Lastly, temptation would be indirectly as well as directly diminished by the absence of prostitutes as a class. It has been already intimated that prostitution committed injustice to both sexes. By this it was intended to refer to the injustice of exposing our young men to perpetual temptation furnished by the facilities for prostitution. The whole question of sexual morality is mainly one of suggestion. Take eight men accustomed to believe that they cannot dispense with sexual connection; put them in a crew and remove the suggestion that they can obtain relief at any time by substituting therefor the notion of loyalty to the crew or a desire to win a race, and the desire which before seemed uncontrollable practically disappears. The moment the race is over, the old suggestion returns, and the night of a boat race has become proverbial in consequence. The same is true of men who go on hunting expeditions, yachting cruises, into lumber camps, etc. Desire becomes dormant or controllable as soon as facilities for gratifying it disappear; the moment the facility returns, the suggestion is revived, and desire becomes uncontrollable.
What, then, would be the consequence if the suggestion were minimized by the absence of prostitution altogether?
But this is not all: Men who seduce young girls and married women have learned to gratify their passions through the facility afforded by prostitution. If our youths were never afforded the chance of taking that first step which leads to the facilis descensus, they would, from the fact of never having gratified their passions, be less likely to undertake to gratify them at the cost of seduction. The suggestion would be absent; all women would tend to be as sacred to a man as his sister. The relation of brother and sister is due entirely to the absence of suggestion; he has learned to regard her with an unconscious respect which removes the possibility of erotic suggestion. What actually happens in the small family of to-day could also happen in the larger family of to-morrow.
This must not be understood as a contention that Socialism would destroy immorality. Far from it. All that is claimed is that it might diminish immorality and that it would put an end to prostitution. This last is reason enough for it.
It is impossible to treat of the economic cause of prostitution without discussing its ethical consequences, because the consequences react upon the cause. But we are here chiefly concerned with its economic features; and it is impossible to put too much emphasis upon the fact that the greatest permanent blot upon our civilization is the necessary result of a competitive system that leaves a large part of our women no other means of livelihood.
Although we have carefully distinguished between the woman who sells herself to one man for a fortune and the common prostitute who sells herself to many men for a pittance, the first is often more to blame than the latter, because the latter is compelled by hunger while the former often barters her chastity out of sheer love of luxury. The whole heredity of man may be altered by the elimination through Socialism of the sordid motive for marriage. Avarice may become diminished by sexual selection. For although sexual selection is not to-day found to have the force in animal heredity that Darwin thought, it is an important factor in human heredity, thanks to the opportunity for deliberate selection furnished by our institution of marriage. But this belongs to another chapter.
From a purely economic point of view, prostitution is to be classed with unemployment, which burdens the community with the support of a class that in a coöperative commonwealth would be self-supporting. It seems hardly necessary to state that the dissipation that attends the life of a prostitute unfits her for work. And not content with being idle herself, she causes others to be idle and constitutes a permanent source of contagion, moral and physical, in our midst.
This is a necessary consequence of the competitive system.
§ 4. Strikes and Lockouts
Another necessary result of a system of production that sets the man who works with his hands against the man who works with his head, is the conflict between capital and labor, that expresses itself in strikes and lockouts. The conflict itself is treated in detail in the chapter entitled Trusts and Trade Unions. Here we shall confine ourselves to its wastefulness in time and money.