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pans, tooting horns, and singing gleefully filthy songs under the windows of an illicit couple, for instance, survived in both the United Kingdom and the United States until at least the First World War. But neither rowdy noisemaking nor shotgun weddings, nor even the odd spot of vigilante justice, could conceivably address all of the sexual crimes that took place in a big city.
    This might, in theory, have been a job for the police. In reality, policing as a branch of civil service was still in its infancy, with City of London police chartered by statute in 1839 and New York City forming a police force only in 1845. The responsibilities and reach of citypolice forces took time to work themselves out, and the law and the courts would similarly scramble for decades to catch up with the regulatory and disciplinary needs of the swelling cities. To those who lived in cities—and even to those who only heard stories about them—the urban world was a frightening, dirty, dangerous place, especially from a sexual standpoint, full of prostitutes and predators.
    Urban sexual misconduct was typically, if inaccurately, blamed on the lower classes. Because the fastest-growing groups in the new city were the working class and the poor, it often appeared that the rising rates of sexual misconduct reflected the socioeconomic class of these new urbanites rather than merely the larger overall population. The middle and upper classes, who prided themselves on their moral rectitude (and had the additional advantage of enjoying all the discretion money could buy), had no trouble ascribing disproportionate, even innate, degeneracy to their socioeconomic inferiors.
    This was not a new idea. Western Europe had long held to the idea that all creatures belonged to a grand overarching hierarchy. Since the medieval era, a central notion of Western thought was the idea of the
scala naturae
or Great Chain of Being, the concept that all living beings had a place in a strict hierarchy that led inexorably upward from dirt to plants to animals to humans to the angels and ultimately to God. As one ascended this natural ladder, one ascended in perfection. Wealth, health, moral uprightness, and social dominance were all considered proofs of superiority, while inferiority betrayed itself in poverty, sickness, immorality, and powerlessness. All men were automatically higher than all women, white-skinned people automatically higher than dark-skinned, and Christians above those of other faiths. The Great Chain thus furnished a conceptual framework that would be important later: the idea that inherent or quasi-inherent “imperfections,” such as particular sexual habits, could be part of the intrinsic makeup of whole classes of people.
    As the nineteenth century wore on, the Great Chain of Being acquired a sort of slantwise sibling in evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin himself never asserted that evolution represented the same sort of grand ladder of ascending perfection. Indeed, the fact that the notion of progress toward an ultimate Godly perfection was entirely excluded from Darwin’s characterization of natural selection was part ofwhat made his theories so controversial. But this did not stop people from applying the teleology of the Great Chain to the principles of natural selection and evolution. In particular, the “science” of eugenics recasts the basic principles of the Great Chain onto natural selection in a particularly poisonous way. (Eugenics and Darwinism were related in a literal way as well as a figurative one: as a field, eugenics was pioneered by Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton.) Eugenicists believed that human evolution had a goal, and that this goal was to produce ever better and fitter human beings. Therefore, they reasoned, a lack of moral or physical virtue directly reflected a hereditary deficit. For instance, the “moral imbecile.” “Moral imbeciles,” in the eyes of eugenicists, were