Page:Wrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil - Elizabeth Blackwell (1883).djvu/48

38 The influence and action of law necessarily extend in logical sequence, from the first timid establishment of a false principle. Thus the State, accepting promiscuous intercourse as a necessity, registers female prostitutes. As a result of this acceptance, the trade must be made healthy, orderly, and ample. As the indiscriminate intercourse of the sexes necessarily produces disease, this, is the first evil which demands attention as sanitary science advances. The first necessary step in regulating the trade in vice, therefore, is to register those who engage in indiscriminate sexual intercourse. But vicious men carry on promiscuous intercourse, and consequently originate and spread disease. Men, however, will not be registered. The State is, therefore, compelled at the outset to leave the most important half of the trade unregulated—that half, namely, that injures the innocent, the unfallen—and that half that supplies all the capital of the trade, the money without which it could not be continued for a week.

The registration of as many females as possible who carry on the trade, is therefore the only possible method practically open to those who, accepting promiscuous intercourse, wish to try and make it healthy. Every result that we have seen in Brussels necessarily follows, from the logical carrying out of this first false step of accepting promiscuous intercourse through registration of women, as a trade