the two hundred and thirty-six disorderly
saloons recently investigated in Chicago by the Vice Commission was
$4,307,000. This profit on the sale of liquor can be traced all along
the line in connection with the white slave traffic and is no less
disastrous from the point of view of young men than of the girls. Even a
slight exhilaration from alcohol relaxes the moral sense and throws a
sentimental or adventurous glamor over an aspect of life from which a
decent young man would ordinarily recoil, and its continued use
stimulates the senses at the very moment when the intellectual and moral
inhibitions are lessened. May we not conclude that both chastity and
self-restraint are more firmly established in the modern city than we
realize, when the white slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to
detain their victims and to ply young men with alcohol that they may
profit thereby? General Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New York
certainly knew whereof he spoke, says: "There is not enough depravity in
human nature to keep alive this very large business. The immorality of
women and the brutishness of men have to be persuaded, coaxed and
constantly stimulated in order to keep the social evil in its present
state of business prosperity."

We may soberly hope that some of the experiments made by governmental
and municipal authorities to control and regulate the sale of liquor
will at last meet with such a measure of success that the existence of
public prostitution, deprived of its artificial stimulus of alcohol,
will in the end be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission has made a
series of valuable suggestions for the regulation of saloons and for the
separation of the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all other
places known as recruiting grounds for the white slave traffic. There is
still need for a much wider and more thorough education of the public in
regard to the historic connection between commercialized vice and
alcoholism, of the close relation between politics and the liquor
interests, behind which the social evil so often entrenches itself.

In addition to the movements against germ diseases and the suppression
of alcoholism, both of which are mitigating the hard fate of the victims
of the white slave traffic, other public movements mysteriously
affecting all parts of the social order will in time threaten the very
existence of commercialized vice. First among these, perhaps, is the
equal suffrage