“It is urged that the ‘tacit sanction’ given to vice, by such a _recognition_ of prostitution as would be involved in a system of supervision, registration, or license, would be a greater evil than all the maladies (moral and physical) which now flow from its unchecked prevalence. But let it be considered that by ignoring we do not abolish it, we do not even conceal it; it speaks aloud; it walks abroad; it is a vice as patent and as well-known as drunkenness; it is already ‘tacitly sanctioned’ by the mere fact of its permitted, or connived-at, existence; by the very circumstance which stares us in the face, that the legislative and executive authorities, seeing it, deploring it, yet confess by their inaction their inability to check it, and their unwillingness to prohibit it, and virtually say to the unfortunate prostitutes and their frequenters, ‘As long as you create no public scandal, but throw a decent veil over your proceedings, we shall not interfere with you, but shall regard you as an inevitable evil.’ By an attempt to regulate and control them, the authorities would confess nothing more than they already in act acknowledge, viz. their desire to mitigate an evil which they have discovered their incompetency to suppress. By prohibiting the practice of prostitution _under certain conditions_, they do not legalise or authorise it under all other conditions; they simply announce that, _under these certain conditions_, they feel called upon promptly to interfere. The legislature does not forbid drunkenness, knowing that it would be futile to do so: but if a man, when drunk, is disorderly, pugnacious, or indecent, or in other mode compromises public comfort or public morals, it steps forward to arrest and punish him; yet surely by no fair use of words can it be represented as thereby sanctioning drunkenness when unaccompanied by indecorous or riotous behaviour, for it merely declares that in the one case interference falls within its functions, and that in the other case it does not.” No living writer, however, _dare_ bring the subject before the public as it should be brought. A penman bolder than his brethren has but to raise the curtain that conceals the thousand-and-one abominations that find growth in this magnificent city of ours, but an inch higher than “decorum” permits, than the eyes of outraged modesty immediately take refuge behind her pocket-handkerchief, and society at large is aghast at the man’s audacity, not to say “indecency.” Warned by the fate of such daring ones, therefore, it shall be the writer’s care to avoid all startling revelations, and the painting of pictures in their real colours, and to confine himself to plain black-and-white inoffensive enumerations and descriptions, placing the plain facts and figures before the reader, that he may deal with them according to his conscience.