street-cars. Very salutary are the laws that require the name of the owner to be placed on all buildings; shame before the public may wring improvements from many a landlord who now takes profits from tenements unfit for habitation. But it ought not to be left to the conscience of the individual owner; the State must exercise its primary right to forbid the crowding of tenants into houses which do not afford sanitary quarters and permit a decent degree of privacy.

III. Commercialized vice? The duty of the State in regard to the vice caterers is obvious; the commercializing of vice must be strictly prohibited by law and enforced by whatever means experience proves most effective. We must include in this class of enemies of society the venders of habit-forming drugs. But the right and duty of society to interfere with their traffic has already been asserted by implication, in our discussion of alcohol; that argument applies a fortiori to opium and cocaine. Of the proprietors of gambling-dens, indecent "shows," etc., we need not further speak, concentrating our attention instead upon the worst species of vice catering, the commercializing of prostitution.

The extent to which the sale of woman's virtue prevails in our cities is scarcely believable. The recent commission of which Mr. Rockefeller was chairman actually counted 14,926 professional prostitutes in Manhattan alone, in 1912; while personal visitation established the existence of over sixteen hundred houses where the gratification of lust could be bought. Not all, certainly, were counted; and this list is, of course, entirely exclusive of the great number of girls occasionally and secretly selling themselves to friends, acquaintances, and employers. Many hundreds of men and women, keepers of houses, procurers, and the like, live on the proceeds of this great underground industry; and to some extent though to what extent it is, of course, impossible to ascertain the forcible retention of young girls is prac

tised. Similar conditions exist in most of the world's cities.

What is being done to abolish this ghastliest of evils? In most great cities, scarcely anything, for two reasons: the one being that so many men, perhaps the majority, secretly wish to retain an opportunity for purchasing sex gratification, the other that the police generally find the protection of illegal vice an easy source of revenue. If the police are honest, they break up a disorderly house-and let the inmates carry the lure of their trade elsewhere. The magistrates fine them, or give them sentences just long enough to bring them needed rest and nutrition, and send them back to their business. Or they drive them out of town-to swell the numbers in the next town. Attempts at legalization and localization are frank admissions of inability or lack of desire to fight the evil; their effect is to make the way of temptation easier for the youth. Compulsory medical inspection gives a promise of immunity from disease which is largely illusory, and entices men who are now restrained by prudential motives.

There is, however, much hope for improving conditions:(1) Now that women vote, there are stronger forces to fight the evil. The prostitutes themselves, being mostly minors, and, in any case, anxious to conceal their identity, seldom vote; and the remaining women are almost en masse bitterly opposed to the trade. With women voting, and an efficient political administration inaugurated in our cities, we shall hope to witness the end of the scandalous nonenforcement of existing laws.

(2) The abolition of the liquor trade has taken away the great political ally of the trade in girlhood; and without the demoralizing influence of alcohol fewer men will yield to their passions and fewer girls be pliant thereto.

(3) The Rockefeller Commission disclosed the fact that

the overwhelming majority of prostitutes are almost wholly uneducated-about half of those questioned had not even gone through the primary school, and only seven per cent had finished the grammar-school work. Compulsory education, vigilantly enforced, will greatly lessen the number of girls who will be willing to take up the life of degradation, suffering, and premature death; especially will this be the case if sex hygiene is properly taught. Approximately a quarter of the girls studied were mentally defective; these should have been detected in the schools and removed to the proper institutions before they fell prey to the clever schemes of the procurer.1 For a falling-off in this alarming number of mental defectives we must await scientific eugenic lawsto be discussed in chapter XXX.

(4) It is a shameful fact that thousands of girls, dependent upon their own earnings for support, receive less than enough to enable them to live in decent comfort, not to say with any enjoyment of life. Many, of course, waste their earnings on needlessly fine clothes, or at the "shows"; the American fashion of extravagant dress and the craving for amusement are factors of importance in the ruin of young girls. But ten dollars, or even fifteen dollars, a week is not enough to live on in the cities; and many girls are paid no more, even less. The State, in framing its minimum wage laws, or other legislation, must take cognizance of this startling and intolerable situation.

(5) Provision should be made for the care of girls who come alone to the cities. Dormitories with clean and airy bedrooms at minimum cost, and attractive reading- and social-rooms, offering provision for normal social life and amusement, can do much to keep lonely and restless girls out of the clutches of the vicious and the vice caterers.

1 of 647 wayward girls recently at the Bedford Reformatory, over 300 were accounted mentally deficient.

Similar provision for young men who live alone might avail to lessen to some extent their patronage of houses of vice.

(6) The model injunction acts of a few of our more advanced States "vest the power in any citizen, whether he or she is personally damaged by such establishment, to institute legal proceedings against all concerned; to secure the abatement of the nuisance, and perpetual injunction against its reëstablishment." It is too early yet to speak with assurance of the practical working of this method; but it bids fair to make the brothel business more precarious. If, in addition, laws against street soliciting are strictly enforced, the first steps of young men into vice will be made much less alluringly easy than at present.

(7) The most radical and effective measure of all will be to arrest the professional prostitutes, segregate them, and keep them segregated during the dangerous years, except as genuine signs of intention to reform appear, in which case they may be released upon probation. The expense will be, at the outset, considerable. But the girls will be taught trades, and kept at work which will in most cases more than pay for their support. Moreover, the community will, of course, save the vast sums now passed over by its lustful men to these women. The saving of health and life will be incalculable. The girls, although under restraint, will be infinitely better off than they were, and can in most cases, with patience and education, be made ultimately to realize their gain; as they grow older and forget their early years of shame, they can be set free again, with some skilled trade learned, and some accumulated earnings. Professional prostitution will, of course, still flourish to a degree underground; but it will be a highly risky business, attracting far fewer girls, and difficult for the uninitiated young man to discover. With this outlet for lust partially closed, there would no doubt tend to be an increase in solitary and homosexual

vice, and in the seduction of innocent girls. But the latter outlet can be checked by raising the "age of consent" to twenty or twenty-one, and punishing the seduction of younger girls as rape. And the former evils, serious as they are, are far less of an evil than the creation of our present wretched class of professional prostitutes. As a matter of fact, there would, beyond all question, be a great diminution in sexual vice, the present amount of it being due by no means wholly to desire that is naturally imperious, but to the artificial fostering of that desire by those who hope to profit financially thereby.

IV. Crime? The gravest of all social ills is crime. Its treatment may be considered under the three heads of prevention, conviction, and the treatment of convicted criminals.

(1) To some extent, not yet clearly determined, the causes of crime are temperamental, due to congenital defects or overexcitable impulses. The inherited effects of insanity, alcoholism, and other pathological conditions, make selfcontrol far more difficult for some unfortunates. Such baneful inheritances will some day be minimized by eugenic laws; and individuals whose abnormal mental condition makes them dangerous to society will be kept under permanent restraint.

The causes of crime are, however, to a far greater degree environmental. Undernutrition, overwork, worry, and various other sources of poor health, create a condition of lowered resistance to impulse. The herding of the poor into crowded tenements, the inability to find work, the lack of wholesome interests and excitements to provide a normal outlet for energy of body and mind, the daily sight of the luxury of the rich and the bitterness of its contrast with their own need, awaken dangerous passions and reckless defiance of law. The lack of education, contact with successful crim