includes whipping
for the male offenders. There are brutes so low, so infamous, so
degraded and bestial in their cruelty and brutality, that the only way
to get at them is through their skins. Sentimentality on behalf of such
men is really almost as unhealthy and wicked as the criminality of the
men themselves. My experience is that there should be no toleration of
any "tenderloin" or "red light" district, and that, above all, there
should be the most relentless war on commercialized vice. The men who
profit and make their living by the depravity and the awful misery
of other human beings stand far below any ordinary criminals, and no
measures taken against them can be too severe.

As for the wretched girls who follow the dreadful trade in question, a
good deal can be done by a change in economic conditions. This ought
to be done. When girls are paid wages inadequate to keep them from
starvation, or to permit them to live decently, a certain proportion are
forced by their economic misery into lives of vice. The employers and
all others responsible for these conditions stand on a moral level not
far above the white slavers themselves. But it is a mistake to suppose
that either the correction of these economic conditions or the abolition
of the white slave trade will wholly correct the evil or will even reach
the major part of it. The economic factor is very far from being the
chief factor in inducing girls to go into this dreadful life. As with so
many other problems, while there must be governmental action, there must
also be strengthening of the average individual character in order to
achieve the desired end. Even where economic conditions are bad, girls
who are both strong and pure will remain unaffected by temptations to
which girls of weak character or lax standards readily yield. Any man
who knows the wide variation in the proportions of the different races
and nationalities engaged in prostitution must come to the conclusion
that it is out of the question to treat economic conditions as the sole
conditions or even as the chief conditions that determine this question.
There are certain races--the Irish are honorably conspicuous among
them--which, no matter what the economic pressure, furnish relatively
few inmates of houses of ill fame. I do not believe that the differences
are due to permanent race characteristics; this is shown by the
fact that the best settlement houses find that practically all their
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