Apart from this traffic, the brothel-keepers are found to be protected by the police authorities, who leave the registered girl dependent upon them: they send clothes to the half-naked workwoman and domestic servant on their leaving the hospital or the prison, to get them into their power through debt, and trade on the ignorance and poverty of unfortunate creatures, wretched to the extent of being obliged to hire from them clothing in which to present themselves for sanitary inspection. In the event of subterfuge, the brothel-keeper brings a charge of taking away with intent to defraud, and our law courts place her victims in her power. If we did not know the debasement of the girls of the lower orders, we should, perhaps, be astonished that hunger should give over to these procuresses, women who, getting none of the money for which they are sold, will finish by rotting in the street into which they are thrust like refuse, when they can no longer bring profit. Their destitution and degradation then become extreme. They live in filthy lodgings, or take shelter under doorways and under carriages. Those women whom our troops bring in from all parts are crowded in narrow and dark caverns, take refuge in plaster-kilns, in partially built houses, in cells as narrow as graves, in which they pass the night upon horrible truckle-beds full of filth and vermin, receiving as their only food some ration-bread which the soldiers throw in the mud to them; they have thus come to look upon prison as a retreat, and often to beg in vain the favour of admission to institutions for beggars.[10] Does the brothel-keeper who has worked their youth for her profit at least share their disgrace? No! from the moment that she makes choice of the evil—that she makes a gain by it, _she_ is no more dishonoured by it than the man who pays the price of it. The unjust assumption of the most respectable titles—the names alone of _lady_, _mistress of the house_, or of _matron_, attest the progress of this woman in general consideration. A burgess in the fullest sense of the term, she dowers and marries her daughters honourably, sometimes to legionaries, and _to agents of the police for morals_. Then as a woman of independent means, _retired from business_, she lives in the country, attracts notice there for her wealth, her devoutness, and her prayer book at the parish mass every Sunday. I do not know if such an ending would appear moral in romance, or whether it would not, on the stage, startle, however little, the indulgent conservators who look upon the tolerated house as a necessary evil, without reflecting that if men guilty of the trade in Blacks are punished with death, the trade in Whites ought not to be made an institution protected by the public power.