Woman under socialism Part 15

Man ever has looked upon the use of prost.i.tution as a privilege due him of right. All the harder and severer does he keep guard and pa.s.s sentence when a woman, who is no prost.i.tute, commits a "slip." That woman is instinct with the same impulses as man, aye, that at given periods of her life (at menstruation) these impulses a.s.sert themselves more vehemently than at others,--that does not trouble him. In virtue of his position as master, he compels her to violently suppress her most powerful impulses, and he conditions both her character in society and her marriage upon her chast.i.ty. Nothing ill.u.s.trates more drastically, and also revoltingly, the dependence of woman upon man than this radically different conception regarding the gratification of the identical natural impulse, and the radically different measure by which it is judged.

To man, circ.u.mstances are particularly favorable. Nature has devolved upon woman the consequences of the act of generation: outside of the enjoyment, man has neither trouble nor responsibility. This advantageous position over against woman has promoted that unbridled license in s.e.xual indulgence wherein a considerable part of men distinguish themselves. Seeing, however, that, as has been shown, a hundred causes lie in the way of the legitimate gratification of the s.e.xual instinct, or prevent its full satisfaction, the consequence is frequent gratification, like beasts in the woods.

_Prost.i.tution thus becomes a social inst.i.tution in the capitalist world, the same as the police, standing armies, the Church, and wage-masters.h.i.+p._

Nor is this an exaggeration. We shall prove it.

We have told how the ancient world looked upon prost.i.tution, and considered it necessary, aye, had it organized by the State, as well in Greece as in Rome. What views existed on the subject during the Middle Ages has likewise been described. Even St. Augustine, who, next to St.

Paul, must be looked upon as the most important prop of Christendom, and who diligently preached asceticism, could not refrain from exclaiming: "Suppress the public girls, and the violence of pa.s.sion will knock everything of a heap." The provincial Council of Milan, in 1665, expressed itself in similar sense.

Let us hear the moderns:

Dr. F. S. Huegel says:[100] "Advancing civilization will gradually drape prost.i.tution in more pleasing forms, but only with the end of the world will it be wiped off the globe." A bold a.s.sertion; yet he who is not able to project himself beyond the capitalist form of society, he who does not realize that society will change so as to arrive at healthy and natural social conditions,--he must agree with Dr. Huegel.

Hence also did Dr. Wichern, the late pious Director of the Rauhen House near Hamburg, Dr. Patton of Lyon, Dr. William Tait of Edinburg, and Dr.

Parent-Duchatelet of Paris, celebrated through his investigations of the s.e.xual diseases and prost.i.tution, agree in declaring: "Prost.i.tution is ineradicable _because it hangs together with the social inst.i.tutions_,"

and all of them demanded its regulation by the State. Also Schmoelder writes: "Immorality as a trade has existed at all times and in all places, and, so far as the human eye can see, _it will remain a constant companion_ of the human race."[101] Seeing that the authorities cited stand, without exception, upon the ground of the modern social order, the thought occurs to none that, with the aid of another social order, the causes of prost.i.tution, and, consequently, prost.i.tution itself, might disappear; none of them seeks to fathom the causes. Indeed, upon one and another, engaged in this question, the fact at times dawns that the sorry social conditions, which numerous women suffer under, might be the chief reason why so many women sell their bodies; but the thought does not press itself through to its conclusion, to wit, that, therefore, the necessity arises of bringing about other social conditions. Among those who recognize that the economic conditions are the chief cause of prost.i.tution belong Th. Bade, who declares:[102] "The causes of the bottomless moral depravity, out of which the prost.i.tute girl is born, lie in the existing social conditions.... _It is the bourgeois dissolution of the middle cla.s.ses and of their material existence, particularly of the cla.s.s of the artisans_, only a small fraction of which carries on to-day an independent occupation as a trade." Bade closes his observations, saying: "Want for material existence, that has partly worn out the families of the middle cla.s.s and will yet wear them out wholly, leads also to the moral ruin of the family, especially of the female s.e.x." In fact, the statistical figures, gathered by the Police Department of Berlin, between 1871-1872, on the extraction of 2,224 enrolled prost.i.tutes, show:

Number. Per Cent. Father's Occupation.

