It is a mere absurdity to assert that prostitution can ever be eradicated. Strenuous and well-directed efforts for this purpose have been made at different times. The whole power of the Church, where it possessed not merely a spiritual, but an actual secular arm, has been in vain directed against it. Nature defied the mandates of the clergy, and the threatened punishments of an after-life were futile to deter men from seeking, and women from granting, sinful pleasures in this world. Monarchs victorious in the field and unsurpassed in the council-chamber have bent all their energies of will, and brought all the aids of power to crush it out, but before these vice has not quailed. The guilty women have been banished, scourged, branded, executed; their partners have been subjected to the same punishment; held up to public opinion as immoral; denuded of their civil rights; have seen their offenses visited upon their families; have been led to the stake, the gibbet, and the block, and still prostitution exists. The teachings of morality and virtue have been powerless here. In some cases they restrain individuals; upon the aggregate they are inoperative. The researches of science have been unheeded. They have traced the physical results of vice, and have foreshadowed its course. They have demonstrated that the suffering parents of this generation will bequeath to their posterity a heritage of ruined powers; that the malady which illicit pleasure communicates is destructive to the hopes of man; that the human frame is perceptibly and regularly depreciating by the operation of this poison, and have shown that even the desire for health and long life, one of the most powerful motives that ever influences a human being, has been of no avail to stem the torrent. But if history proves that prostitution can not be suppressed, it also demonstrates that it can be regulated, and directed into channels where its most injurious results can be encountered, and its dangerous tendencies either entirely arrested or materially weakened. This is the policy to which civilized communities are tending, and to aid the movement it is needful that the subject be examined, even at the risk of the world's contumely.