justice also those men should be held under
surveillance who hunt up prostitutes, maintain them and make their
existence possible,--of that no one thinks. Dr. Fock also demands the
taxing of the prostitutes, and their concentration in given streets. In
other words, the Christian State is to procure for itself a revenue out
of prostitution, and, at the same time, organize and place prostitution
under its protection for the benefit of male creation. What was it that
the Emperor Vespasian said at a somewhat similar juncture? "_Non
olet!_"--it smells not.

Did we exaggerate when we said: Prostitution is to-day a necessary
social institution just as the police, standing armies, the Church and
wage-mastership?

In the German Empire, prostitution is not, like in France, organized and
superintended by the State; it is only tolerated. Official public houses
are forbidden by law, and procuring is severely punishable. But that
does not prevent that in a large number of German cities public houses
continue to exist, and are winked at by the police. This establishes an
incomprehensible state of things. The defiance of the law implied in
such a state of things dawned even upon our statesmen and they bestirred
themselves to remove the objection by legislative enactments. The German
Criminal Code makes also the lodging of a prostitute a penal offense. On
the other hand, however, the police are compelled to tolerate thousands
of women as prostitutes, and, in a measure, to privilege them in their
trade, provided they enter themselves as prostitutes on the Police
Register, and submit to the Police regulations,--for instance,
periodically recurring examinations by a physician. It follows, however,
that, if the Government licenses the prostitute, and thereby protects
the exercise of her trade, she must also have a habitation. Aye, it is
even in the interest of public health and order that they have such a
place to ply their trade in. What contradictions! On the one hand, the
Government officially acknowledges that prostitution is necessary; on
the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prostitute and the pimp. But
it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together.
Moreover, the attitude of the Government is an avowal that prostitution
is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve:
it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prostitution in order
to avoid greater evils. In other words, our soc