The problem cannot be solved by policemen, even if--as is now recommended--they be called “morals” police. The word has a reassuring note of course, possibly by some confused with “moral” police, but policemen are policemen still. I have seen the _police des moeurs_ in European cities, and they look quite like other policemen. And all cities in America have had morals police; that is exactly what our policemen have been, and that is exactly what is the matter with them. That is, all cities have had detectives especially detailed to supervise the conduct of the vicious, and they always fail. We had such a squad in Toledo for years, though it was not called morals police. It was composed of men, mere men, because we had nothing else but men to detail to the work. They were honest, decent, self-respecting men for the most part, who on the whole did very well considering the salaries they were paid and the task imposed on them. They regulated vice as well as anybody anywhere could regulate it. But of course they failed to solve the problem, just as the world for thousands of years has failed to solve it, with all the machinery of all the laws of all the lawgivers in history. Solon in Athens tried every known device, including segregation. He established a state monopoly of houses of prostitution, confined the _dicteriades_ to a certain quarter of the city, and compelled them to wear a distinctive dress, but all his stringent laws had broken down long before Hyperides dramatically bared the breast of Phryne to the Areopagus. In Rome there was the most severe regulation in the ancient world and yet--it may be read in Gibbon--the successive experiments of the law under Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Valerian, Theodosius and Justinian were all failures, and when the laws were most rigorous and the most rigorously enforced, immorality was at its height. Charlemagne tried and failed, and though the sentiment of the age of chivalry and the rise of Christianity for a while softened the law, under the English Puritans, bawds were whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned, and for a second offense put to death. France was not behind; under Louis IX., prostitutes were exiled, and in 1635 an edict in Paris condemned men concerned in the traffic to the galleys for life, while the women and girls were whipped, shaved and banished for life. Charles V. in the monastery at Yuste, trying to make two clocks tick in union, found his efforts no more vain than his attempts to regulate human conduct, and Philip II. tried again to do what his father had been unable to accomplish. Peter the Great was a grim enforcer of the laws, and in Vienna Maria Theresa was most rigorous with prostitutes, putting them in a certain garb, and then in handcuffs; she was almost as remorseless in her treatment of them as was John Calvin in Geneva, which came to have more prostitutes proportionately than any other city in Europe. Several modern attempts at annihilation have been made.