Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage
entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators
as aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an
almost horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by
persons and papers notoriously indifferent to public morals on
all other occasions. The explanation is very simple. The profits
of Mrs Warren's profession are shared not only by Mrs Warren and
Sir George Crofts, but by the landlords of their houses, the
newspapers which advertize them, the restaurants which cater for
them, and, in short, all the trades to which they are good
customers, not to mention the public officials and
representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or
blackmail. Add to these the employers who profit by cheap female
labor, and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it [you
find such people everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in
the highest places in Church and State], and you get a large and
powerful class with a strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs
Warren's profession, and a correspondingly strong incentive to
conceal, from their own consciences no less than from the world,
the real sources of their gain. These are the people who declare
that it is feminine vice and not poverty that drives women to the
streets, as if vicious women with independent incomes ever went
there. These are the people who, indulgent or indifferent to
aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against
performances of Mrs Warren's Profession, and drag actresses to
the police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for
fulfilling their engagements. For please observe that the
judicial decision in New York State in favor of the play does not
end the matter. In Kansas City, for instance, the municipality,
finding itself restrained by the courts from preventing the