it makes her a pariah and involves her in all the hardening and depraving influences of social ostracism.  But her degradation only serves to render her influence on her partners more demoralizing.  Prostitution,” he concludes, “has a strong tendency towards emphasizing the naturally selfish attitude of men towards women, and encouraging them in the delusion, born of unregulated passions, that the sexual act itself is the aim and end of the sex life.  Prostitution can therefore make no claim to afford even a temporary solution to the sex problem.  It fulfils only that mission which has made it a ’necessary evil’—­the mission of palliative to the physical rigors of celibacy and monogamy.  It does so at the cost of a considerable amount of physical and moral deterioration, much of which is undoubtedly due to the action of society in completing the degradation of the prostitute by persistent ostracism.  Prostitution was not so great an evil when it was not thought so great, yet even at its best it was a real evil, a melancholy and sordid travesty of sincere and natural passional relations.  It is an evil which we are bound to have with us so long as celibacy is a custom and monogamy a law.”  It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a system which makes venal love possible.  “The time has gone past,” the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) “when a mere ceremony can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed into the sincerity of sexual affection.  If, to enter into sexual connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law.  If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a different set of external circumstances.  Either the prostitute wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors.”

The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social relationships of life, was James Hinton.  More than thirty years ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea.  It may be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton’s MSS.:  “I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will rule also in human life....  There is a tension, a crushing of the soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves.  It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms....