the hands of the
police and establish herself elsewhere as a clandestine prostitute. Every
rigid attempt to keep prostitution within the police ring leads to
offensive interference with the actions and the freedom of respectable
women which cannot fail to be intolerable in any free community. Even in a
city like London, where prostitution is relatively free, the supervision
of the police has led to scandalous police charges against women who have
done nothing whatever which should legitimately arouse suspicion of their
behavior. The escape of the infected woman from the police cordon has, it
is obvious, an effect in raising the apparent level of health of
registered women, and the police statistics are still further fallaciously
improved by the fact that the inmates of brothels are older on the average
than clandestine prostitutes and have become immune to disease.[163] These
facts are now becoming fairly obvious and well recognized. The state
regulation of prostitution is undesirable, on moral grounds for the
oft-emphasized reason that it is only applied to one sex, and on practical
grounds because it is ineffective. Society allows the police to harass the
prostitute with petty persecutions under the guise of charges of
"solicitation," "disorderly conduct," etc., but it is no longer convinced
that she ought to be under the absolute control of the police.

The problem of prostitution, when we look at it narrowly, seems to be in
the same position to-day as at any time in the course of the past three
thousand years. In order, however, to comprehend the real significance of
prostitution, and to attain a reasonable attitude towards it, we must look
at it from a broader point of view; we must consider not only its
evolution and history, but its causes and its relation to the wider
aspects of modern social life. When we thus view the problem from a
broader standpoint we shall find that there is no conflict between the
claims of ethics and those of social hygiene, and that the cooerdinated
activity of both is involved in the progressive refinement and
purification of civilized sexual relationships.

_III. The Causes of Prostitution._

The history of the rise and development of prostitution enables us to see
that prostitution is not an accident of our marriage system, but an
essential constituent which appears concurrently with its other essential
constituents. The gradual development of the family on a patriarchal and
larg