parasites in the houses, and as far as possible he separated the business from the saloon business. Any house which ignored his orders found a policeman posted before it; then it came to time. The result was, as Mr. Mooney could report in the course of a year, that the number of brothels had been reduced from over two hundred to thirty and the number of prostitutes of whom the police had any knowledge, in an equal proportion. He was very proud when General Bingham complimented his policemen and their policing, as he was at similar compliments from the government’s white slave agents. Superficially this was a very gratifying report, but only superficially. Five-sixths of the brothels had been closed, but their inmates had to go somewhere, just as Jones said, and the police found that clandestine prostitution had proportionately increased; the women had gone into flats, or hotels, or residences which on occasion could be made to serve as assignation houses. It may perhaps have improved the life of the prostitute, made it freer and more human, or perhaps it indicated that prostitution in America is showing a decadent tendency toward refinement. But while they had reduced the number of houses of prostitution, the police discovered that they had not reduced prostitution in the least, and when, after a trial of four years, I asked the Director and the Chief of Police what the result of the experiment had been, they said that, aside from the fact that it seemed to make for order in the city, and simplified the work of policing, it had done no good. The experience was like that of Chicago, where after a police order prohibiting the sale of liquor in houses of prostitution, it was found--according to the report of the vice commission--to be “undoubtedly true that the result of the order has been to scatter the prostitutes over a wide territory and to transfer the sale of liquor carried on heretofore in houses to the near-by saloon keepers, and to flats and residential sections, but it is an open question whether it has resulted in the lessening of either of the two evils of prostitution and drink.” The experience, I think, is probably universal. I used to hear the systems of regulation used in European cities held up as models by the pessimistic as the only practical method of dealing with the problem. Paris was commonly considered as the ideal in this respect; latterly it is apt to be Berlin. But the fact is that the _reglementation_ which for years and years has been in force in Paris is a failure; the experience there was precisely what it was in our little city. And from Berlin, which the well-known German genius for organization has made the most efficiently governed city in the world, the same failure has been reported.