CHAPTER VI

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