He was still further examined by Senator O’Connor:—
Q. I want to ask you a question or two: what do you mean to say, that if people would give the women the same protection given to mules and horses prostitutes would be fewer?
A. What I mean by it is this: when they are arrested, instead of sending them to a magistrate to be fined and money taken from them, send them to a reformatory and inquire into their history, and you will find there are a great many of these people that you see lost in the papers. As I say, the women are not bad naturally; it is only where they are driven to it. If there was a reformatory and the money taken from them and taken care of, and put the institution under good women, good, proper persons to control that reformatory, and not abuse them, not send them to jail or abuse them, but send them to a reformatory. You will find some people from Massachusetts, some from Ohio, some from somewhere else, some from Michigan; send them to their homes, and if they are foreigners, who have not been here five years, send them back to Europe, and you will find as a general thing that the reason why the prostitutes and why the disorderly houses cannot be overcome is that there is no care taken of them; they haven’t a friend in the world. There is no friend to a prostitute; everybody bangs her, everybody beats her; she is dragged into the station-house, taken to court, fined, and thrown on the street to get more money and bring it back.—Vol. i., p. 5,214.
These words deserve to be written up in letters of gold in every place wherever men discuss the question of abating this plague. It is the verdict of experience upon the habitual resource of the unthinking. “Go to, let us harry our sisters!” is the first and last word of most of those who dream it is possible to promote the cause of morality by outraging the principles of justice.
Of the system in New York there is only one good thing to be said. Bad as it was, it is infinitely better than the hideous abomination of the European system of tolerated houses with their police des mœurs and the compulsory weekly surgical examination of their unhappy inmates. Better a thousand times even the rude, irregular tyrannies of Hoch and Koch, and all the diabolical gang of blackmailers, than elaborate all these infamies into a legalised system stamped with the seal of the approval of the State and enforced by the dread penalties of the law.
Prostitution, everywhere hateful, is at least less intolerable when it is free. When to the horrors of prostitution there is added the legalised slavery of the regulation system, you have indeed the sum of all villainies, and the abomination that maketh desolate is at last set up in the very holy of holies.
