Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!")
This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every succeeding age, could not prevent for one day the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St. Augustine was a sounder philosopher when he wrote:
"Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris."
("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you will defile home with disease and dishonor.")
If St. Augustine had written but this sentence, I would proclaim him a great psychologist; in a few words he has shown all the sides of the tremendous problem, given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, of social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he addressed them to a world so different from ours.
Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from or by concealing them; and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the most burning questions of modern society after the manner of a child who by closing his eyes believes that he is fleeing from the dog that threatens him. To Dr. Monlau in Spain and Dr. Bergeret in France, who thought that they would be able to save society by abolishing prostitution, I replied in a few words which I wish to save from the shipwreck of the newspapers in order to gather them in the shadow of this book:
"I have never wondered at finding philosophers who study man in Fichte or in Kant without having ever touched his palpitating body, or examined any of his fibers with the microscope; who advise the legislator to destroy in the social organism, with iron and fire, that livid and cancerous spot called prostitution; neither have I given the alarm or extolled it as a miracle when I heard the auto-da-fé invoked against the houses of ill fame by moralists who have had the rare fortune of having been born without the sixth sense, or the still rarer merit of smothering it with the extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently, and with a compassionate voice I ask myself: 'Is he really a physician? Has this moralist actually seen a man in convulsive delirium and cut into his cold and rigid flesh on the chilly marble slab of the anatomical cabinet? He who hurls the anathema at prostitution, is he really the physician who should act as a kind link between the legislator, who in man sees only a defendant to punish, and the philanthropist, who in him considers only an unhappy creature to heal and help?'
"These and other questions I addressed to the illustrious Spanish physician Monlau when he proposed to his government the absolute suppression of the houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure of seeing my poor words printed in the progressive Spanish medical journals. Now I make the same reproach to Dr. Bergeret, who, in one of his memoirs on prostitution in the country places and small towns of France, went so far as to fling the anathema against that caustic wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh of the modern social organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the French physician a melancholy: 'Tu quoque, fili mi?'
"Bergeret lost much of his time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurred in some villages of France. And who does not know similar stories? We have them in Italy, in Germany; we can find them in every country where humanity loves and suffers, gets drunk and prostitutes itself; wherever the eyes of the authorities cannot penetrate into the most secret fissures of the social edifice where lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But between deploring the evils that are the results of clandestine prostitution and destroying all toleration on this ground there is an abyss over which the physician and the legislator should not pass on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but which should be crossed over the solid bridge of a wise criticism.
"Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice in the houses of ill fame; but, then, without taverns would there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no poisoners, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars? And who, pray, is the cause of the existence of houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand if it is true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morals are those of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot convert; they are as false and coarse as those of the legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the guilty; as those of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the member which, with a wiser and more merciful science, he should preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor's stake, has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more in preservative medicine than in the surgeon's knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature imbued with evil humors, with many curious bones and many scrofulous tumors, we will kindly cauterize its flesh to keep it alive, to divert into more ignoble parts those acrid humors that would poison the sources of life, until we shall succeed with the tonic cure of education in renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid and in pouring this new blood into his flesh, his bones and his nerves, to rebuild them.
"This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a precious wound open to save the life of a diseased organism.
"And believe me, O egregious colleague of the country beyond the Alps, when life shall be no longer threatened and the organism shall have new blood, then we will close this wound, too, together with many other ones which are still bleeding. We will close the house of voluptuousness when every man will have his nest and love will not be considered a crime any longer."
There are some savage races among which prostitution is unknown, while no civilized nation is without prostitutes; on the contrary, every country, even the most moral, has the high prostitutes and the very high, the low and the very low. Not in all countries are prostitutes cynically named according to the price they ask for their favors, as in Persia, where they are termed "the fifty tomani," "the twenty tomani," etc.; but everywhere a tariff is the index of the hierarchy of vice and a scale of lechery. Alexander Severus did not want the money collected through taxes on houses of prostitution to be paid into the treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, used it for the maintenance of the theaters and the public health. With Juvenalian sagacity, the government of Brazil devotes to the regulation of vice the money received from the sale of decorations and titles of nobility. We find everywhere women who sell themselves, but we also find, to our honor, that society is everywhere ashamed of this stain, conceals and does not mention it, and a mysterious mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love.
A thousand muddy streamlets carry their tributes to prostitution; but at the first source the cause is one and powerful: in man an imperious appetite for voluptuousness, in woman an imperious want of bread or licentiousness, or licentiousness and bread at the same time. Unfortunately woman can always sell five minutes of voluptuousness without love, without desire; she can sell herself with disgust in her heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, fashion, according to the infamous art with which she knows how to feign pleasure and counterfeit love. Procurers and procuresses hasten to the market of lechery to test the flesh of the precious victims, to fatten the lean and buy the plump for the higher bidder; and panders and bawds, keeping within the shadow of the law, conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of prostitution that quivering herd of youth and shame. And prisoners in the same gloomy atmosphere are martyrs of love and nymphomaniacs; victims of hunger and of ignorance; fallen angels and foul demons; all the lowest strata of feminine society, all the bloody carrions of the great social battles.