There are others, apparently in increasing numbers, who approach the problem of prostitution not from an aesthetic standpoint but from a moral standpoint.  This moral attitude is not, however, that conventionalized morality of Cato and St. Augustine and Lecky, set forth in previous pages, according to which the prostitute in the street must be accepted as the guardian of the wife in the home.  These moralists reject indeed the claim of that belief to be considered moral at all.  They hold that it is not morally possible that the honor of some women shall be purchaseable at the price of the dishonor of other women, because at such a price virtue loses all moral worth.  When they read that, as Goncourt stated, “the most luxurious articles of women’s trousseaux, the bridal chemises of girls with dowries of six hundred thousand francs, are made in the prison of Clairvaux,"[216] they see the symbol of the intimate dependence of our luxurious virtue on our squalid vice.  And while they accept the historical and sociological evidence which shows that prostitution is an inevitable part of the marriage system which still survives among us, they ask whether it is not possible so to modify our marriage system that it shall not be necessary to divide feminine humanity into “disreputable” women, who make sacrifices which it is dishonorable to make, and “respectable” women, who take sacrifices which it cannot be less dishonorable to accept.

Prostitutes, a distinguished man of science has said (Duclaux, L’Hygiene Sociale, p. 243), “have become things which the public uses when it wants them, and throws on the dungheap when it has made them vile.  In its pharisaism it even has the insolence to treat their trade as shameful, as though it were not just as shameful to buy as to sell in this market.”  Bloch (Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Ch.  XV) insists that prostitution must be ennobled, and that only so can it be even diminished.  Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, also argues that we cannot check prostitution unless we create “in the minds of men and women a spirit of tolerance instead of intolerance of fallen women.”  This point may be illustrated by a remark by the prostitute author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen.  “If the profession of yielding the body ceased to be a shameful one,” she wrote, “the army of ‘unfortunates’ would diminish by four-fifths—­I will even say nine-tenths.  Myself, for example!  How gladly would I take a situation as companion or governess!” “One of two things,” wrote the eminent sociologist Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, January, 1907), “either prostitution will disappear through continuing to be dishonorable and will be replaced by some other institution which will better remedy the defects of monogamous marriage, or it will survive by becoming respectable, that is to say, by making itself respected, whether liked or disliked.”  Tarde thought this