Alcoholic drinks should not be permitted to be sold in brothels; minors of either sex and married men should not be allowed there; the "age of consent" should be raised to eighteen years; soliciting on streets, whether by men or women, should be a misdemeanor; procurers should be dealt with by the imposition of crushing punishments, and in every possible manner the way to reform should be made easy.
If temptations be removed, the desires of the men will be lessened, and unprotected women will not be so liable to insult as they are in Continental cities where morality is low. The commerce of procuring is reduced to the lowest possible limits by this method; and only those who are naturally vicious will resort to licentiousness. Unquestionably, thousands upon thousands would refrain from immoral practices if a judicious repressive system were in force.
With the decrease in the number of brothels would come a decrease also in the amount of clandestine prostitution, as we may read from the experience of foreign cities. Fallen women, if they desired, would have a chance to reform; illegitimacy would be enormously lessened, and crimes would dimmish, for every policeman and every detective know that brothels are the hot beds of every evil machination.
Debauchery and disease would lessen, and we should have fewer of those sexual perverts who resort to the lowest degradation of infamy such as are common in vice infected haunts, and such as the inhabitants of Pompefi practised. Pompeii, the pagan city whose vileness was covered by "indignant Vesuvius", reads the traveller a lesson on the depths of infamy to which a people who are given up to libertinism will come. Over the doors of her well preserved brothels, in sight of the passers by on the streets, are the exaggerated genital organs of the male, which seemed to be facile princeps in their estimation, as in the mind of many a man today.
On the walls within these brothels there are yet to be seen frescoes, in a wonderful state of preservation, illustrating every conceivable perversion which any demon might invent. And in the locked rooms in the museum at Naples, closed to women, we have seen the obscene statues which point ua to that abyss of shame to which we too shall descend if we trifle with, or encourage, or countenance impurity in our sexual relations.
Eepressive measures inflict no hardship on any individual or class, while the license system and the tolerating system do; for where prostitution flourishes, the women's interests are never considered as of anything like equal importance to the men's. Any law liable to great abuse or without equity should have no life in a republic.
Laws are meant to punish the vicious, to protect the weak, to throw safeguards around minors and the unprotected, to encourage right doing, to honor the sanctity of marriage ; and not to appoint any policeman, physician, or other agent to degrade himself by the cowardly and unmanly work of helping along a traffic whose object is to sacrifice an untold number of young women to the basest passions of a mob of coarse and diseased men.
All that we ask is that brave and humane men will merely do their duty as they understand it reverencing all women, and not consigning, by their influence or their votes, thousands of them to the extremest agony of shame and the darkest abysm of degradation.