In 1860 a Mayor of Portsmouth felt it his duty to attempt to suppress prostitution. "In the early part of his mayoralty," according to a witness before the Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts (p. 393), "there was an order passed that every beerhouse-keeper and licensed victualer in the borough known to harbor these women would be dealt with, and probably lose his license. On a given day about three hundred or four hundred of these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the women were allowed to go back to their former places."
Similar experiments have been made even more recently in America. "In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the houses of prostitutes were closed, the inmates turned out upon the streets, and were refused lodging and even food by the citizens of that place. A wave of popular remonstrance, all over the country, at the outrage on humanity, created a reaction which resulted in a last condition by no means better than the first." In the same year also a similar incident occurred in New York with the same unfortunate results (Isidore Dyer, "The Municipal Control of Prostitution in the United States," report presented to the Brussels International Conference in 1899).
There grew up instead the tendency to regulate prostitution, to give it a semi-official toleration which enabled the authorities to exercise a control over it, and to guard as far as possible against its evil by medical and police inspection. The new brothel system differed from the ancient mediæval houses of prostitution in important respects; it involved a routine of medical inspection and it endeavored to suppress any rivalry by unlicensed prostitutes outside. Bernard Mandeville, the author of the Fable of the Bees, and an acute thinker, was a pioneer in the advocacy of this system. In 1724, in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews, he argues that "the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most of the mischievous effects of this vice, but even lessen the quantity of whoring in general, and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can possibly be contained in." He proposed to discourage private prostitution by giving special privileges and immunities to brothels by Act of Parliament. His scheme involved the erection of one hundred brothels in a special quarter of the city, to contain two thousand prostitutes and one hundred matrons of ability and experience with physicians and surgeons, as well as commissioners to oversee the whole. Mandeville was regarded merely as a cynic or worse, and his scheme was ignored or treated with contempt. It was left to the genius of Napoleon, eighty years later, to establish the system of "maisons de tolérance," which had so great an influence over modern European practice during a large part of the last century and even still in its numerous survivals forms the subject of widely divergent opinions.
On the whole, however, it must be said that the system of registering, examining, and regularizing prostitutes now belongs to the past. Many great battles have been fought over this question; the most important is that which raged for many years in England over the Contagious Diseases Acts, and is embodied in the 600 pages of a Report by a Select Committee on these Acts issued in 1882. The majority of the members of the Committee reported favorably to the Acts which were, notwithstanding, repealed in 1886, since which date no serious attempt has been made in England to establish them again.
At the present time, although the old system still stands in many countries with the inert stolidity of established institutions, it no longer commands general approval. As Paul and Victor Margueritte have truly stated, in the course of an acute examination of the phenomena of state-regulated prostitution as found in Paris, the system is "barbarous to start with and almost inefficacious as well." The expert is every day more clearly demonstrating its inefficacy while the psychologist and the sociologist are constantly becoming more convinced that it is barbarous.
It can indeed by no means be said that any unanimity has been attained. It is obviously so urgently necessary to combat the flood of disease and misery which proceeds directly from the spread of syphilis and gonorrhœa, and indirectly from the prostitution which is the chief propagator of these diseases, that we cannot be surprised that many should eagerly catch at any system which seems to promise a palliation of the evils. At the present time, however, it is those best acquainted with the operation of the system of control who have most clearly realized that the supposed palliation is for the most part illusory,[[157]] and in any case attained at the cost of the artificial production of other evils. In France, where the system of the registration and control of prostitutes has been established for over a century,[[158]] and where consequently its advantages, if such there are, should be clearly realized, it meets with almost impassioned opposition from able men belonging to every section of the community. In Germany the opposition to regularized control has long been led by well-equipped experts, headed by Blaschko of Berlin. Precisely the same conclusions are being reached in America. Gottheil, of New York, finds that the municipal control of prostitution is "neither successful nor desirable." Heidingsfeld concludes that the regulation and control system in force in Cincinnati has done little good and much harm; under the system among the private patients in his own clinic the proportion of cases of both syphilis and gonorrhœa has increased; "suppression of prostitutes is impossible and control is impracticable."[[159]]
It is in Germany that the attempt to regulate prostitution still remains most persistent, with results that in Germany itself are regarded as unfortunate. Thus the German law inflicts a penalty on householders who permit illegitimate sexual intercourse in their houses. This is meant to strike the unlicensed prostitute, but it really encourages prostitution, for a decent youth and girl who decide to form a relationship which later may develop into marriage, and which is not illegal (for extra-marital sexual intercourse per se is not in Germany, as it is by the antiquated laws of several American States, a punishable offense), are subjected to so much trouble and annoyance by the suspicious police that it is much easier for the girl to become a prostitute and put herself under the protection of the police. The law was largely directed against those who live on the profits of prostitution. But in practice it works out differently. The prostitute simply has to pay extravagantly high rents, so that her landlord really lives on the fruits of her trade, while she has to carry on her business with increased activity and on a larger scale in order to cover her heavy expenses (P. Hausmeister, "Zur Analyse der Prostitution," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, 1907, p. 294).
