Our inquiry has also, it may be hoped, incidentally tended to show that in practically dealing with the question of prostitution it is pre-eminently necessary to remember the warning which, as regards many other social problems, has been embodied by Herbert Spencer in his famous illustration of the bent iron plate.  In trying to make the bent plate smooth, it is useless, Spencer pointed out, to hammer directly on the buckled up part; if we do so we merely find that we have made matters worse; our hammering, to be effective, must be around, and not directly on, the offensive elevation we wish to reduce; only so can the iron plate be hammered smooth.[219] But this elementary law has not been understood by moralists.  The plain, practical, common-sense reformer, as he fancied himself to be—­from the time of Charlemagne onwards—­has over and over again brought his heavy fist directly down on to the evil of prostitution and has always made matters worse.  It is only by wisely working outside and around the evil that we can hope to lessen it effectually.  By aiming to develop and raise the relationships of men to women, and of women to women, by modifying our notions of sexual relationships, and by introducing a saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the responsibilities of women as well as of men, by attaining, socially as well as economically, a higher level of human living—­it is only by such methods as these that we can reasonably expect to see any diminution and alleviation of the evil of prostitution.  So long as we are incapable of such methods we must be content with the prostitution we deserve, learning to treat it with the pity, and the respect, which so intimate a failure of our civilization is entitled to.

FOOTNOTES: 

[107] See, e.g., Cheetham’s Hulsean Lectures, The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, pp. 123, 136.

[108] Hormayr’s Taschenbuch, 1835, p. 255.  Hagelstange, in a chapter on mediaeval festivals in his Sueddeutsches Bauernleben im Mittelalter, shows how, in these Christian orgies which were really of pagan origin, the German people reacted with tremendous and boisterous energy against the laborious and monotonous existence of everyday life.

[109] This was clearly realized by the more intelligent upholders of the Feast of Fools.  Austere persons wished to abolish this Feast, and in a remarkable petition sent up to the Theological Faculty of Paris (and quoted by Flogel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen, fourth edition, p. 204) the case for the Feast is thus presented:  “We do this according to ancient custom, in order that folly, which is second nature to man and seems to be inborn, may at least once a year have free outlet.  Wine casks would burst if we failed sometimes to remove the bung and let in air.  Now we are all ill-bound casks and barrels which would let out the wine of wisdom if by constant devotion and fear of God we allowed it to ferment.  We must let in air so that it may not be spoilt.  Thus on some days we give ourselves up to sport, so that with the greater zeal we may afterwards return to the worship of God.”  The Feast of Fools was not suppressed until the middle of the sixteenth century, and relics of it persisted (as at Aix) till near the end of the eighteenth century.