1,015 47.9 Artisans 467 22.0 Millhands 305 14.4 Small office-holders 222 10.4 Merchants and railroad workers 87 4.1 Farmers 26 1.2 Military service

Of 102 the father's occupation was not ascertainable.

Specialists and experts rarely take up investigations of a deeper nature; they accept the facts that lie before them, and judge in the style of the "Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift," that writes in its No.

35, for the year 1863: "What else is there left to the large majority of willing and unwilling celibates, in order to satisfy their _natural wants_, than the forbidden fruit of the Venus Pandemos?" The paper is, accordingly, of the opinion that, for the sake of these celibates, prost.i.tution is necessary, because what else, forsooth, are they to do in order to satisfy their s.e.xual impulse? And it closes, saying: "Seeing that prost.i.tution is necessary, it has the right to existence, to protection, and to immunity from the State." And Dr. Huegel declares himself in his work, mentioned above, in accord with this view. Man, accordingly, to whom celibacy is a horror and a martyrdom, is the only being considered; that there are also millions of women living in celibacy is well known; but they have to submit. What is right for man, is, accordingly, wrong for women; is in her case immorality and a crime.

The Leipsic Police Doctor, Dr. J. Kuehn, says:[103] "Prost.i.tution is not merely an evil that must be tolerated, _it is a necessary evil_, because it protects the wives from infidelity, [which only the husbands have the right to be guilty of] and virtue also [female virtue, of course, the husbands have no need of the commodity] from being a.s.sailed [sic.] and, therefore, from falling." These few words of Dr. Kuehn typify, in all its nakedness, the cra.s.s egoism of male creation. Kuehn takes the correct stand for a Police Doctor, who, by superintending prost.i.tution, sacrifices himself, to the end of saving the men from disagreeable diseases. In the same sense with him did his successor, Dr. Eckstein, utter himself at the twelfth convention of the German a.s.sociations of House and City Real Estate Owners, held in Magdeburg in the summer of 1890. The honorable house-owners wished to know how they could prevent the numerous instances of prost.i.tutes occupying their houses, and how to protect themselves against fines in case prost.i.tutes are caught living in them. Dr. Eckstein lectured them on this head to the effect that prost.i.tution was a "necessary evil," never absent from any people or religion. Another interesting gentleman is Dr. Fock, who in a treatise, ent.i.tled "Prost.i.tution, in Its Ethical and Sanitary Respects," in the "Deutschen Vierteljahrschrift fuer offentliche Gesundheitspflege," vol.

xx, No. 1, considers prost.i.tution "an unenviable corollary of our civilized arrangements." He fears an over-production of people if all were to marry upon reaching the age of p.u.b.erty; hence he considers important to have prost.i.tution "regulated" by the State. He considers natural that the State supervise and regulate prost.i.tution, and thereby a.s.sume the care of providing for the supply of girls that are free from syphilis. He p.r.o.nounces himself in favor of the most rigid inspection of "all women, proven to lead an abandoned life;"--also when ladies of "an abandoned life" belong to the prominent cla.s.ses? It is the old story.

That in all logic and justice also those men should be held under surveillance who hunt up prost.i.tutes, maintain them and make their existence possible,--of that no one thinks. Dr. Fock also demands the taxing of the prost.i.tutes, and their concentration in given streets. In other words, the Christian State is to procure for itself a revenue out of prost.i.tution, and, at the same time, organize and place prost.i.tution under its protection for the benefit of male creation. What was it that the Emperor Vespasian said at a somewhat similar juncture? "_Non olet!_"--it smells not.

Did we exaggerate when we said: Prost.i.tution is to-day a necessary social inst.i.tution just as the police, standing armies, the Church and wage-masters.h.i.+p?

