Page:Wrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil - Elizabeth Blackwell (1883).djvu/39

Rh authorized, and in which so much capital is invested." Again, "The police, accustomed to consider this traffic as legal, and even licensed and privileged, always encourage and protect it, and especially protect the brothel-keepers."

A striking fact, in comparing the official demoralization which this system produces on the continent, with the British laissez faire, is shown in the untruths, the denials, the almost insuperable obstacles which arose in Brussels, when English public opinion began to awake to the fact that an organized and very profitable trade had long been going on to sell young English girls into an obscene imprisonment which has no parallel as yet in England.

English officials in London, and wherever they have not been corrupted by acts regulating vice, although they have often been indifferent to, or ignorant of the course of social evil—see 79, 436, 589, 596—still preserve their moral sense. As has been seen, they willingly give testimony about these evils, and they earnestly make suggestions for their removal. But on the continent there is a mighty system of fully organized government force to support female prostitution; a complete police Bastile banded together to prevent investigation, and to protect a cherished institution. So resolved was this organized force not to be investigated, that the English officials who were first employed to inquire into this