It has always been considered, among experienced workers, a most difficult thing to attack prostitution itself by means of penalties, for the reason that the punishment is invariably visited with greatest severity upon the head of the female partner in shame, who is often the mere victim, while the male partner goes free. But surely those men who make a business of cultivating vice and vicious practices,--who use every sort of device to corrupt the youth and develop the trade in women, can be reached by just and wholesome laws. We cannot make men moral by act of parliament, but we can restrict their depredations. It has long been our feeling that every form and kind of spurious marriage, such as bigamy, polygamy, illegal divorce and remarriage, seduction, adultery, and bastardy, besides constituting sometimes cause for civil action, might with good results be lifted into offenses against the State. National development depends not upon the individual but upon the _family unit_, and that family unit is non-existent outside the monogamous relation, or, at least, is so frail as to easily crumble. Nothing could be more vicious in moral education to the youth than the average suit for civil damages, in which the whole decision of the case is made to depend upon whether some young girl can or cannot be ruined in reputation by lawyers of the defense and by their client, concerning whom there is not a question as to their lack of a decent reputation. When the State rises to defend itself against counterfeit marriage, just as it defends itself against counterfeit coin, then the whole horizon of the life of a profligate woman will not be brought before the public gaze every time she comes into court, but will be kept in deserved obscurity, and the woman will be tried for a _single_ offense, just as the man is tried, and not for all the offenses and indiscretions of a life-time. The penalty for such wrong doing may not be placed at even so high a figure in the Statute Book as it now stands, while accounted a civil injury, but the dignity of the trial would give serious lessons in virtue to the youth. No nation can long exist that does not incessantly discourage the practice of every sort of offense against the sanctity of the marriage relation. But after all, there will be no success in attempting to cope with Oriental prostitution by means of laws against prostitution and kindred vices, for the reason that the evil is a far graver one than this. Innocent children are reared for vice, and at a certain age thrust into the life through no choice of theirs; and not infrequently perfectly respectable women of mature years are kidnaped for the vile service. The effect upon the moral character of a man who resorts to a _slave_ class of victims to his evil propensities, must be to make that man a menace to society wherever he goes, through deeds of violence which he is willing to commit, and accustomed to commit, of the worst imaginable sort.