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
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 law, is by no means to affirm that it is an evil which must endure for ever and that no influence can affect it. But we have to realize, in the first place, that prostitution belongs to that sphere of human impulses in which mere external police ordinances count for comparatively little, and that, in the second place, even in the more potent field of true morals, which has nothing to do with moral