How He Lied to Her Husband | Page 5

weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul free
of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors. But I have
certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like that word "ordure."
Apply it to my work, and I can afford to smile, since the world, on the
whole, will smile with me. But to apply it to the woman in the street,
whose spirit is of one substance with our own and her body no less holy:
to look your women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang
yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.
POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from
America that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the
most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren's
Profession, has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue
from advertisements of Mrs Warren's houses.
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 performance, fell back on a local
bye-law against indecency to evade the Constitution of the United
States. They summoned the actress who impersonated Mrs Warren to
the police court, and offered her and her colleagues the alternative of
leaving the city or being prosecuted under this bye-law.
Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who
suddenly displayed such concern for the morals of the theatre were
either Mrs Warren's landlords, or employers of women at starvation
wages, or restaurant keepers, or newspaper proprietors, or in some
other more or less direct way sharers of the profits of her trade. No
doubt it is equally possible that they were simply stupid men who
thought that indecency consists, not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have,
however, been myself a member of a municipal council, and have not
found municipal councillors quite so simple and inexperienced as this.
At all events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the benefit
of the doubt. I therefore advise the public at large, which will finally
decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on gentlemen who will stand
anything at the theatre except a performance of Mrs Warren's
Profession, and who assert in the same breath that [a] the play is too
loathsome to be bearable by civilized people, and [b] that unless its
performance is prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They
may be merely excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public
that it is equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.
At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which the play
exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for assuming that the
prohibitionists are disinterested moralists, and that the author, the
managers, and the performers, who depend for their livelihood on their
personal reputations and not on rents, advertisements, or dividends, are
grossly inferior to them in moral sense and public responsibility.
It is true that in Mrs Warren's Profession,