Common sense asks for a full investigation of all the evils attending prostitution. In the every-day affairs of life, any man who feels the pressure of a particular evil looks at once for its cause. He may be neither a philosopher nor a logician, and may never have heard of or read any of the luminous treatises which professedly simplify science, yet he knows very well that for every effect there must be some adequate cause, and for this he generally searches diligently till he can find and remove it. But here, in the city of New York, is a population who claim to be as intelligent as any on the Western continent, who have been for years suffering from the effects of a vice in purse and person; who have paid and are paying every year large sums of money on account of it; who witness every day some broken constitution or ruined character resulting from it, and who yet have never thought of seeking out the cause! Is it now too late to enlist your sympathies in the undertaking? Hence we conclude that propriety, expediency, public safety, private interest, and common sense demand an investigation like this now submitted to the reader. And what is the argument brought forward to oppose it? The world's scorn--"this scorn being only a sort of tinseled cloak to its deformed weakness." But is not this scorn powerless against the array of favoring motives? Will it stand the test of comparison with any one of them, much less of all? Is not its influence lost when its real character is known? The reckless carelessness which has suffered a growing vice to increase and multiply, which has permitted a deadly Upas-tree to take root and blossom in the community until its poisonous exhalations threaten universal infection; which has, by its actual indifference, fostered vice, promoted seduction, perpetuated disease, and entailed death; shall this deformed weakness now raise its trembling hands, and exhibit its tottering frame, and lift its puny voice to forbid an examination into the sources of the danger? Has not the finger of this scorn too long forbid the search for truth? Has not the hour arrived when truth will speak trumpet-tongued, and when her voice must be heard?