[4] See, for many of the chief of these, Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, 5th Edition, 1914.
[5] W.P. Pycraft, The Courtship of Animal, p. 9.
X — THE WHITE SLAVE CRUSADE
During recent years we have witnessed a remarkable attempt—more popular and more international in character than any before—to deal with that ancient sexual evil which has for some time been picturesquely described as the White Slave Traffic. Less than forty years ago Professor Sheldon Amos wrote that this subject can scarcely be touched upon by journalists, and "can never form a topic of common conversation." Nowadays Churches, societies, journalists, legislators have all joined the ranks of the agitators. Not only has there been no voice on the opposite side, which was scarcely to be expected—for there has never been any anxiety to cry aloud the defence of "White Slavery" from the house-tops—but there has been a new and noteworthy conquest over indifference and over that sacred silence which was supposed to encompass all sexual topics with suitable darkness. The banishment of that silence in the cause of social hygiene is, indeed, not the least significant feature of this agitation.
It is inevitable, however, that these periodical fits of virtuous indignation by which Society is overtaken should speedily be spent. The victim of the moral fever finds himself exhausted by the struggle, scarcely able to cope with the complications of the disease, and, at the best, only too anxious to forget what he has passed through. He has an uneasy feeling that in the course of his delirium he has said and done many foolish things which it would now be unpleasant to recall too precisely.
There is no use in attempting to disguise the fact that this is what happened in the White Slave Traffic agitation. It became clear that we had been largely misled in regard to the evils to be combated, and that we were seduced into sanctioning various remedies for these evils which in cold blood it is impossible to approve of, even if we could believe them to be effective.
It is not even clear that all those who have talked about the "White Slave Traffic" have been quite sure what they meant by the term. Some people, indeed, have seemed to think that it meant prostitution in general. That is, of course, an absurd misapprehension. We are concerned with a trade which flourishes on prostitution, but that trade is not itself the trade or (as some prefer to call it) the profession of prostitutes. Indeed, the prostitute, under ordinary conditions and unharassed by persecution, is in many respects anything but a slave. She is much less a slave than the ordinary married woman. She is not fettered in humble dependence on the will of a husband from whom it is the most difficult thing in the world to escape; she is bound to no man and free to make her own terms in life; while if she should have a child, that child is absolutely her own, and she is not liable to have it torn from her arms by the hands of the law. Apart from arbitrary and accidental circumstances, due to the condition of social feeling, the prostitute enjoys a position of independence which the married woman is still struggling to obtain.
The White Slave Traffic, therefore, is not prostitution; it is the commercialised exploitation of prostitutes. The independent prostitute, living alone, scarcely lends herself to the White Slave trader. It is on houses of prostitution, where the less independent and usually weaker-minded prostitutes are segregated, that the traffic is based. Such houses cannot even exist without such traffic. There is little inducement for a girl to enter such a house, in full knowledge of what it involves, on her own initiative. The proprietors of such houses must therefore give orders for the "goods" they desire, and it is the business of procurers, by persuasion, misrepresentation, deceit, intoxication, to supply them. "The White Slave Traffic," as Kneeland states, "is thus not only a hideous reality, but a reality almost wholly dependent on the existence of houses of prostitution," and as the authors of The Social Evil state, it is "the most shameful species of business enterprise in modern times."[1]