In the German Empire, prost.i.tution is not, like in France, organized and superintended by the State; it is only tolerated. Official public houses are forbidden by law, and procuring is severely punishable. But that does not prevent that in a large number of German cities public houses continue to exist, and are winked at by the police. This establishes an incomprehensible state of things. The defiance of the law implied in such a state of things dawned even upon our statesmen and they bestirred themselves to remove the objection by legislative enactments. The German Criminal Code makes also the lodging of a prost.i.tute a penal offense. On the other hand, however, the police are compelled to tolerate thousands of women as prost.i.tutes, and, in a measure, to privilege them in their trade, provided they enter themselves as prost.i.tutes on the Police Register, and submit to the Police regulations,--for instance, periodically recurring examinations by a physician. It follows, however, that, if the Government licenses the prost.i.tute, and thereby protects the exercise of her trade, she must also have a habitation. Aye, it is even in the interest of public health and order that they have such a place to ply their trade in. What contradictions! On the one hand, the Government officially acknowledges that prost.i.tution is necessary; on the other, it prosecutes and punishes the prost.i.tute and the pimp. But it is out of contradictions that bourgeois society is put together.

Moreover, the att.i.tude of the Government is an avowal that prost.i.tution is a Sphinx to modern society, the riddle which society can not solve: it considers necessary to tolerate and superintend prost.i.tution in order to avoid greater evils. In other words, our social system, so boastful of its morality, its religiousness, its civilization and its culture, feels compelled to tolerate that immorality and corruption spread through its body like a stealthy poison. But this state of things betrays something else, besides _the admission by the Christian State that marriage is insufficient, and that the husband has the right to demand illegitimate gratification of his s.e.xual instincts_. Woman counts with such a State in so far only as she is willing, as a s.e.xual being, to yield to illegitimate male desires, i. e., become a prost.i.tute. In keeping herewith, the supervision and control, exercised by the organs of the State over the registered prost.i.tutes, do not fall upon the men also, those who seek the prost.i.tute. Such a provision would be a matter of course if the sanitary police control was to be of any sense, and even of partial effect,--apart from the circ.u.mstance that a sense of justice would demand an even-handed application of the law to both s.e.xes. No; "supervision and control" fall upon woman alone.

This protection by the State of man and not woman, turns upside down the nature of things. _It looks as if men were the weaker vessel and women the stronger; as if woman were the seducer, and poor, weak man the seduced._ The seduction-myth between Adam and Eve in Paradise continues to operate in our opinions and laws, and it says to Christianity: "You are right; woman is the arch seductress, the vessel of iniquity." Men should be ashamed of such a sorry and unworthy _role_; but this _role_ of the "weak" and the "seduced" suits them;--_the more they are protected, all the more may they sin_.

Wherever men a.s.semble in large numbers, they seem unable to amuse themselves without prost.i.tution. This was shown, among other instances of the kind, by the occurrences at the German Schuetzenfest, held in Berlin in the summer of 1890, which caused 2,300 women to express themselves as follows in a pet.i.tion addressed to the Mayor of the German capital: "May it please your Honor to allow us to bring to your knowledge the matters that have reached the provinces, through the press and other means of communication, upon the German shooting matches, held at Pankow from the 6th to the 13th of July of this year.

The reports of the matter, that we have seen with indignation and horror, represent the programme of that festival with the following announcements, among others: 'First German Herald, the Greatest Songstress of the World;' 'A Hundred Ladies and Forty Gentlemen:'

Besides these smaller _cafes chantants_ and shooting galleries, in which importunate women forced themselves upon the men. Also a 'free concert,'

whose gaily-clad waitresses, seductively smiling, brazenly and shamelessly invited the gymnasium students and the fathers of families, the youths and the grown men alike, to the 'shooting retreats.'... The barely dressed 'lady' who invited people to the booth of 'The Secrets of Hamburg, or a Night in St. Pauli,' should have been enough to justify her removal by the police. And then the shocking announcement, almost incredible of the much boasted about Imperial capital, and hardly to be believed by plain male and female citizens in the provinces, to the effect that the managers of the festival had consented to the employment, without pay, of 'young women' in large numbers, as bar-maids, instead of the waiters who applied for work.... We, German women, have thousands of occasions, as wives, mothers and as sisters, to send our husbands, children, daughters and brothers to Berlin in the service of the fatherland; we, consequently, pray to your Honor in all humbleness and in the confident expectation that, with the aid of the overpowering influence, which, as the chief magistrate of the Imperial capital, lies in your hand, you may inst.i.tute such investigations of those disgraceful occurrences, or adopt such other measures as to your Honor may seem fit, to the end that a recurrence of those orgies may not have to be apprehended at the pending Sedan festival, for instance...."

