It must be particularly noticed that, where the Eegulation System is in force, the law does not impose penalties on the girls for the sin of being prostitutes far from it; but only if they refuse to comply with the demands of the police for frequent and brutal examinations. If by chance they escape disease, the law encourages them to continue in their trade, and to expose themselves to the embraces of unexamined men, an enormous number of whom are diseased. Young girls can be decoyed and bought and destroyed as easily, almost, as sheep; and when the legal stamp of infamy, and the "abiding seal of shame", is affixed to them, they have not even the humane rights which civilized communities accord to animals.
How can a chivalrous nation treat unfortunate women as the mere instruments of man's pleasure? Why is it that a nation should be so careful to throw safeguards around the vicious men, and bait their appetites with healthy girls whom it does not scruple to sacrifice to disease, infamy and death? Why should the State leave the most important fivefold aggressive majority unregulated?
It is partly because vicious legislators are given control, and partly because of the apathy and indifference which pure women show for the humiliation of their sex, and the welcome which so called good society holds out to libertines.
The Anglo Saxon race cannot understandingly tolerate such gross injustice to the personal rights and liberties of any one class as that of enslaving and outlawing them, and at the bate time legally employing them for the wanton pleasure of its coarse men. Better than this is the "Let Alone System", which permits licentiousness to stalk with bold face in our streets, soliciting in our parks and thoroughfares, and shocking our sense of decency by brazenfaced display.
Better to have assignation houses and brothels spring up sporadically than to establish by legal sanction sections in the city which become the recognized foci from which emanate fornication, adultery, disease, drunkenness, divorce, illegitimacy and abortions manufactories for the corruption of our young men, schools for the debasement of the sentiments of society, and will o the wisps which by their lying lights betray and lure our fellows to destruction.
Dr. Chanfleury, of Holland, who was for many years an advocate of the Regulation System, and officially employed in the work of supervision, reported his final conclusions regarding the system to the last meeting of the "Continental Federation for the Suppression of State Begulation" as follows:
"1st. That it is absolutely impossible by any medical supervision to guarantee the health of a woman leading a life of vice.
2d. That any partial advantages of such supervision are more than compensated by the increase of libertinism engendered by a false sense of security, so that such supervision actually results in increased disease among men.
3d. That the attempt at supervision is demoralizing to all engaged in it".
And the eminent French statesman, M. Julev Faure, who expresses the verdict of experienced men in continental Europe, says:
"Governments have never looked the question of prostitution fairly in the face; but when interfering at all, have almost invariably done so in order to elevate it into an institution, by which means they have increased and given permanence to the evil. Begard for the public health is their sole excuse. But even the worst that could befall the public health is nothing to the corruption of morals and national life engendered, propagated, and prolonged by the system of official surveillance. It is utterly inexcusable, and an act of supreme folly, to give a legal sanction to the licentiousness of one sex and the enslavement of the other".