Year: 1877

:
an evil proposed to be extirpated.
The law here declares that bawdy
houses shall not exist. They are pro-
nounced nuisances and must be extir-
pated and each effort to execute the
absurd law fails ridiculously and most
unfortunately for society and for 6e-
cency. Where this mock heroic Puri


tanical code of extirpation prevails not
only are the women the more thorough
ly brutalized because of brutalities and
robbery to which they are constantly
subjected by myrmidons of the law,
but the police themselves are thorough
ly corrupted. Each month they make
descents upon each don of prostitution
and each month each wretched woman
must pay the bedizzened police
a fixed sum to assure exemption from
monthly arrests. In one Southern
city the mayor, without law, accepted,
as he himself confessed, a monthly
stipend at the hands of each bawd in
the city, that she might ply her voca-
tion without interruption by the police.
Pharisaical, over-modest and unc-
tiously pious lawmakers have not the
courage to deal with this worldwide
indestructible vice as they should with
whisky. If we cannot destroy utterly
let US restrict and ameliorate. If we
cannot fill the world with virtue and
eXtirpate vice let US at least confine it
to the narrowest possible limits. At


tempting too much we fail in every
thing, even as did our lawgivers whose
zeal outstrpped wisdom when they
proposed to oblIterate not only whisky
but native wine and beer sat one fell
swoop." When we refuse to recog-
nIze and regulate an evil which no hu
man agency of force or morals has ever
annihilated, when we attempt to de-
stroy that which is lasting as the vices
and virtues of mankind, and can only
be destroyed by destroying our race,
we should begin to inquire what meth


ods of restraint are best calculated to
lessen and conceal from public view
enormities now made doubly product
i've of evil by crude pharisaical codes.
The authors of these laws now
operative would have the world
confess the virtue of the lawgiver. So
good and great and pure are aldermen
that they cannot even compromise with
indestructible vice. They would an
nihilate, but their lofty sanctimonious-
ness will admit of no concessions. The
result is before US. The abandoned,
helpless and unfortunate women are
without the protection Of the law.
They have no rights which vicious
policeman or knavish citizen dreams of
recognizing. The police levy black
mail, which the women pay as the trib-
ute of vice to unexampled virtue, and
the very outrages practiced by society,
under the forms of law, drive the aban


doned, friendless and the helpless to
deeper depths of degradation, and
most of them are finally murdered by
the slow accumulation of indignities
until poison or whisky, administered
by despair, does its holy office. Chris
tian men and women look on with
stolld indifference while hell is popu-
lated by their acts with fiends that
were once next to angels in loveliness
and purity. Society and law deliber


ately do these things and commit these
crimes, and each day and week, be-


fore the mayors court of this city,
mockeries of Law and justice arc en-
acted, in enforcing the savage law,
that make decency shudder and Chris


tian civilization hiss and byword
among savages. As with whisky, so
with this irremediable and incurable
vice. The law must license, restrict,
confne to the narrowest limits-regu-
late and control. 1t cannot extirpate
a Calamity bora with our race, and
which can only die with it. Violent,
radical legislation, springing from cant
and hypocrisy, is based upon the false
assumption that the law will not toler-
ate the existence of vice. And yet who
among lawmakers would dare cast the
first stonel In all other cases of wrong
doing the law commends the practice
Of mercy as well as justice, and yet in
this there is neither Justice nor mercy,
and yet the Savior Himself uttered the
very words prefxed to these para
graphs. -