The medical certificates obtained under the circumstances described are, of course, worthless. According to the best medical opinion the inmates are all dangerous,--in many of them disease is in an acute stage. When external indications develop, the women are sent to a hospital. One girl, in such a condition as to be utterly useless in the house, was removed by her cadet, who, covering up the signs of her disease, put her on the street. An equally unconscionable and characteristic incident is the following: A young traveling salesman was assured that an inmate was free from disease and a medical certificate stating this fact was shown to him. As a matter of fact, she was at that time under treatment by the very physician who had given her the certificate. The visitor contracted venereal disease. When he complained to the madame, she gave him a card of introduction to the same doctor, in order that he too might receive treatment. Since the general closing of parlor houses in 1907[13] it is a matter of common complaint among owners that business is not what it was before. The falling off is explained by an alleged increase of disorderly flats in tenements and of massage parlors. An owner who conducted a house on West 24th Street before and after the cleaning up in 1907 declared that his receipts, before that date $3,500 per week from 25 women, have gradually declined until now they are about $2,000 per week. Another owner, in West 36th Street, gave the reason for this falling off: He had visited disorderly flats and had there seen the men who had formerly been his customers. "Why do the authorities bother us?" he remonstrated. "We are locked within four walls. Nobody sees anything; nobody hears anything. They pass tenement house laws. Why don't they raid the flats and let us alone?" There is therefore a constant effort on the part of the keepers of parlor houses to undermine the business done by women on the street, in flats, and in massage parlors. They write anonymous letters to the Police Commissioner and the Tenement House Department; they send men to the flats to persuade their inmates to leave and enter the parlor houses on the pretense that much more money can be earned thus; street walkers are frightened away from the vicinity of these houses by threats of the police. The madame of an establishment in West 28th Street drove away a street walker who was soliciting men for a nearby tenement house by telling her that she would make a complaint against her for using a tenement for immoral purposes. There are cases on record where keepers have had officers on the beat and plainclothes men arrest street walkers; they have also been known to "beat up" girls loitering near their places.