atest
Songstress of the World;' 'A Hundred Ladies and Forty Gentlemen:'
Besides these smaller _cafes chantants_ and shooting galleries, in which
importunate women forced themselves upon the men. Also a 'free concert,'
whose gaily-clad waitresses, seductively smiling, brazenly and
shamelessly invited the gymnasium students and the fathers of families,
the youths and the grown men alike, to the 'shooting retreats.'... The
barely dressed 'lady' who invited people to the booth of 'The Secrets of
Hamburg, or a Night in St. Pauli,' should have been enough to justify
her removal by the police. And then the shocking announcement, almost
incredible of the much boasted about Imperial capital, and hardly to be
believed by plain male and female citizens in the provinces, to the
effect that the managers of the festival had consented to the
employment, without pay, of 'young women' in large numbers, as
bar-maids, instead of the waiters who applied for work.... We, German
women, have thousands of occasions, as wives, mothers and as sisters, to
send our husbands, children, daughters and brothers to Berlin in the
service of the fatherland; we, consequently, pray to your Honor in all
humbleness and in the confident expectation that, with the aid of the
overpowering influence, which, as the chief magistrate of the Imperial
capital, lies in your hand, you may institute such investigations of
those disgraceful occurrences, or adopt such other measures as to your
Honor may seem fit, to the end that a recurrence of those orgies may not
have to be apprehended at the pending Sedan festival, for instance...."
(!!)

During the session of the Reichstag, from 1892 to 1893, the united
Governments made an effort to put an end to the contradiction that
governmental practice, on the one hand, and the Criminal Code on the
other, find themselves in with regard to prostitution. They introduced a
bill that was to empower the police to designate certain habitations to
prostitutes. It was admitted that prostitution could not be suppressed,
and that, therefore, the most practical thing was to tolerate the thing
in certain localities, and to control it. The bill--upon that all minds
were agreed--would, if it became a law, have called again to life the
brothels that were officially abolished in Prussia about 1845. The bill
caused a great uproar, and it evoked a number of protests in which the
warning was raised against the State's setting itself up as the
prot