ched in a body to the workhouse, but for
many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women
wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt
that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the
women were allowed to go back to their former places."

Similar experiments have been made even more recently in America.
"In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the houses of prostitutes
were closed, the inmates turned out upon the streets, and were
refused lodging and even food by the citizens of that place. A
wave of popular remonstrance, all over the country, at the
outrage on humanity, created a reaction which resulted in a last
condition by no means better than the first." In the same year
also a similar incident occurred in New York with the same
unfortunate results (Isidore Dyer, "The Municipal Control of
Prostitution in the United States," report presented to the
Brussels International Conference in 1899).

There grew up instead the tendency to regulate prostitution, to give it a
semi-official toleration which enabled the authorities to exercise a
control over it, and to guard as far as possible against its evil by
medical and police inspection. The new brothel system differed from the
ancient mediaeval houses of prostitution in important respects; it involved
a routine of medical inspection and it endeavored to suppress any rivalry
by unlicensed prostitutes outside. Bernard Mandeville, the author of the
_Fable of the Bees_, and an acute thinker, was a pioneer in the advocacy
of this system. In 1724, in his _Modest Defense of Publick Stews_, he
argues that "the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most
of the mischievous effects of this vice, but even lessen the quantity of
whoring in general, and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can
possibly be contained in." He proposed to discourage private prostitution
by giving special privileges and immunities to brothels by Act of
Parliament. His scheme involved the erection of one hundred brothels in a
special quarter of the city, to contain two thousand prostitutes and one
hundred matrons of ability and experience with physicians and surgeons, as
well as commissioners to oversee the whole. Mandeville was regarded merely
as a cynic or worse, and his scheme was ignored or treated with contempt.
It was left to the genius of Napoleon, eighty years later, to establish