of a segregated district under
police regulation means, of course, that the existing law must be
nullified or at least rendered totally inoperative. When police
regulation takes the place of law enforcement a species of municipal
blackmail inevitably becomes intrenched. The police are forced to
regulate an illicit trade, but because the men engaged in an unlawful
business expect to pay money for its protection, the corruption of the
police department is firmly established and, as the Chicago vice
commission report points out, is merely called "protection to the
business." The practice of grafting thereafter becomes almost official.
On the other hand, any man who attempts to show mercy to the victims of
that business, or to regulate it from the victim's point of view, is
considered a traitor to the cause. Quite recently a former inspector of
police in Chicago established a requirement that every young girl who
came to live in a disreputable house within a prescribed district must
be reported to him within an hour after her arrival. Each one was
closely questioned as to her reasons for entering into the life. If she
was very young, she was warned of its inevitable consequences and urged
to abandon her project. Every assistance was offered her to return to
work and to live a normal life. Occasionally a girl was desperate and it
was sometimes necessary that she be forcibly detained in the police
station until her friends could be communicated with. More often she was
glad to avail herself of the chance of escape; practically always,
unless she had already become romantically entangled with a disreputable
young man, whom she firmly believed to be her genuine lover and
protector.

One day a telephone message came to Hull House from the inspector asking
us to take charge of a young girl who had been brought into the station
by an older woman for registration. The girl's youth and the innocence
of her replies to the usual questions convinced the inspector that she
was ignorant of the life she was about to enter and that she probably
believed she was simply registering her choice of a boarding-house. Her
story which she told at Hull House was as follows: She was a Milwaukee
factory girl, the daughter of a Bohemian carpenter. Ten days before she
had met a Chicago young man at a Milwaukee dance hall and after a brief
courtship had promised to marry him, arranging to meet him in Chicago
the following week. Fearing that her Bohemia