Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1916-07-18
POLICE IN THE VICE
DISTRICT

- tration a Vice quarantine was es-
tablished and with more or less effec-
tiveness maintained. A number of be-
draggled women, destitute of money and
morality, having gone down the wrong
gullet of civilization and come at last
into the muck and mire of soulnaked-
ness. were snatched from the brothels
in which they piled their trade and driven
out into the byways and highways. where
they sought, as best they could, some
refuge from the law. and found 1t too
often either in other cities or in sections
Of this municipality whittier formerly
their foul breath had not penetrated.
Human charity is not always flint and
ice. There were some among us, practi-
cal people. who knew that condition,
not a theory, was to be solved. They
asked for no catalogue of sin that they
might hold calendar of shame unceas-
lngly before the eyes of the fallen while
shouting "Uncleanl unclean" Instead,
they made provision for homes to which
these women might go, where kindly
treatment would seek to revive in them
the moribund ghosts OF conscience, which
would lash into activity the nerves Of
moral vision and afford fighting chance
for the recovery Of respectability and
self.respect.
Raids may be good as disciplinary
measures, either for the discipline of
politicians who must be taught that to
levy a toll on vice they must first prac-
tice loyalty toward the powers that be,
or for the discipline of the habitues who,
having paid price for protection, throw
licentiousness no bounds. But at Its best,
If conceived in good purpose and achieved
in the right spirit, raid can be only
raid, a poor palliative for a condition
that needs a cure. The Magdalenes of
the world cannot be clubbed into
righteousness. They are morally dis
eased, and they need spiritual quinine
more than they do a physical flagelum.
The protagonists OF segregation, with
it's accompanying recognition of vice as
a necessity, have made no great progress
in America, although the scheme has
seemed to work fairly well in such a city
as New Orleans Segregation offers no
cure. 1t is a police measure. intended to
protect decent citizens, and that is all
that 1t does do. On the other hand. the
dispersion of the outcasts has in 1t also
none of the elements of a cure. 1t seeks
to kill by hiding. 1t is centrifugal, not
centripetal in action, so it merely spreads
over a wide area q curse which has
crushed only a small area.
The problem was old when Homer was
Young. Each successive civilization has
sought to solve 1t in its own way, and
none has succeeded. This age must
bring to the problem not the prison cell
and the brutality of the police club, but
its science and it's culture, its knowledge
and its religion. fighting this plague as 1t
fights leprosy or any other, in the expec-
tation that for it, too, there may be
found a cure. We have none in sight
now. We can do no more than apply
preventive measures, as we do for in
fantile paralysis. Is the raid such a pre-
ventive measure? Under proper conditions
it might be. It may, under other condi.
tions. be worse than the vice it proposes
to eradicate Law-enforcement Is an every
day thing; not spasmodic and theatri-
cal affair.
It is more important to get the
politicians out OF the vice district than it
is to drag the habltues out. for the former
action is a prerequisite to the latter.
There is no proof that protection is being
paid for. but the signs all point TO a COM
liberalization OF the cleansing process.
under conditions likely to encourage vice
rather than sterilize the Objectionable
territory.