Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/306

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  • oned, and for a second offense put to death. France

was not behind; under Louis IX., prostitutes were exiled, and in 1635 an edict in Paris condemned men concerned in the traffic to the galleys for life, while the women and girls were whipped, shaved and banished for life. Charles V. in the monastery at Yuste, trying to make two clocks tick in union, found his efforts no more vain than his attempts to regulate human conduct, and Philip II. tried again to do what his father had been unable to accomplish. Peter the Great was a grim enforcer of the laws, and in Vienna Maria Theresa was most rigorous with prostitutes, putting them in a certain garb, and then in handcuffs; she was almost as remorseless in her treatment of them as was John Calvin in Geneva, which came to have more prostitutes proportionately than any other city in Europe. Several modern attempts at annihilation have been made. Saxony tried to do away with prostitutes, but they exist in Dresden and other cities of the Kingdom and Hamburg claims to have banished them, but in that Free and Hanseatic city I was told by an American who was investigating the subject that there were as many there as elsewhere.



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And these laws have not only failed, they have not only stimulated and intensified the evil, but they themselves have created a white slavery worse than that of the preposterous tales and sentimental twad-