eaving out of account all prostitutes in flats,
rooms, hotels and houses of assignation, and also taking no note of
clandestine prostitutes--receive 15,180 visits from men daily, or
5,540,700 per annum. They consider further that the men in question may
be one-fourth of the adult male population (800,000 in the city itself,
leaving the surrounding district out of the reckoning), and they rightly
insist that this estimate cannot possibly cover all the facts. Yet it
never occurs to the Vice Commissioners that in thus proposing to brand
one-third or even only one quarter of the adult male population as
criminals, and as such to prosecute them actively, is to propose an
absurd impossibility.

It is not by any means only in the United States that an object lesson
in the foolishness of attempting to make people moral by force is set up
before the world. It has often been set up before, and at the present
day it is illustrated in exactly the same way in Germany. Unlike as are
the police systems and the national temperaments of Germany and the
United States, in this matter social reformers tell exactly the same
story. They report that the German laws and ordinances against
immorality increase and support the very evil they profess to attack.
Thus by making it criminal to shelter, even though not for purposes of
gain, unmarried lovers, even when they intend to marry, the respectable
girl is forced into the position of the prostitute, and as such she
becomes subject to an endless amount of police regulation and police
control. Landlords are encouraged to live on her activities, charging
very high rates to indemnify themselves for the risks they run by
harbouring her. She, in her turn, to meet the exorbitant demands which
the law and the police encourage the whole environment to make upon her,
is forced to exercise her profession with the greatest activity, and to
acquire the maximum of profit. Law and the police have forged the same
vicious circle.[216]

The illustrations thus furnished by Germany, Holland, England, and the
United States, will probably suffice to show that there really is at the
present time a wave of feeling in favour of the notion that it is
possible to promote public morals by force of law. It only remains to
observe that the recognition of the futility of such attempts by no
means necessarily involves a pessimistic conservatism. To point out that
prostitution never has been, and never can be, abolished by la