THE REGULATION OF PROSTITUTION
EUROPEAN governments have for many decades experimented with the legalizing and regulating of prostitution elevating it to the dignity of a state institution. In the lands where this infamous system is legalized, the possibility that any man shall remain chaste and pure is hardly conceived of by either men or women; and it is taken for granted that the sons of the family must have their mistresses.
There being a continual demand for fresh batches of young girls to take the places of those who have been crowded out by disease and death, as previously shown, a lamentable proportion of women have consequently been degraded, and no unprotected girl of the lower classes is safe from the machinations of the procurers and procuresses wherever the system of Regulation is in force.
In those countries the police reports show an increase in the number of brothels, an increase in the number of registered women, and an enormous increase in clandestine prostitution. Moreover, there has been an increase in the spread of loathsome diseases, and the whole system in every detail has proved a delusion to the men and a snare to the women. The alleged aim and object of legal sanction and the state regulation of vice is, of course, to secure the protection of the public health and to shield the pure women from harm; but we shall presently see how preposterous are both these propositions.
The chief purpose of regulation is to have the harlots examined by medical inspectors, once or twice a week, in order to insure men a relative safety from contracting disease. The advocates of this plan claim that there are a large number of vicious men whose appetites must be appeased, and for their sake a proportional number of girls must be set apart and condemned to the lowest abyss of shame. Of course, men must frankly acknowledge that all these regulation schemes have been adopted solely in order to make fornication safe for them, while the women's interests are entirely ignored, since they are to be put into the lazaretto as soon as infected which they speedily will be and the vacancies caused by their withdrawal are to be filled with fresh and healthy women.
It seems a powerful argument when the promulgators of this system declare that it is their desire to throw safeguards around the pure women of the community; but this is a mistaken assumption, since the exact opposite obtains. It is, indeed, in those very countries and cities where prostitution is licensed that virtuous women and working-girls cannot walk the streets without being accosted and insulted.
The advocates of this system would separate women into two classes the sheep and the goats saying that these must be absolutely chaste, and those absolutely unchaste; the barriers between them are to be impenetrable, while the men may freely consort with both groups.
Harlotry is admittedly the worst use to which a woman can be put, as hanging is for a man; and the country which goes into such a perfidious business offers a Paradise to knaves, but a Hell to women and children. To some men, all winds are contrary which do not blow in the evil direction they desire; and such are continually striving to introduce into our country the customs which the governments of Europe have tried and found ineffectual.
The wickedness of a nation's laws reflects the weakness and the wickedness of the lawmakers; and before the bar of Justice and the Court of Heaven a plea that crime must be recognized can gain no remission of the dire consequences. Just as men do not demand nor expect chastity from all women, but only from a portion of them, so the law, when it recognizes vice, does not attempt to dispense equity nor pretend to expect morality only partially so.
Certain forms of wickedness such as murder, theft, arson, perjury, rape, etc. the law absolutely discountenances and does not attempt to trifle with.