"Bergeret lost much of his time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurred in some villages of France. And who does not know similar stories? We have them in Italy, in Germany; we can find them in every country where humanity loves and suffers, gets drunk and prostitutes itself; wherever the eyes of the authorities cannot penetrate into the most secret fissures of the social edifice where lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But between deploring the evils that are the results of clandestine prostitution and destroying all toleration on this ground there is an abyss over which the physician and the legislator should not pass on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but which should be crossed over the solid bridge of a wise criticism. "Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice in the houses of ill fame; but, then, without taverns would there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no poisoners, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars? And who, pray, is the cause of the existence of houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand if it is true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morals are those of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot convert; they are as false and coarse as those of the legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the guilty; as those of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the member which, with a wiser and more merciful science, he should preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor's stake, has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more in preservative medicine than in the surgeon's knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature imbued with evil humors, with many curious bones and many scrofulous tumors, we will kindly cauterize its flesh to keep it alive, to divert into more ignoble parts those acrid humors that would poison the sources of life, until we shall succeed with the tonic cure of education in renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid and in pouring this new blood into his flesh, his bones and his nerves, to rebuild them. "This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a precious wound open to save the life of a diseased organism.