had detectives especially detailed to supervise the conduct of the vicious, and they always fail. We had such a squad in Toledo for years, though it was not called morals police. It was composed of men, mere men, because we had nothing else but men to detail to the work. They were honest, decent, self-respecting men for the most part, who on the whole did very well considering the salaries they were paid and the task imposed on them. They regulated vice as well as anybody anywhere could regulate it. But of course they failed to solve the problem, just as the world for thousands of years has failed to solve it, with all the machinery of all the laws of all the lawgivers in history. Solon in Athens tried every known device, including segregation. He established a state monopoly of houses of prostitution, confined the dicteriades to a certain quarter of the city, and compelled them to wear a distinctive dress, but all his stringent laws had broken down long before Hyperides dramatically bared the breast of Phryne to the Areopagus. In Rome there was the most severe regulation in the ancient world and yet—it may be read in Gibbon—the successive experiments of the law under Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Valerian, Theodosius and Justinian were all failures, and when the laws were most rigorous and the most rigorously enforced, immorality was at its height. Charlemagne tried and failed, and though the sentiment of the age of chivalry and the rise of Christianity for a while softened the law, under the English Puritans, bawds were whipped, pilloried, branded and impris-
