The report of the Chicago Vice Commission, made public last week, is a notable document for many reasons. To begin with, this is said to have been the first commission appointed by the mayor of a great city to deal with this question. In the next place, it conducted its inquiry in a scientific and dispassionate manner, and as a result has some definite and practical recommendations to make. But most important of all is that it rejects definitely and vigorously the theory that since prostitution has always been and is always likely to be, therefore there is nothing to be done but to regulate and tolerate and segregate. Into none of these pitfalls has it fallen. Without letting its idealism run away with it, the committee—a strong one, composed of business men, teachers, editors, doctors, and ministers—lays down the sound truth that the proper policy for a city is “constant and persistent repression,” with “absolute annihilation as the ultimate ideal.” There is no counsel of cowardice and despair here; no advocacy of those evil, out-worn policies of toleration which have long since demonstrated in Europe their inability to protect the public health or morals. What is counselled is a determined and vigorous grappling with the evil by the municipality, while the community as a whole devotes itself to those far-reaching policies of education and economic readjustment, which must eventually control some of the human currents that underlie this fearful social peril. How great that evil is in Chicago alone appears from the committee’s sober estimate that the annual loss in lives is 5,000 and the annual profit of those engaged in the trade is $15,000,000, which latter figure has since been raised four-fold. It has often been pointed out in these columns and elsewhere that, if there were any other single drain upon a city that cost it 5,000, or let us say even 2,500, lives a year, the community would be up in arms about it. A fire loss of that figure would stir this city to its foundations; the heavy toll in children’s lives paid every summer because of impure or improper food has roused the humanitarian spirit, and we are all familiar with the public determination to blot out the tuberculosis scourge as rapidly as possible. But these matters here come under the Board of Health, which spends great sums every year in such crusades. No department really has charge of this scourge of immorality save the Police Department, which in the past has regulated it as though merely with a view to obtaining for its corrupt members as large a share in the profits as possible.