The reason why any such high-handed repression of immorality by force is as impracticable in Chicago as elsewhere is revealed in the excellent picture of the conditions furnished by the Vice Commissioners themselves.
They estimate that the prostitutes in disorderly houses known to the police—leaving 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