Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/300

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or Justinian, or Karl the Great, or Peter the Great, or St. Louis, or Frederick Barbarossa, or the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna, or as John Calvin in Geneva, or Cotton Mather in Massachusetts, with all their tortures and floggings and rackings and brandings and burnings; or as the English Puritans who used to have bawds whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned and for a second offense put to death. And even they were not brutal enough, it seems, since prostitution went right on down the centuries to our times. I suppose that we might have learned from their failures that prostitution could not be ended by physical force and brutality. However, when the girls were driven from the streets, inasmuch as the police did not despatch them, they still had to go somewhere, and the brothels remained. They had their own quarter and if it was not a segregated quarter it was something very like it, since the police bent their efforts to rid other portions of the city of such places. It was perhaps a tolerated rather than a segregated district, and after a while the Director of Public Safety wished to try the experiment of making it a regulated district as well. I felt that the world was too old and I found myself too much of its mood to hope that any good could come from any of the efforts of policemen to dispose of such a problem, but I was glad of any experiment conducted in sincerity that might make for the better, and accordingly the Director of Safety put his scheme into operation. It was not reglementation in the exact European sense, since the temper of our American people will not acquiesce in that,