Far from keeping the young man at a distance from the sin by a threefold fear, our society even tries to take that fear away from him by using the utmost solicitude to set him free from every duty in contriving, if possible, to rid him of those selfish subjects of prior interest for him, which might have proved his safeguard upon the brink of ruin. The sanitary visits and the imprisonment of women guilty of not having kept the debauchee unharmed, cost nearly half a million in Paris. Let an approximate calculation be made for our other towns, and it will be apparent how valuable a citizen, in the interests of public order, is the frequenter of permitted brothels. His cynicism will have victims, above all among those women who have no material independence, and no moral development. We know the fate of the common prostitutes who, formerly kept down by laws applied equally to their accomplices, are now accounted for nothing in the eye of the law, for the profit of these same accomplices.[24] The girl of the town is no longer a person, she is a _thing_ in the eye of a species of roving commission, which gives its stamp of security to the bargain; prostitution is no longer an unspeakable infamy, it is a social want, as necessary as, more imperious even, than nutriment in the opinion of the legislator, since he does not permit a theft which might even be the sole means of appeasing a devouring hunger, whilst he is destroying human dignity and social justice in the interest of debauchery. The lower-class girl becomes as the sweepings of the streets, will be imprisoned therefore, not for her immoral way of getting a living, but for not complying with the law after the markets are closed, or for want of customers; because, from the moment she accepts an offer, she escapes from the control of the police. Our unsavoury raids upon the haunts of debauchery are termed service of morals; they are usually made by old soldiers—models, doubtlessly of chastity—in a military spirit, who have the right to treat, without ceremony, every woman _guilty of walking about_, and who will be looked upon as prostituted if she has no relatives to claim her. An absolute judge gives his sentence, without any appeal, for condemning this one to be registered, that to be imprisoned; if, week by week, they do not present themselves for detestable investigations, they will be imprisoned as persons guilty of _intended_ prostitution. Twelve verdicts of guilty of this kind are, on an average, pronounced daily at Paris, to the gain of profligacy. In our seaports, the police, established for the security of evil, intrude even upon domestic privacy to oblige female servants to be enrolled.