We are breeding in our slums a degenerate race,-boys who grow up
used to vice, and girls that drift naturally into prostitution; we are
allowing disease to spread from them, through the children that go
to the public schools, the shop-girls we buy from in the stores, the
servants that enter our houses, the men we rub elbows with on the
street or in the street-cars. Very salutary are the laws that require
the name of the owner to be placed on all buildings; shame before the
public may wring improvements from many a landlord who now takes
profits from tenements unfit for habitation. But it ought not to be
left to the conscience of the individual owner; the State must exercise
its primary right to forbid the crowding of tenants into houses which
do not afford sanitary quarters and permit a decent degree of privacy.


III. COMMERCIALIZED VICE?

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