This is the besetting sin of all attempts to keep the streets clear of immoral women by giving men, more or less immoral themselves, absolute liberty to arrest any woman whom they please to say is loitering for purposes of prostitution. It was with a flush of pride that I came all unawares upon a reference made before the Lexow Committee to the case of Miss Cass, which made the name of Endacott a byword and a reproach in London some dozen years ago. Counsel had not got the story quite right. His version curiously mixed up the Trafalgar Square agitation with the arrest of the dressmaker in Regent Circus, but he had the main idea quite right. Scotland Yard and Mr. Matthews hit the poor girl a foul blow before the incident was ended, but it was a welcome thing to find that their belated vengeance had failed to silence the reverberations of indignation evoked by her scandalous arrest. Americans and foreigners are often shocked at the state of London streets. Mr. Croker, I remember, expressed himself as being much horrified at the state of Piccadilly at midnight. But better a thousand times have the scandal of our streets than place the liberty of all women at the mercy of the police. The arrests of women fell 50 per cent. in London after the uproar that was made about Miss Cass, and they are not likely to rise so long as the authorities insist upon the most just and salutary rule then introduced, that no woman shall be arrested for molesting by solicitation, unless the citizen who is molested is willing to give evidence next day in the police-court to that effect. The right of a human being to walk about the streets, to loiter about the streets, does not depend, and ought not to depend, upon the chastity of that individual. But if that principle were to be adopted as a principle of police action, it ought in justice to be applied impartially to both sexes. Some very scandalous instances of the arbitrary arrest of innocent women, and their consignment to prison on the uncorroborated oath of a policeman, were brought before the Committee. The case of Ettie Kelter is one instance of the kind of thing that follows inevitably from making the policeman practically at once sole accuser and sole judge of the right of a woman to be at large in the streets.