onal prostitutes in London, and
Dr. Ryan calculates that there are 400,000 men in that city directly or
indirectly connected with them, and that this vice causes the city an
annual expenditure of $40,000,000.

All attempts to describe the loathsome and contagious disease which it
engenders defy human language. The Rev. Wm. G. Eliot, of St. Louis, says
of it: "Few know of the terrible nature of the disease in question and
its fearful ravages, not only among the guilty, but the innocent. Since
its first recognized appearance in Europe in the fifteenth century, it
has been a desolation and a scourge. In its worst forms it is so subtle,
that its course can with difficulty be traced. It poisons the
constitution, and may be imparted to others by those who have no outward
or distinguishable marks of it themselves. It may be propagated months
and years after it seems to have been cured. The purity of womanhood and
the helplessness of infancy afford no certainty of escape."

[Medical testimony given from cities in Europe.]

Man's legislative attempts to set back this fearful tide of social
corruption have proved even more futile and disastrous than have those
for the suppression of intemperance--as witness the Contagious Diseases
Acts of England and the St. Louis experiment. And yet efforts to
establish similar laws are constantly made in our large cities, New York
and Washington barely escaping last winter.

To license certain persons to keep brothels and saloons is but to throw
around them and their traffic the shield of law, and thereby to blunt
the edge of all moral and social efforts against them. Nevertheless, in
every large city, brothels are virtually licensed. When "Maggie Smith"
is made to appear before the police court at the close of each quarter,
to pay her fine of $10, $25 or $100, as an inmate or a keeper of a
brothel, and allowed to continue her vocation, so long as she pays her
fine, _that is license_. When a grand jury fails to find cause for
indictment against a well-known keeper of a house of ill-fame, that,
too, is _permission_ for her and all of her class to follow their trade,
against the statute laws of the State, and that with impunity.

The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the
penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this
violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it. These causes
are said to be wholly different with the sexes. The ackn