Plato taught that the unpardonable sin is to betray a great public trust. What public trust is so great as the health and morals of the people? The old Roman law had at its foundation this motto: "The safety of the people is the supreme law." The Supreme Court of the United States has declared more than once: "No legislature can bargain away the public health or the public morals. The people themselves cannot do it, much less their servants." Stone vs. Mississippi, 101 U. S. Rep., 814-819.
A great lawyer has written: "Even if the legislature does attempt to give sanction and confer its authority upon any enterprise which is immoral in its nature or which results in immorality, then the Governor and the Judge have each an oath registered in heaven to declare such legislation void." Moral Law and Civil Law, p. 90.
SUPREME COURTS ARE UNSTAINED.
It is the settled doctrine of the highest courts, as voiced by the Supreme Court of California in the case of Pon vs. Wittman, in July, 1905, that:
"These houses are common or public nuisances. Their maintenance directly tends to corrupt and debase public morals, to promote vice, and to encourage dissolute and idle habits, and the suppression of nuisances of this character and having this tendency is one of the important duties of government."
But notwithstanding the unequivocal declarations of Supreme Courts, there are nearly always politicians whose political creed is learned from the white slave trader, and the serpentine woman who keeps the glittering vestibule of hell. Such a mother of harlots, clothed in silks and decked in diamonds, can state the argument for regulation much more logically and eloquently than any policeman, politician, or rare misguided preacher (lineally descended from the Bishop of Winchester aforementioned) can state it for her benefit and profit.
Let us be careful that we be not numbered among those of whom it is written, "There were false prophets among the people."
The white slave traders, and all who wilfully or ignorantly aid and abet their abominable commerce in girls, are ardent advocates of segregation or some form of regulation—whereby they obtain a police status which enables them to exploit the helpless and foolish, and ignorant, and vicious to dispense alike to guilty men and innocent wives and babies, blindness, insanity, locomotor ataxia, abscesses, tumors, surgical operations and coffins.
To protect these loathsome resorts is like maintaining a thousand pest houses, not for purposes of quarantine, but with the sole result of advertising and spreading the pestilence.