Experience has taught that neither the establishment of houses of prostitution, controlled by the police, nor the supervision and medical inspection, ordered by the police, afford the slightest guarantee against contagion. The nature of these diseases is frequently such that they are not to be easily or immediately detected. If there is to be any safety, the inspection would have to be held several times a day. That, however, is impossible in view of the number of women concerned, and also of the costs. Where thirty or forty prostitutes must be "done" in an hour, inspection is hardly more than a farce; moreover, one or two inspections a week is wholly inadequate. The success of these measures also suffers shipwreck in the circumstance that the men, who transmit the germs of disease from one woman to another, remain free from all official annoyance. A prostitute, just inspected and found healthy, may be infected that same hour by a diseased man, and she transmits the virus to other patrons, until the next inspection day, or until she has herself become aware of the disease. The control is not only illusory: These inspections, made at command, and conducted by male, instead of female physicians, hurt most deeply the sense of shame; and they contribute to its total ruination. This is a phenomenon confirmed by many physicians. Even the official report of the Berlin Police Department admits the fact by stating: "It may also be granted that _registration causes the moral sense of the prostitute to sink_ still lower."[104] Accordingly, the prostitutes try their utmost to escape this control. A further consequence of these police measures is that they make it extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, for the prostitute ever again to return to a decent trade. _A woman, that has fallen under police control, is lost to society; she generally goes down in misery within a few years._ Accurately and exhaustively did the fifth Congress at Geneva for Combatting Immorality utter itself against the police regulation of prostitutes, by declaring: "The compulsory medical inspection of prostitutes is an all the more cruel punishment to the woman, seeing that, by destroying the remnants of shame, still possible within even the most abandoned, such inspection drags down completely into depravity the wretched being that is subjected thereto. The State, that means to regulate prostitution with the police, forgets that it owes equal protection to both sexes; it demoralizes and degrades women. Every system for the official regulation of prostitution has police arbitrariness for its consequence, as well as the violation of civic guaranties that are safeguarded to every individual, even to the greatest criminal, against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Seeing this violation of right is exercised to the injury of woman only, the consequence is an inequality, shocking to nature, between her and man.