Mrs. Butler has well expressed the encouragement to vice that the compulsory examination of women leads to in the following words: "We all approve of healing disease and taking care of the sick, no matter what has brought on their disease, no matter how sinful and degraded they may be. The Abolitionists have always pleaded for plenty of free hospital accommodation for men and women afflicted with this curse. But it will be clear to you that this law is not for simple healing, as Christ would have us heal, caring for all, whatever their character, and whatever their disease. This law is invented to provide beforehand, that men may be able to sin without bodily injury--if that were possible, which it is not. If a burglar, who had broken into my house and stolen my goods, were to fall and be hurt, I would be glad to get him into a hospital and have him nursed and cured; but I would not put a ladder up against my window at night and leave the windows open, in order that he might steal my goods without danger of breaking his neck." But to return to the Lock Hospital mentioned. The nurse produced the records for our examination. In the correspondence book was the copy of a letter from the military surgeon, informing the Cantonment magistrate of six girls suspected of disease, and asking that they be apprehended and sent to the hospital for examination. That looked simple enough, and why not? Imagine yourself the one apprehended, and the case assumes a different aspect. A policeman comes to your door and reads a warrant for your arrest as a common prostitute; you ask on what authority; you are informed that the name of the informant is not made public, because if a man can be induced to help trace out diseases--it being regarded as a "point of honour" to inform other men where danger lurks--his confession must not be made known, it would injure his reputation. (We are now describing the exact conditions always existent where there is compulsory examination of women.) You contend that you have a right to your good name, and that it is a principle of justice that no one can be punished on secret and unproved evidence, and that it is punishment of the worst sort to be taken by a policeman through the streets to a hospital used exclusively for the treatment of a certain class of disorders. You are then informed that unless you will go at once without any trouble, you will be taken out of the town in which you live, set down as a common vagrant by the roadside, and if ever again found within the limits of the city in which your parents, brothers, and sisters live, you will be arrested and put in jail. What will you do? Yet these were exactly the laws under which these poor women, among whom we were spending the day, lived.