ABSTRACT
Isabel Paterson was one of the few writers who went to literary "teas' and actually wanted tea, not alcohol, but she was perpetually at odds with Prohibition. For if the law is not meant to suppress venal sex relations, and then it has no object whatever. If prostitution is a crime, and the two persons are shown to have intended to commit this crime, then the law has a fair pretext. The present law against soliciting is vitiated by the same humbug on the part of respectable people which taints the prohibition law. The sale of liquor is a crime, but not the purchase. In the case of the convicted girls, men are only silencing their own uneasy conscience by an outcry against the police and the decoy. The Civil War slave owners professed to despise slave dealers and overseers, who were in fact their agents, executing their orders.
