The great primitive instinct, so responsive to social control as to be almost an example of social docility, has apparently broken with all the restraints and decencies under two conditions:  first and second, when the individual felt that he was above social control and when the individual has had an opportunity to hide his daily living.  Prostitution upon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for it becomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that social control may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feels superior to it.  When a city is so large that it is extremely difficult to fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries was considered the luxury of the king comes within the reach of every office-boy, and that lack of community control which belonged only to the overlord who felt himself superior to the standards of the people, may be seized upon by any city dweller who can evade his acquaintances.  Against such moral aggression, the old types of social control are powerless.

Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions which make moral isolation possible, constantly tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the mutual dependences of city life and its daily necessities.  The city itself socializes the very instruments that constitute the apparatus of social control—­Law, Publicity, Literature, Education and Religion.  Through their socialization, the desirability of chastity, which has hitherto been a matter of individual opinion and decision, comes to be regarded, not only as a personal virtue indispensable in women and desirable in men, but as a great basic requirement which society has learned to demand because it has been proven necessary for human welfare.  To the individual restraints is added the conviction of social responsibility and the whole determination of chastity is reinforced by social sanctions.  Such a shifting to social grounds is already obviously taking place in regard to the chastity of women.  Formerly all that the best woman possessed was a negative chastity which had been carefully guarded by her parents and duennas.  The chastity of the modern woman of self-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which gives her an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a new value and importance in the establishment of social standards.  There was a certain basis for the belief that if a woman lost her personal virtue, she lost all; when she had no activity outside of domestic life, the situation itself afforded a foundation for the belief that a man might claim praise for his public career even when his domestic life was corrupt.  As woman, however, fulfills her civic obligations while still guarding her chastity, she will be in position as never before to uphold the “single standard,” demanding that men shall add the personal virtues to their performance of public duties.  Women may at last force men to do away with the traditional use of a public record as a cloak for a wretched private character, because society will never permit a woman to make such excuses for herself.