or more of disorderly saloons where men and women congregated. But we found that merely by posting a policeman in uniform before such a place, its patronage was discouraged, and in a few days discontinued. Of course it was a dangerous and preposterous power to wield; in the hands of unscrupulous police it might have appalling possibilities of evil. I had the idea of stationing a policeman before a disorderly house from Tom Johnson, who told me he had it from his father—who was Chief of Police in Louisville. And so we adopted it, and after a while the wine-rooms were no more. And that was something. But the girls in them, of course, had to go somewhere, just as Jones said.
Then we found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive the girls off the streets. It seemed to me always a despicable sort of business—the actions of the police I mean; I didn't like to hear the reports of it; I don't like to think of it, or write of it even now. It is not very creditable to make war on women, whatever the Puritans may say. But the streets would show an improvement, even they would admit; much as they might linger and loiter and leer, the most seductively pure of them could not get himself "accosted" anywhere down town at night. Of course, after a while, the poor things would come back, or others exactly like them would come. Then the police would have to practice their brutalities all over again. Perhaps they were not brutal enough; I am not certain. To be sure they were not as brutal as Augustus with his sumptuary laws, or as Theodosius, or Valentinian,