In Italy, opinion on this matter is much divided. The regulation of prostitution has been successively adopted, abandoned, and readopted. In Switzerland, the land of governmental experiments, various plans are tried in different cantons. In some there is no attempt to interfere with prostitution, except under special circumstances; in others all prostitution, and even fornication generally, is punishable; in Geneva only native prostitutes are permitted to practice; in Zurich, since 1897, prostitution is prohibited, but care is taken to put no difficulties in the path of free sexual relationships which are not for gain. With these different regulations, morals in Switzerland generally are said to be much on the same level as elsewhere (Moreau-Christophe, Du Problème de la Misère, vol. iii, p. 259). The same conclusion holds good of London. A disinterested observer, Félix Remo (La Vie Galante en Angleterre, 1888, p. 237), concluded that, notwithstanding its free trade in prostitution, its alcoholic excesses, its vices of all kinds, "London is one of the most moral capitals in Europe." The movement towards freedom in this matter has been evidenced in recent years by the abandonment of the system of regulation by Denmark in 1906.
Even the most ardent advocates of the registration of prostitutes recognize that not only is the tendency of civilization opposed rather than favorable to the system, but that in the numerous countries where the system persists registered prostitutes are losing ground in the struggle against clandestine prostitutes. Even in France, the classic land of police-controlled prostitutes, the "maisons de tolérance" have long been steadily decreasing in number, by no means because prostitution is decreasing but because low-class brasseries and small cafés-chantants, which are really unlicensed brothels, are taking their place.[[160]]
The wholesale regularization of prostitution in civilized centres is nowadays, indeed, advocated by few, if any, of the authorities who belong to the newer school. It is at most claimed as desirable in certain places under special circumstances.[[161]] Even those who would still be glad to see prostitution thoroughly in the control of the police now recognize that experience shows this to be impossible. As many girls begin their career as prostitutes at a very early age, a sound system of regulation should be prepared to enroll as permanent prostitutes even girls who are little more than children. That, however, is a logical conclusion against which the moral sense, and even the common sense, of a community instinctively revolts. In Paris girls may not be inscribed as prostitutes until they have reached the age of sixteen and some consider even that age too low.[[162]] Moreover, whenever she becomes diseased, or grows tired of her position, the registered woman may always slip out of the hands of the police and establish herself elsewhere as a clandestine prostitute. Every rigid attempt to keep prostitution within the police ring leads to offensive interference with the actions and the freedom of respectable women which cannot fail to be intolerable in any free community. Even in a city like London, where prostitution is relatively free, the supervision of the police has led to scandalous police charges against women who have done nothing whatever which should legitimately arouse suspicion of their behavior. The escape of the infected woman from the police cordon has, it is obvious, an effect in raising the apparent level of health of registered women, and the police statistics are still further fallaciously improved by the fact that the inmates of brothels are older on the average than clandestine prostitutes and have become immune to disease.[[163]] These facts are now becoming fairly obvious and well recognized. The state regulation of prostitution is undesirable, on moral grounds for the oft-emphasized reason that it is only applied to one sex, and on practical grounds because it is ineffective. Society allows the police to harass the prostitute with petty persecutions under the guise of charges of "solicitation," "disorderly conduct," etc., but it is no longer convinced that she ought to be under the absolute control of the police.