menace to society. They are not altogether new. The Elizabethan drama is full of references to men who took toll of prostitutes in return for protective services in the old days of persecution; but they have been greatly fostered by the modern system, under which women find it necessary or convenient to have the cover of a man, who can pass for a husband and baffle the police. Thus the law is evaded on the one hand by the corruption of those who administer it, and on the other by the appearance of a class of criminal idlers more degraded than any other—both greater evils than the traffic which the law is intended, but fails, to control. There are no data for comparing the extent of profligacy at present existing in Western communities with that in other countries or in former times, but the unmentionable facts which come constantly to the knowledge of the police des mœurs, and less frequently to the ears of doctors, and lawyers, leave no doubt that in intensity of vice the great centres of modern civilization have nothing whatever to learn from Corinth, imperial Rome, ancient Egypt or modern China. The classical obscenities dug up and relegated to museums are far surpassed by the photographic abominations prepared to-day in Paris or in Amsterdam. The gross perversion and abuse of the sexual instinct implied by these excesses may be a passing phase, but it is a phase which has always marked the decadence of great nations. It is undoubtedly accompanied by a general tendency towards increase of the volume of prostitution. Improvement in the conditions of life among the poor ought to tend in the opposite direction, by removing one of the most potent causes of the traffic, but it is more than counterbalanced by the rising standard of luxury and comfort which accompanies it, by the aggregation of the people more and more into great cities, and by their craving for amusement. The growth of prostitution has already left its marks on the marriage- and birthrates of the most highly civilized Western communities.
In 1900 the Prussian Government made an attempt, with the co-operation of the medical corporations, to ascertain the amount of venereal disease prevalent in the kingdom. Circular questions were addressed to all members of the medical profession requesting them to report the number of patients suffering from those disorders in their practice at the date of the 1st of April. Answers were sent in by 63%, and the aggregate number of patients was 40,902. From this datum it is calculated that the number of persons attacked in the course of a year is at the very least 500,000 in Prussia alone (vide Hygienische Rundschau, April 1902).
Authorities.—W. F. Amos, State Regulation of Vice; Committee of Fifteen (New York), The Social Evil (1902); Conférence Internationale (Brussels, 1899), Comptes rendus; Fiaux, La Prostitution en Belgique; Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Henne-am-Rhyn, Die Gebrechen der Sitten-polizei; Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris; Reuss, La Prostitution; Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen; Sanger, History of Prostitution; Schlegel, Histoire de la prostitution en Chine; Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien; Stürmer, Die Prostitution in Russland; Tarnowsky, La Prostitution; Zehnder, Die Gefahren der Prostitution. (A. Sl.)
PROSTYLE (Gr. πρό, before, and στῦλος, a column), in architecture, a portico in which the columns project from the building to which it is attached.
PROTAGORAS (c. 481–411 B.C.), Greek philosopher, was born at Abdera. He is known as the first of the Sophists (q.v.), i.e. he was the first to teach for payment. It is said that he received nearly £400 from a single pupil. He learned philosophy in the Ionian school, and was perhaps a pupil of Democritus, though this is doubtful on chronological grounds. He was an older contemporary of Socrates. He was so highly esteemed by Pericles that he was entrusted with the task of framing laws for the new colony of Thurii (Plut. Pericles, 36). At the age of seventy, having been accused by Pythodorus, and convicted of atheism, Protagoras fled from Athens, and on his way to Sicily was lost at sea. According to Plato (Prot., 318 E), he endeavoured to communicate “prudence” (εὐβουλία) to his pupils, “which should fit them to manage their households, and to take part by word and deed in civic affairs.” The education which he provided consisted of rhetoric, grammar, style and the interpretation of the poets. His formal lectures were supplemented by discussions amongst his pupils. He left behind him several treatises, of which only a few fragments have survived. In Truth, by way of justifying his rejection of philosophy or science, he maintained that “man is the measure of all things—of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not.” Besides Truth, and the book Of the Gods which caused his condemnation at Athens, Diogenes Laërtius attributes to him treatises on political, ethical, educational and rhetorical subjects. Protagoras was the first to systematize grammar, distinguishing the parts of speech, the tenses and the moods.
Authorities. Diog. Laërt., ix. 8, &c.; the very different representations in Plato’s Protagoras and Theaetetus; the fragments in Johannes Frei, Quaestiones Protagoreae (Bonn, 1845), and A. J. Vitringa, Disquisitio de Protagorae vita et Philosophia (Gröningen, 1852); for the Thurian legislation, M. H. E. Meier, Opuscula, i. 222, and Gomperz in Franz Hoffmann’s Beiträge zur Gesch. des griech. und röm. Rechts (1870). On Protagoras’ philosophy see the histories of philosophy, e.g. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (Eng. trans., 1901) i. 438–475 and 586–592, Zeller, Ueberweg, Erdmann, and works quoted under Sophists.
PROTECTION, in economics a system of commercial policy and a body of doctrine, which in their modern forms are the outgrowth of the commercial and industrial development of the 19th century. The common definition of protection as a policy is the attempt to develop a manufacturing industry by a system of discriminating duties upon manufactured goods imported from foreign countries. But this is far too narrow a definition to suit the modern use of the term, though the notion of discriminating tariffs is common and, we may say, basal to all definitions. Protection as a policy includes not only discriminating tariffs, but also a large number of other features supplementary to this fundamental one and designed to emphasize its purpose. Thus a scheme of bounties and premiums, of rebates and drawbacks, is everywhere considered an essential element of the protective system. Nor is it any longer limited to the encouragement of manufactures, but includes as well the protection of agriculture, forestry, mining, fishing, shipping, &c. In short, one cannot give a comprehensive and satisfactory dentition of protection to-day without giving it a much wider scope than that of a system of protective duties upon manufacturing industry.
Many of its advocates claim, and with some show of reason, that the term protection, as now used to describe the commercial policy of a nation, should be so defined as to include all the means by which a country undertakes to secure through the positive efforts of the government the complete industrial and commercial development National Policy. of all its resources and of all its parts. As its object is thus comprehensive, its justification is to be found in a series of arguments based upon political, economic, and social considerations. From this point of view the protective policy embraces not merely the system of discriminating import duties in favour of home products—industrial, agricultural and mining, with which the policy began in the United States, for example—but, also the system of bounties offered for the introduction and establishment of new industries; the policy of restricted immigration of the less desirable classes of labourers, combined with the positive inducements to the skilled labour of other countries to transfer itself to the one in question; the system of discriminating or prohibitive tonnage duties, known as Navigation Acts; the system of developing foreign markets by an active policy directed towards securing advantages for home products in foreign countries—in a word, all those pecuniary or other sacrifices which a country may make in order to develop its material resources and establish, develop and foster industry and commerce. In this wide sense the comprehensive policy adopted by the United States, for example, includes the making, of a careful geological and botanical survey of the whole country in order to discover and open up the vast natural wealth of its domain in its mines, forests and fields; the establishment of experiment stations to test the usefulness of new crops or means of making old crops more valuable; the stocking of its rivers with fish and the afforesting of its mountains; the introduction of new or more valuable breeds of livestock; the building of railways and canals, and the offering of inducements to private parties to undertake similar enterprises; the deepening of its
