cape
this control. A further consequence of these police measures is that
they make it extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, for the
prostitute ever again to return to a decent trade. _A woman, that has
fallen under police control, is lost to society; she generally goes down
in misery within a few years._ Accurately and exhaustively did the fifth
Congress at Geneva for Combatting Immorality utter itself against the
police regulation of prostitutes, by declaring: "The compulsory medical
inspection of prostitutes is an all the more cruel punishment to the
woman, seeing that, by destroying the remnants of shame, still possible
within even the most abandoned, such inspection drags down completely
into depravity the wretched being that is subjected thereto. The State,
that means to regulate prostitution with the police, forgets that it
owes equal protection to both sexes; it demoralizes and degrades women.
Every system for the official regulation of prostitution has police
arbitrariness for its consequence, as well as the violation of civic
guaranties that are safeguarded to every individual, even to the
greatest criminal, against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Seeing
this violation of right is exercised to the injury of woman only, the
consequence is an inequality, shocking to nature, between her and man.
Woman is degraded to the level of a mere means, and is no longer treated
as a person. _She is placed outside of the pale of law._"

Of how little use police control is, England furnishes a striking
illustration. In the year 1866 a law was enacted on the subject for
places in which soldiers and marines were garrisoned. Now, then, while
from 1860 to 1866, without the law, the lighter cases of syphilis had
declined from 32.68 to 24.73 per cent., after a six years' enforcement
of the new law, the percentage of diseased in 1872 was still 24.26. In
other words, it was not one-half per cent. lower in 1872 than in 1866;
but the average for these six years was 1-16 per cent. higher than in
1866. In sight of this, a special Commission, appointed in 1873, to
investigate the effect of that law, arrived at the unanimous conclusion
that "the periodical inspection of the women who usually have sexual
intercourse with the _personnel_ of the army and navy, _had, at best,
not occasioned the slightest diminution in the number of cases_," and it
_recommended the suspension_ of periodical inspections.

The effects of the Act of Insp