All the considerations briefly indicated in the preceding pages—­the fundamental sense of human equality generated by our civilization, the repugnance to cruelty which accompanies the refinement of urban life, the ugly contrast of extremes which shock our developing democratic tendencies, the growing sense of the rights of the individual to authority over his own person, the no less strongly emphasized right of the community to the best that the individual can yield—­all these considerations are every day more strongly influencing the modern moralist to assume towards the prostitute an attitude altogether different from that of the morality which we derived from Cato and Augustine.  He sees the question in a larger and more dynamic manner.  Instead of declaring that it is well worth while to tolerate and at the same time to condemn the prostitute, in order to preserve the sanctity of the wife in her home, he is not only more inclined to regard each as the proper guardian of her own moral freedom, but he is less certain about the time-honored position of the prostitute, and moreover, by no means sure that the wife in the home may not be fully as much in need of rescuing as the prostitute in the street; he is prepared to consider whether reform in this matter is not most likely to take place in the shape of a fairer apportionment of sexual privileges and sexual duties to women generally, with an inevitably resultant elevation in the sexual lives of men also.

The revolt of many serious reformers against the injustice and degradation now involved by our system of prostitution is so profound that some have declared themselves ready to accept any revolution of ideas which would bring about a more wholesome transmutation of moral values.  “Better indeed were a saturnalia of free men and women,” exclaims Edward Carpenter (Love’s Coming of Age, p. 62), “than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night.”

Even those who would be quite content with as conservative a treatment as possible of social institutions still cannot fail to realize that prostitution is unsatisfactory, unless we are content to make very humble claims of the sexual act.  “The act of prostitution,” Godfrey declares (The Science of Sex, p. 202), “may be physiologically complete, but it is complete in no other sense.  All the moral and intellectual factors which combine with physical desire to form the perfect sexual attraction are absent.  All the higher elements of love—­admiration, respect, honor, and self-sacrificing devotion—­are as foreign to prostitution as to the egoistic act of masturbation.  The principal drawbacks to the morality of the act lie in its associations more than in the act itself.  Any affectional quality which a more or less promiscuous connection might possess is at once destroyed by the intrusion of the monetary element.  In the resulting degradation the woman has the largest share, since