Effects of Prohibition.--Required Change of Policy.-- Governmental Obligations.--Prostitution augmented by Seclusion.--Impossibility of benevolent Assistance.-- Necessity of sanitary Regulations.--Yellow Fever.--Effect of remedial Measures in Paris.--Syphilitic Infection not a local Question.--Present Measures to check Syphilis.--ISLAND HOSPITAL, BLACKWELL'S ISLAND.--Mode of Admission.--Vagrancy Commitment "on Confession," and its Action on Blackwell's Island.--Pecuniary Results.--Moral Effects.--Perpetuation of Disease.--Inadequacy of Present Arrangements.--Discharges.-- Writs of _Habeas Corpus_ and _Certiorari_, how obtained, and their Effects.--Public Responsibility.--Proposed medical and police Surveillance.--Requirements.--_Hospital Arrangements to be entirely separated from punitive Institutions._-- Medical Visitation.--Power to place diseased Women under Treatment and _detain them till cured_.--Refutation of Objections.--Quack Advertisers.--Constitution of Medical Bureau.--Duties of Examiners.--License System.--Probable Effects of Surveillance.--Expenses of the proposed Plan.-- Agitation in England.--The London _Times_ on Prostitution.-- Objections considered.--Report from MEDICAL BOARD OF BELLEVUE HOSPITAL on Prostitution and Syphilis.--Report from RESIDENT PHYSICIAN, RANDALL'S ISLAND, on Constitutional Syphilis.-- Reliability of Statistics.--Resumé of substantiated Facts. 627 THE HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION. INTRODUCTION. Arguments are unnecessary to prove the existence of prostitution. The evil is so notorious that none can possibly gainsay it. But when its extent, its causes, or its effects are questioned, a remarkable degree of ignorance or carelessness is manifested. Few care to know the secret springs from which prostitution emanates; few are anxious to know how wide the stream extends; few have any desire to know the devastation it causes. Society has formally laid a prohibition on the subject, and he who presumes to argue that what affects one may injure all; he who believes that the malady in his neighbor's family to-day may visit his own to-morrow; he who dares to intimate that a vice which has blighted the happiness of one parent, and ruined the character of one daughter, may produce, must inevitably produce, the same sad results in another circle; in short, he who dares allude to the subject of prostitution in any other than a mysterious and whispered manner, must prepare to meet the frowns and censure of society.