In the German Empire, prostitution is not, like in France, organized and superintended by the State; it is only tolerated. Official public houses are forbidden by law, and procuring is severely punishable. But that does not prevent that in a large number of German cities public houses continue to exist, and are winked at by the police. This establishes an incomprehensible state of things. The defiance of the law implied in such a state of things dawned even upon our statesmen and they bestirred themselves to remove the objection by legislative enactments. The German Criminal Code makes also the lodging of a prostitute a penal offense. On the other hand, however, the police are compelled to tolerate thousands of women as prostitutes, and, in a measure, to privilege them in their trade, provided they enter themselves as prostitutes on the Police Register, and submit to the Police regulations,--for instance, periodically recurring examinations by a physician. It follows, however, that, if the Government licenses the prostitute, and thereby protects the exercise of her trade, she must also have a habitation. Aye, it is even in the interest of public health and order that they have such a place to ply their trade in. What contradictions! On the one hand, the Government officially acknowledges that prostitution is necessary; on the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prostitute and the pimp. But it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together. Moreover, the attitude of the Government is an avowal that prostitution is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve: it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prostitution in order to avoid greater evils. In other words, our social system, so boastful of its morality, its religiousness, its civilization and its culture, feels compelled to tolerate that immorality and corruption spread through its body like a stealthy poison. But this state of things betrays something else, besides _the admission by the Christian State that marriage is insufficient, and that the husband has the right to demand illegitimate gratification of his sexual instincts_. Woman counts with such a State in so far only as she is willing, as a sexual being, to yield to illegitimate male desires, i. e., become a prostitute. In keeping herewith, the supervision and control, exercised by the organs of the State over the registered prostitutes, do not fall upon the men also, those who seek the prostitute. Such a provision would be a matter of course if the sanitary police control was to be of any sense, and even of partial effect,--apart from the circumstance that a sense of justice would demand an even-handed application of the law to both sexes. No; "supervision and control" fall upon woman alone.