siege, by the ruining of girls under promise of marriage. In Chicago the average wage of a shop girl is six dollars a week; it takes at least eight dollars a week to support life there; the prostitute can make twenty-five dollars a week. Yet even so, she could not be secured in sufficient numbers without the carefully calculated traffic. A prominent social worker in Chicago said in his evidence: “A lot can be done, if we believe that a very large percentage of those who pass through a period of prostitution are capable of climbing upward instead of downward by the momentum of their own better nature. We will have to change our theory about the woman criminal, if we are going to save her. And if the woman is a prostitute, it is only through (1) the uncontrolled passion of youth, and (2) financial stress. To my mind she can fight both of these, but she can’t fight those and the added damnation of the saloon and the cool, sagacious business man, who simply stands by and drains her for profit. She could break through the economic dangers and the physical temptations if you will give her a chance, but when you make her fight alcohol and capitalisation, she has no show.”

We see from these accounts, then, that the demand[123] comes from men, and that the supply is largely procured by men for business purposes. In England when a procurer is caught, he or she is sent to jail, but the men who finance the procurer and the men who are her clients are shielded. Who can doubt that when women know these things and are admitted to full citizenship, there will be a change of public opinion all along the lines that feed the supply—economic and educational? The Chicago Commission in apportioning the blame, says: “The Commission has refrained from unnecessary criticism of public officials. Present-day conditions are better in respect to open vice than the city has known in many years. But they are by no means a credit to Chicago. However, this must be remembered, they are not unique in the history of the city. Present-day public officials are no more lax in their handling of the problem than their predecessors for years; as a matter of fact, the regulations respecting flagrant and open prostitution under the present police administration, are more strict in tone, and repressive in execution than have been issued or put in operation for many years. Public opinion has made no united demand for a change in the situation. The Commission feels, therefore, that all public officials who are equally responsible for the present conditions are equally open to criticism. Further, that the greatest criticism is due the citizens of Chicago (italics mine), first, for the constant evasion of the problem, second, for their ignorance and indifference to the situation,[124] and third, for their lack of united effort in demanding a change in the intolerable conditions as they now exist.” If ignorance and indifference in the mass of citizens are the ultimate causes, may we not find in the fact that only men are citizens one of the causes of this ignorance and indifference? You can rouse the country on an election cry of “slavery,” if it is the slavery of men. The far worse slavery of women is no profitable election cry. Do our anti-suffrage politicians never think of the reason for this? It is a fine commentary on the “Chivalry” of which they prate.

And, lastly, we come to the traffic in war. The recent exposure in Germany of such traffic among armament manufacturers—an international traffic like that in women—has reminded us of the extraordinary folly of allowing private firms to manufacture the actual implements of war. Of course there are many other necessities of war over which it is impossible to have control, but at least the manufacture of warships and guns and ammunition should not be let out of the hands of the government. Here again the sovereign remedy, as in so many other matters, is light, knowledge. When the working man, who is regarded as food for powder, knows in whose interests wars are made, how contrived, financed, and timed, it will not be so easy to catch him with the bait of rhetoric. It will be still less easy to catch women. In the Labour Leader of 24th July 1913 there appeared an article giving a list of thirty-five aviation companies,[125] many of which expect to share in the boom that will be given to the trade by orders from the war-departments of various governments. Here we have a baby industry reposing most of its hopes of profit not on the use men may make of this wonderful discovery for the enlargement of life, but for the spreading of death. Truly it looks as if the glorious inventions of the sovereign mind of man would continue to be accursed until man acknowledges his fellow-sovereign.