The White Slave Trade should be abolished as a trade. If a woman was herself willing to become the tool of every man who came along, she could not perhaps be restrained, but those who profit from it other than herself should be vigorously prosecuted. All diseased should be prohibited from sexual intercourse.
Even under the present state of society, there is a solution to one problem. Many young men, like myself, have strong sexual passions, but we do not like to consort with those who, starting out with a debased idea of sexual relations, have debauched it. Now we meet girls who are also passionate and who, were it not for the knowledge that their life would be ruined, would be only too glad to have intercourse with us on the basis of mutual sexual attraction and passion. This would bring relief to both of us from much of the deadly monotony of sordid, every-day affairs, if the girl could go on just the same as the man, she being allowed to have a child legally, which she could either take care of herself or delegate to the State’s care. This would take care of that large body of men who are not in a position to marry for various reasons, and that equally large body of women who are unable to find suitable husbands, but who feel the emptiness in their lives, and those women who want children and consider, or would consider if society would permit, that it is nobody’s business who the father is. It should be a crime to have intercourse when one is diseased, and the knowledge that one can with impunity have intercourse with a woman for love would deter a large number of men from having it with those who only give themselves for money and are liable to transmit disease. This would then leave those men who are morbidly fond of the baser forms of sexual perversion to the professional prostitutes and women (few comparatively), who naturally are attracted by, or are willing to put up with, the drunkenness and attendant beastliness of a certain kind of man, who we may hope, will be a smaller and smaller factor, as radicalism grows.
Thus, now, with radical views, I am endeavoring to attain my old state as before my twentieth year, for a year at least, so as to work this out with other problems, because in my present state of physical weakness I cannot afford to risk added weakness, and so fight this off every night, and hope soon my nature will have become resigned to this until my twenty-third birthday, when I hope to have a clearer plan of action.
Starting this with a nervous sleeplessness, I end at 6:30 A. M., over two hours later with a clear head, but, of course, the tired feeling lies there dormant.
Havana, Friday, May 10, 1912.
Another birthday, my twenty-second, and I intend this year to be the best yet. The past one has been the worst and the best; the worst because of my acute nervousness and self-consciousness and my foolish actions during the early months in Havana; best because I woke up from a lethargy and blind groping in the dark to a conscious effort to find myself and be myself; and to this end I have dedicated my twenty-second year. I do not expect to work out things to a fine point during this time, but hope to decide on a broad, general scheme of life policy of procedure and philosophy; of necessity the major part of the details will take years to work out.
Hope and ambition, tempered by my experience, are dominant, and my calm periods are becoming of longer duration and more frequent occurrence, in fact, predominate to a gratifying extent lately as compared with what has gone before.
I start afresh on a year’s freedom from sexual excitement, or such is my plan, for not the least of the problems to work out is that of sex. It will be hell to hold myself in check entirely in every respect, but I feel I must, in order to collect my thoughts and feelings which were becoming rather confused on this, as on other subjects, owing to my changeable moods, passions and feelings.
I have the advantage of starting out on the broadest basis possible, the agnostic position as I understand it. I have not studied Spencer nor reduced my agnosticism to any dogmatic position of knowable or unknowable, but always it has been: I neither believe nor deny; my mind is open; I am willing to learn; to give all who have a serious message a hearing. True, up to the present I have not given much serious study to the problem, having read considerably more about philosophy than of it, but I have had that tendency, and, being young yet, it is perhaps best that I did not attempt to go too deeply into the problem ere this, and even now I shall go slow.
The question has unconsciously, however, narrowed itself down. I have given enough thought to the matter to reject the Christian theory of Christ being the son of God, and, leaving out most of the minor religions or philosophies