In one city, if the press dispatches are to
be believed, the proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued with
such ferocity that seven of them were driven to suicide. And in another
city, after a campaign of repression so unfortunate in its effects that
there were actually protests against it by clergymen elsewhere, a
distinguished (and very friendly) connoisseur of such affairs referred
to it ingenuously as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." Such
disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no permanent good. It
is a commonplace, indeed, that a city is usually in worse condition
after it has been "cleaned up" than it was before, and I need not point
to New York, Los Angeles and Des Moines for the evidence as to the
social evil, and to any large city, East, West, North, South, for the
evidence as to the saloon. But the Puritans who finance such enterprises
get their thrills, not out of any possible obliteration of vice, but out
of the galloping pursuit of the vicious. The new Puritan gives no more
serious thought to the rights and feelings of his quarry than the gunner
gives to the rights and feelings of his birds.
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