the same rooms. She may have to pay the police to refrain from
molesting her, as well as others to protect her from molestation. She is
surrounded by people whom the law encourages to prey upon her. She is
compelled to exert her energies at highest tension to earn the very
large sums which are necessary, not to gain profits for herself, but to
feed all the sharks who are eager to grab what is given to her. The
blind or perverse zeal of the moral legislators not only intensifies the
evils it aims at curing, but it introduces a whole crop of new evils.

How large these sums are we may estimate by the investigation made by
the Vice Commissioners of Chicago. They conclude after careful inquiry
that the annual profits of prostitution in the city of Chicago alone
amount to between fifteen to sixteen million dollars, and they regard
this as "an ultra-conservative estimate." It is true that not all this
actually passes through the women's hands and it includes the sales of
drinks. If we confine ourselves strictly to the earnings of the girls
themselves it is found to work out at an average for each girl of
thirteen hundred dollars per annum. This is more than four times as much
as the ordinary shop-girl can earn in Chicago by her brains, virtue, and
other good qualities. But it is not too much for the prostitute's needs;
she is compelled to earn so large an income because the active hostility
of society, the law, and the police facilitates the task of all those
persons--and they are many--who desire to prey upon her. Thus society,
the law, and the police gain nothing for morals by their hostility to
the prostitute. On the contrary, they give strength and stability to
the very vice they nominally profess to fight against. This is shown in
the vital matter of the high rents which it is possible to obtain where
prostitution is concerned. These high rents are the direct result of
legal and police enactments against the prostitute. Remove these
enactments and the rents would automatically fall. The enactments
maintain the high rents and so ensure that the mighty protection of
capital is on the side of prostitution; the property brings in an
exorbitant rate of interest on the capital invested, and all the forces
of sound business are concerned in maintaining rents. So gross is the
ignorance of the would-be moral legislators--or, some may think, so
skilful their duplicity--that the methods by which they profess to fight
against immora