(7) The most radical and effective measure of all will be to arrest the professional prostitutes, segregate them, and keep them segregated during the dangerous years, except as genuine signs of intention to reform appear, in which case they may be released upon probation.  The expense will be, at the outset, considerable.  But the girls will be taught trades, and kept at work which will in most cases more than pay for their support.  Moreover, the community will, of course, save the vast sums now passed over by its lustful men to these women.  The saving of health and life will be incalculable.  The girls, although under restraint, will be infinitely better off than they were, and can in most cases, with patience and education, be made ultimately to realize their gain; as they grow older and forget their early years of shame, they can be set free again, with some skilled trade learned, and some accumulated earnings.  Professional prostitution will, of course, still flourish to a degree underground; but it will be a highly risky business, attracting far fewer girls, and difficult for the uninitiated young man to discover.  With this outlet for lust partially closed, there would no doubt tend to be an increase in solitary and homosexual vice, and in the seduction of innocent girls.  But the latter outlet can be checked by raising the “age of consent” to twenty or twenty-one, and punishing the seduction of younger girls as rape.  And the former evils, serious as they are, are far less of an evil than the creation of our present wretched class of professional prostitutes.  As a matter of fact, there would, beyond all question, be a great diminution in sexual vice, the present amount of it being due by no means wholly to desire that is naturally imperious, but to the artificial fostering of that desire by those who hope to profit financially thereby.

IV.  Crime?

The gravest of all social ills is-crime.  Its treatment may be considered under the three heads of prevention, conviction, and the treatment of convicted criminals.

(1) To some extent, not yet clearly determined, the causes of crime are temperamental, due to congenital defects or overexcitable impulses.  The inherited effects of insanity, alcoholism, and other pathological conditions, make self-control far more difficult for some unfortunates.  Such baneful inheritances will some day be minimized by eugenic laws; and individuals whose abnormal mental condition makes them dangerous to society will be kept under permanent restraint.  The causes of crime are, however, to a far greater degree environmental.  Undernutrition, overwork, worry, and various other sources of poor health, create a condition of lowered resistance to impulse.  The herding of the poor into crowded tenements, the inability to find work, the lack of wholesome interests and excitements to provide a normal outlet for energy of body and mind, the daily sight of the luxury of the rich and the bitterness of its contrast with their