Among other devices adopted with a view to effect this, and to mitigate in some degree the resulting evils, the issuing of licenses for brothels has been practiced in several large cities. One of the conditions of the license makes it obligatory upon the keepers of houses of ill-repute and their inmates to submit to medical examination at stated intervals. By this means, it is expected to detect the cases of foul disease at the outset, and thus to protect others by placing the infected individuals under restraint and treatment. It will be seen that for many reasons such examinations could not be effective; but, even if they were, the propriety of this plan of dealing with the vice is exceedingly questionable, as will appear from the following considerations:-- 1. The moment that prostitution is placed under the protection of law by means of a license, it at once loses half its disrepute, and becomes respectable, as do gambling and liquor-selling under the same circumstances. 2. Why should so vile a crime as fornication be taken under legal protection more than stealing or the lowest forms of gambling? Is it not a lesser crime against human nature to rob a man of his money by theft or by deceit and trickery than to snatch from him at one fell swoop his health, his virtue, and his peace of mind? Why not as well have laws to regulate burglary and assassination, allowing the perpetrators of those crimes to ply their chosen avocations with impunity under certain prescribed restrictions; if robbery, for instance, requiring the thief to leave his victim money enough to make his escape to another country; or, if murder, directing the assassin to allow his intended victim time to repeat a sufficient number of _Ave Marias_ to insure his safe transit through purgatory or to pay a priest for doing the same? Such a course would not be inconsistent with the policy which legalizes that infamous traffic in human souls, prostitution. 3. By the use of certain precautionary measures the fears of many will be allayed, so that thousands whose fear of the consequences of sin would otherwise have kept them physically virtuous, at least, erroneously supposing that the cause for fear has been removed, will rush madly into a career of vice, and will learn only too late the folly of their course.