INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL

When certain groups in a community, to whom a social wrong has become intolerable, prepare for definite action against it, they almost invariably discover unexpected help from contemporaneous social movements with which they later find themselves allied.  The most immediate help in this new campaign against the social evil will probably come thus indirectly from those streams of humanitarian effort which are ever widening and which will in time slowly engulf into their rising tide of enthusiasm for human betterment, even the victims of the white slave traffic.

Foremost among them is the world-wide movement to preserve and prolong the term of human life, coupled with the determination on the part of the medical profession to eliminate all forms of germ diseases.  The same physicians and sanitarians who have practically rid the modern city of small-pox and cholera and are eliminating tuberculosis, well know that the social evil is directly responsible for germ diseases more prevalent than any of the others, and also communicable.  Over and over again in the history of large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medical profession has been urged to control the diseases resulting from the commercialized vice which the municipal authorities themselves permitted.  But the experiments in segregation, in licensed systems, and certification have not been considered successful.  The medical profession, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasibility of such undertakings, is virtually united in the conclusion that so long as commercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city against the spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatal alike to the individual and to his offspring.  The medical profession agrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become the purveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type, safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercialized vice.  They point out the indirect ways in which this contagion can spread exactly as any other can, but insist that its control is enormously complicated by the fact that the victims of these diseases are most unwilling to be designated and quarantined.  The medical profession is at last taking the position that the community wishing to protect itself against this contagion will in the end be driven to the extermination of the very source itself.  A well-known authority states the one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is the social institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred and cultivated there, they then spread through the community, attacking alike both the innocent and the guilty.