(5) Commercialised Vice
“And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw—
‘I am God, and King, and Law!’”
The Mask of Anarchy, P. B. Shelley.

Emil Reich, writing in 1908, said (Woman through the Ages, vol. ii. p. 247): “The women of the East lie under an adamant yoke of complete severity. It is in the West that the only movement comes, a movement—at its mistaken best—which makes a crusade against prostitution, alcoholism, and war; all of which must exist as hideous necessities and which, if they could be swept away, would, in their disappearance, utterly upset the balance of[118] civilisation.” On the previous page he has asserted that “the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of Empire.” Many women will also see in the enslavement of women the chief cause of the decay of Empires, and will hold that a civilisation which is balanced on prostitution, alcoholism and war is in a state of unstable equilibrium. They will be confirmed in this belief by the extraordinary state of panic into which Imperialists so often get about the Empire, which is so delicate that it must be sheltered from every breath of popular opinion. A healthy Empire should normally be in a condition of stable equilibrium, to which it returns after any shocks, and there is no manner of doubt that women want to abolish the notoriously rickety three legs of which Dr. Reich was so proud.

In themselves no one is found to recommend these three objects of man’s solicitude. Even Dr. Reich calls them “hideous.” It is, then, merely the impossibility of abolishing them that we are invited to accept, and it is too much to ask energetic and active women to accept “hideous” things, without ever having been given the chance of abolishing them, or even seriously diminishing them, especially when it is women who bear by far the greater weight of this hideous burden.

Now these three things are in their origin due to human appetites; these appetites have, by indulgence, by stimulation, and by exploitation, become lusts which, far more truly than any reform, do threaten the extinction of the Empires which[119] are allowing themselves to be eaten up with them. It is with the stimulation and exploitation that this chapter more especially deals. Natural appetite may be gross, may even be brutal, but in simple communities where each individual must rely on his own strength for his own livelihood, it tends to return to a norm which is that of health. Appetite, stimulated with every artifice of advertisement and allurement, exploited by every financial and commercial profiteer, becomes in crowded communities a gnawing ulcer, destroying bone and nerve and tissue, body and soul. To walk the streets and frequent the amusements of any great modern town—London or Vienna or Paris—is to find oneself in the midst of a perfect obsession of the lusts of the flesh. An enormous amount of what passes for art has no design but that of inciting appetite. Music halls and musical comedies, farces, picture-palaces, advertisement posters, repeat the same tedious, banal, hideous assaults. If you are incapable of responding, you are nauseated and bored beyond expression; but it is clear that the jaded nerves of many people can be whipped into response. There are many people who are so flaccid that they invariably succumb to the fixed idea. The profiteer knows this, and the idea is fixed by every device that capital can contrive.

Take the lust of alcoholism. What chance has the feeble will to escape its lure? Have we not given “The Trade” a solidarity which must be the envy of mere purveyors of necessities? (Mr.[120] Justice Channell said before the Jury Commission that a special jury very often consists half of publicans.) Have we not connected light and entertainment and conviviality with the vice of drunkenness? Have we not refused to allow people even the right to protect themselves against the unwelcome intrusion of the temptation into their neighbourhood? Do not our plays exhibit drunkenness as laughable and lovable in men? (It is significant that they are not so in women.) We have allowed the traffic in alcohol to become a vested interest which controls the lives of the people, and it is to the interest of this traffic that the people should not become sober. Will the traffickers not use their control to prevent the people becoming sober? “You cannot make men and women sober by Act of Parliament?” Perhaps not. Need you give such vast power to those whose profit lies in making men and women drunk?

Take the lust of sex. If alcoholism is stimulated in many ways, it is as nothing compared with the incessant appeals to lust. We all hear of the profits from the drink traffic. We are only beginning to hear of the profits from the traffic in women, which are often closely bound up with the profits of drink. But we must insist on knowing very much more than we do about these profits. The Chicago Commission asserts that in their belief Chicago “is far better proportionately to its population than most of the other large cities of the country,” and this statement is based upon a[121] careful study of fifty-two of the largest cities. In this city of Chicago (with a population of two millions) prostitution, they assert, is a “Commercialised Business of large proportions with tremendous profits of more than fifteen million dollars (over ￡3,000,000) per year, controlled largely by men, not women. Separate the male exploiter from the problem and we minimise its extent and abate its flagrant outward expression. In addition we check an artificial stimulus which has been given to the busin............