Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/311

 And then the commerce in vice will have to be stopped. I do not mean prohibited by penal laws alone. Policemen cannot stop it, and policemen should have no more to do with it than firemen. In fact much of the commerce has proceeded from the fact that its regulation has been entrusted to the police. It should be a subject for the fiscal laws. It is, I assume, known by most persons that the owners of the dilapidated tenements in which for the most part prostitution is carried on, because of the "risk," extort exorbitant rentals for them, and then on the ground that they can rent them to no one of respectability, they hold them to be so worthless that they pay little if any taxes on them. Our present tax laws of course have the effect of rewarding the slothful, the lazy and the idle, and of punishing the energetic and the enterprising producer in business, and it would be quite possible to revise the tax laws so that tenderloins would be economically impossible, because they would cease to be profitable.

In the next place, or some place in the program, there should be some sort of competent and judicious sex education. I do not know just who would impart it, since no one as yet knows very much about it, but with the earnest, sincere and devoted work that is being carried on all over the world by the scientific men and women who are studying eugenics and social hygiene, there is hope in this direction, even if it is probable that the world will not be saved by the new race of athletes that are scientifically to be bred, and may still have