nominally by
working for shops, but principally by the means of night prostitution.
One natural result of this dense aggregation of depravity in a narrow
spot was the front of insolent and shameless defiance which vice had put
on. Indecent exhibitions in broad day from the windows of these houses,
utterances the most revolting, that startled and shocked the ear of the
passenger who had unwarily penetrated these haunts of infamy, together
with the outrageous conduct of the unhappy children of shame, who even
before the shades of night had fallen were wont to come forth in hundreds
upon the pavements of Portland-place and Regent-street, seemed to
indicate a determination that no vestige of respectability should be
suffered to linger in a neighbourhood which not thirty years before was
as pure and as much resorted to as any of the most favoured districts of
western London. The keepers of these houses were many of them
foreigners; some were known to the police as determined forgers,
gamblers, and thieves. Others, indeed the principal part, were females
grown old in the path of depravity, in whose bosom every spark of womanly
tenderness had become quenched; who could treat, indeed, with a show of
kindness the unhappy girls they had enticed to their doors, so long as
they were able to satisfy their exorbitant demands, but who did not
hesitate to cast them out into a deeper degradation, or utter
destitution, the moment a decay of their attractions or ill health had
disabled them from paying the extravagant charges for their hired rooms
and dresses. Riotous and brutal outrages were constantly taking place in
these houses, and evidence that crimes of violence and sensuality of the
darkest type had been enacted in them came to light. It was, moreover,
ascertained that among those wretched traders in sin were those who had
embarked in a still more repulsive branch of their guilty trade, and were
making large gains by turning their houses into receptacles for young
unfallen girls imported from abroad, who were sold over from time to time
to the neighbouring brothel keepers. Such was the awful moral pestilence
which, up to that time, was raging unchecked, and year by year it was
rapidly enlarging the area of its ravages.

At the meeting held to receive this report, the Rev. Mr. Garnier stated
that "he visited himself a house in Norton-street, where in one room he
saw a seat placed around so as to hold as many of the poor creat