ere is a hotel.
Public as well as secret prostitution has enormously increased during
the last thirty or forty years.[BN]

Thanks to Mr. Murphy's consecrated energy, the appalling legalized
and hopeless slavery under which these two classes of girls exist is
at last coming to light. He has shown, by several test cases, that
although the national laws are good to look at they are powerless
because set aside by local police regulations over which the courts
are powerless! In September, 1900, however, in large part due no doubt
to the facts made public by him, and backed up by the public press,
and such leaders of Japan's progressive elements as Shimada Sabur, the
police regulations were modified, and with amazing results. Whereas,
previous to that date, the average monthly suicides throughout the
land among the public prostitutes were between forty and fifty, during
the two months of September and October there were none! In that same
period, out of about five thousand prostitutes in the city of Tokyo,
492 had fled from their brothels and declared their intentions of
abandoning the "shameful business," as the Japanese laws call it, and
in consequence a prominent brothel had been compelled to stop the
business! We are only in the first flush of this new reform as these
lines are written, so cannot tell what end the whole movement will
reach. But the conscience of the nation is beginning to waken on this
matter and we are confident it will never tolerate the old slavery of
the past, enforced as it was by local laws, local courts, so that
girls were always kept in debt, and when they fled were seized and
forced back to the brothels in order to pay their debts!

But in contrast to the undoubted ideal of Old Japan in regard to the
chastity of women, must be set the equally undoubted fact that the
sages have very little to say on the subject of chastity for men.
Indeed there is no word in the Japanese language corresponding to our
term "chastity" which may be applied equally to men and women. In his
volume entitled "Kokoro," Mr. Hearn charges the missionaries with the
assertion that there is no word for chastity in Japanese. "This," he
says, "is true in the same sense only that we might say that there is
no word for chastity in the English language, because such words as
honor, virtue, purity, chastity have been adopted into English from
other languages."[BO] I doubt if any missionary has made such a
statement. His further as