The intense nausea this system has lately caused France may make apparent to what kind of despotism it gives up self-dependent women. Moreover, if a head official is continued in power after the mistakes which are the necessary consequence of his orders, it is a crying injustice; if he is deprived, it is as great an injustice, since this victim is sacrificed for having done what he considered his duty. Our machinery for morals will remain for ever an evidence of the degree of barbarity which depraved communities may attain to; let us not expect anything more humane from them, and if we have forgotten the history of prostitution in ancient France, let us recall that when slavery had developed in the Roman Empire those excesses which are consistent with the right of citizenship among ourselves, Tiberius was compelled to put down the incontinence of women, and Domitian issued sumptuary edicts against women of loose morals. _The protection accorded to the immoralities of the man is the cause of the incessant persecution of the girl of the town_; she alone is followed up in furnished rooms and hotels, which are likewise the refuge of the workwoman, the female-servant, and the art-worker without employment, who, when there, find themselves the subjects of the harsh misconstructions of the police, who are invested with the right of intruding upon, and of arresting them at any minute. Immorality has, from this motive, gone to the length of driving women from our boarding-houses who were trying to get a respectable living. In 1845, the Prefect of the Seine, acting on the express order of the Minister of Public Instruction, issued a regulation prohibiting mistresses of boarding-houses and _secular_ institutions from receiving women-lodgers as boarders, and ordered them, under the penalty of a prompt closing of their establishments, to turn out of doors, without delay or exception, those then residing with them. As a consequence of this severe measure, the modest woman, often not knowing where to rest her head, sees herself obliged to submit to the discretionary discipline of public girls. The convents, it is true, not being included in the regulation cited above, admit women very far advanced in pregnancy, who are presented to them by an ecclesiastic. The young woman endowed with youth and beauty cannot show her face alone in our streets without being exposed to insulting looks and words; if she accept a situation behind a counter, in a spirit dealer’s establishment, she will, by the laws of 1861, fall under the action of the police, as _guilty of corrupting young people_.