If the advocates of the regulation system are in earnest about protecting the decent members of the community, they will make provision that the men must have licenses to indulge in fornication as well as the women; that licenses will not under any circumstances be issued to married men, but only to boys past eighteen and bachelors and widowers; that both sexes must submit to an inspection far more searching than anything now required; that the license of a diseased male or female profligate shall be revoked and the victim incarcerated in a lazaretto until pronounced innocuous by a skilled corps of medical examiners, consisting of female physicians for the women, and of male physicians for the men; and that if a woman become pregnant she shall be withdrawn, tenderly cared for in a retreat, and her illegitimate child reared up as a ward of the State until twenty one years of age.
If some lawyer will take his cue from the above and elaborate such a bill in legal form for presentation to a legislative body, there will be thousands of sensible people who will support it. As a rider to his bill he should also make provision for an increase in the local police force in order to contend successfully with the opposition of the men who might be relied upon to rebel against such brutal tyranny and the abrogation of their rights as citizens.
The Three Methods of Dealing with Prostitution. The following systems present themselves for our consideration :
I. The System of Toleration laissezfaire or the "Let-Alone System".
II. The System of Regulation, or the system of trafficwhich demands the legal sacrifice of fresh young womencontinually.
III. The System of Repression, which seeks to reduce impurity to a minimum.
From these three systems our lawmakers have the privilege of selecting.
We must candidly own that the proper solution of this problem is very difficult indeed, being surrounded with obstacles which are all dependent on ignorance and misconception; and we crave pardon for expressing our firm conviction that no individual is competent to pass judgment who does not fully understand all the subject matter of this book, and even more. The expounding of the question is properly the task of students who have enlightened themselves on the science of sex life; but on the other hand, we are often grieved to see men with an equipment of dangerous pseudo science placed in positions of trust
and power.
Legislation cannot purify men's hearts nor make them more virtuous; but it can by corrupt laws rapidly develop an enormous number of uncontrollable libertines whose children will inherit their feelings and tendencies—and then what hope is there for our dear country?
Society cannot be purified by devoting sections of cities to the practice of immoralities which poison the sources whence posterity is to come. This may hide from a portion of the community the external signs of the fructification of corruption, but it cannot prevent licentiousness from growing and rankling, and extending diffusely.
Christianity cannot countenance such immoral laws; for it has elevated woman to a rightful social equality with man, and has thus been the most powerful of all influences in establishing a normal standard for the sexual relations. Better the polygamy and the harems of the Mohammedans than the devices of the modern God-defying anti-Christians who are more than eighteen centuries behind the times.