n in a subject is itself a sign of great
importance. Surely vice has a thousand implications that touch all of us
directly. It is closely related to most of the interests of
life--ramifying into industry, into the family, health, play, art,
religion. The miseries it entails are genuine miseries--not points of
etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice issues in pain. The world
suffers for it. To attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a
problem as any that we human beings face.

The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily measured problem before it.
At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the
number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists
are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field
of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public
prostitution is so varied that nobody can do better than estimate it
roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the
remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates is the constant
repression and the ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses
discovery and measurement.

The report estimates that there are five thousand women in Chicago who
devote their whole time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that
one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen million dollars a year.
These figures are admittedly low for they leave out all consideration of
occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prostitution. It is only the nucleus
that can be guessed at; the fringe which shades out into various degrees
of respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet these suburbs of the
Tenderloin must always be kept in mind; their population is shifting and
very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe
that it is the natural refuge of the "suppressed" prostitute. Moreover it
defies control.

The 1012 women recognized on the police lists are of course the most
easily studied. From them we can gather some hint of the enormous
bewildering demand that prostitution answers. The Commission informs us
that this small group alone receives over fifteen thousand visits a
day--five million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012 women are only
about one-fifth of the professional prostitutes in Chicago. If the
average continues, then the figures mount to something over 27,000,000.
The five thousand professionals do not begin to represent the whole
illicit t