The duty of the State in regard to the vice caterers is obvious; the commercializing of vice must be strictly prohibited by law and enforced by whatever means experience proves most effective.  We must learn to include in this class of enemies of society the manufacturers and sellers of alcoholic liquors, as well as of the less generally used arcotics; but this matter has been already discussed in connection ]with our study of the individual’s duty in relation to alcohol.  Of the proprietors of gambling dens, indecent “shows,” etc, we need not further speak, concentrating our attention instead upon the worst species of vice catering, the commercializing of prostitution.  The extent to which the sale of woman’s virtue prevails in our cities is scarcely believable.  The recent commission of which Mr. Rockefeller was chairman actually counted 14,926 professional prostitutes in Manhattan alone, in 1912; while personal visitation established the existence of over sixteen hundred houses where the gratification of lust could be bought.  Not all, certainly, were counted; and this list is, of course, entirely exclusive of the great number of girls occasionally and secretly selling themselves to friends, acquaintances, and employers.  Many hundreds of men and women, keepers of houses, procurers, and the like, live on the proceeds of this great underground industry; and to some extent-though to what extent it is, of course, impossible to ascertain the forcible retention of young girls is exist in most of the world’s cities.  What is being done to abolish this ghastliest of evils?  In most great cities, scarcely anything, for two reasons:  the one being that so many men, perhaps the majority, secretly wish to retain an opportunity for purchasing sex gratification, the other that the police generally find the protection of illegal vice an easy source of revenue.  If the police are honest, they break up a disorderly house-and let the inmates carry the lure of their trade elsewhere.  The magistrates fine them, or give them sentences just long enough to bring them needed rest and nutrition, and send them back to their business.  Or they drive them out of town-to swell the numbers in the next town.  Attempts at legalization and localization are frank admissions of inability or lack of desire to fight the evil; their effect is to make the way of temptation easier for the youth.  Compulsory medical inspection gives a promise of immunity from disease which is largely illusory, and entices men who are now restrained by prudential motives.  There are, however, many promising lines of attack: 

(1) When women gain the vote, they can be counted on to fight the evil.  The prostitutes themselves, being mostly minors, and, in any case, anxious to conceal their identity, seldom vote; and the remaining women are almost en masse bitterly opposed to the trade.  With women voting, and an efficient political administration inaugurated in our cities, we shall hope to witness the end of the scandalous nonenforcement of existing laws.