For myself, I shall try to avoid a purely moral and idealistic treatment of the subject. At the same time, before explaining what practical measures should, in my opinion, be taken to lessen the evils, I should like to refer briefly, and I know inadequately, to the deeper causes, which are rooted in our attitude of life, as well as dependent on our hidden desires. Man, and of course I include woman, as a whole is estimated at too low a value. It is a paradoxical consequence that the _parts of man_, I mean his separate organs, rise in value. His brain, his sex, his stomach--each strives for mastery in attention; a faithless age has manias of sexuality, of intellect, of gastronomy.[117:1] These manias are the result of low values really placed on man himself. How do we discover that low value? It is not so much a matter of opinion; far more important than the opinion of the public is the wide-spread, always-acting, fundamental public feeling, expressed in the atmosphere of our society. Every smallest detail of life, our aims and hourly habits, everything that makes up the secret imaginations and the un-willed purposes of life--all have a part to play in deciding what our estimations of life will be, the things we shall seek as desirable, what avoid as unpleasant. If our estimations and hidden desires in actual fact rise in goodness, if we find better aims to satisfy our lives than the excitements of sexual satisfaction, then this department of morality will rise.
The question is one of great complexity, and the surest means of improvement are very difficult to decide; not to be settled in a spirit of Sunday-school optimism. The bad boy does not always come to harm, or the good boy gain the reward that he ought to have. It is not so simple as that. Even if all vulgar and evil desires could by some magician's wand be transformed into their opposites, so that all of us bubbled and seethed with virtues, I do not believe we could count on the results. Our very virtues might hasten us to perdition: both higher and lower aims, if ill-adjusted to form a complete life, may lead astray. The savage in us all has to be reckoned with as the angel, and the dreamer who ever looks to heaven often stumbles over a tiny stone. Thus a helpless romanticizing, a too ideal as well as a too low view of love, may lead easily to a self-deceiving resort to prostitution.