Then we found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive the girls off the streets. It seemed to me always a despicable sort of business--the actions of the police I mean; I didn’t like to hear the reports of it; I don’t like to think of it, or write of it even now. It is not very creditable to make war on women, whatever the Puritans may say. But the streets would show an improvement, even they would admit; much as they might linger and loiter and leer, the most seductively pure of them could not get himself “accosted” anywhere down town at night. Of course, after a while, the poor things would come back, or others exactly like them would come. Then the police would have to practice their brutalities all over again. Perhaps they were not brutal enough; I am not certain. To be sure they were not as brutal as Augustus with his sumptuary laws, or as Theodosius, or Valentinian, or Justinian, or Karl the Great, or Peter the Great, or St. Louis, or Frederick Barbarossa, or the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna, or as John Calvin in Geneva, or Cotton Mather in Massachusetts, with all their tortures and floggings and rackings and brandings and burnings; or as the English Puritans who used to have bawds whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned and for a second offense put to death. And even they were not brutal enough, it seems, since prostitution went right on down the centuries to our times. I suppose that we might have learned from their failures that prostitution could not be ended by physical force and brutality. However, when the girls were driven from the streets, inasmuch as the police did not despatch them, they still had to go somewhere, and the brothels remained. They had their own quarter and if it was not a segregated quarter it was something very like it, since the police bent their efforts to rid other portions of the city of such places. It was perhaps a tolerated rather than a segregated district, and after a while the Director of Public Safety wished to try the experiment of making it a regulated district as well. I felt that the world was too old and I found myself too much of its mood to hope that any good could come from any of the efforts of policemen to dispose of such a problem, but I was glad of any experiment conducted in sincerity that might make for the better, and accordingly the Director of Safety put his scheme into operation. It was not _reglementation_ in the exact European sense, since the temper of our American people will not acquiesce in that, and, as I discovered by some inquiries of my own in the principal cities of Europe, it is not of very valid effect over there. But the Director adopted most of the familiar requirements of the Parisian _reglement_, except the examinations, and the registration of those not _en maison_; he required the proprietresses to report at police headquarters the presence of new inmates; he forbade them to have minors or male