During the session of the Reichstag, from 1892 to 1893, the united Governments made an effort to put an end to the contradiction that governmental practice, on the one hand, and the Criminal Code on the other, find themselves in with regard to prost.i.tution. They introduced a bill that was to empower the police to designate certain habitations to prost.i.tutes. It was admitted that prost.i.tution could not be suppressed, and that, therefore, the most practical thing was to tolerate the thing in certain localities, and to control it. The bill--upon that all minds were agreed--would, if it became a law, have called again to life the brothels that were officially abolished in Prussia about 1845. The bill caused a great uproar, and it evoked a number of protests in which the warning was raised against the State's setting itself up as the protector of prost.i.tution, and thereby favoring the idea that the use of prost.i.tution was not in violation of good morals, or that the trade of the prost.i.tute was such that the State could allow and approve of. The bill, which met with the strongest opposition both on the floor of the Reichstag and in the committee, was pigeon-holed, and dared not again come into daylight. That, nevertheless, such a bill could at all take shape reveals the embarra.s.sment that society is in.

The administrative regulation of prost.i.tution raises in the minds of men not only the belief that the State allows the use of prost.i.tution, but also that such control protects them against disease. Indeed, this belief greatly promotes indulgence and recklessness on the part of men.

Brothels do not reduce s.e.xual diseases, they promote the same: _the men grow more careless and less cautious_.

Experience has taught that neither the establishment of houses of prost.i.tution, controlled by the police, nor the supervision and medical inspection, ordered by the police, afford the slightest guarantee against contagion. The nature of these diseases is frequently such that they are not to be easily or immediately detected. If there is to be any safety, the inspection would have to be held several times a day. That, however, is impossible in view of the number of women concerned, and also of the costs. Where thirty or forty prost.i.tutes must be "done" in an hour, inspection is hardly more than a farce; moreover, one or two inspections a week is wholly inadequate. The success of these measures also suffers s.h.i.+pwreck in the circ.u.mstance that the men, who transmit the germs of disease from one woman to another, remain free from all official annoyance. A prost.i.tute, just inspected and found healthy, may be infected that same hour by a diseased man, and she transmits the virus to other patrons, until the next inspection day, or until she has herself become aware of the disease. The control is not only illusory: These inspections, made at command, and conducted by male, instead of female physicians, hurt most deeply the sense of shame; and they contribute to its total ruination. This is a phenomenon confirmed by many physicians. Even the official report of the Berlin Police Department admits the fact by stating: "It may also be granted that _registration causes the moral sense of the prost.i.tute to sink_ still lower."[104] Accordingly, the prost.i.tutes try their utmost to escape this control. A further consequence of these police measures is that they make it extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, for the prost.i.tute ever again to return to a decent trade. _A woman, that has fallen under police control, is lost to society; she generally goes down in misery within a few years._ Accurately and exhaustively did the fifth Congress at Geneva for Combatting Immorality utter itself against the police regulation of prost.i.tutes, by declaring: "The compulsory medical inspection of prost.i.tutes is an all the more cruel punishment to the woman, seeing that, by destroying the remnants of shame, still possible within even the most abandoned, such inspection drags down completely into depravity the wretched being that is subjected thereto. The State, that means to regulate prost.i.tution with the police, forgets that it owes equal protection to both s.e.xes; it demoralizes and degrades women.

Every system for the official regulation of prost.i.tution has police arbitrariness for its consequence, as well as the violation of civic guaranties that are safeguarded to every individual, even to the greatest criminal, against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Seeing this violation of right is exercised to the injury of woman only, the consequence is an inequality, shocking to nature, between her and man.

Woman is degraded to the level of a mere means, and is no longer treated as a person. _She is placed outside of the pale of law._"

Of how little use police control is, England furnishes a striking ill.u.s.tration. In the year 1866 a law was enacted on the subject for places in which soldiers and marines were garrisoned. Now, then, while from 1860 to 1866, without the law, the lighter cases of syphilis had declined from 32.68 to 24.73 per cent., after a six years' enforcement of the new law, the percentage of diseased in 1872 was still 24.26. In other words, it was not one-half per cent. lower in 1872 than in 1866; but the average for these six years was 1-16 per cent. higher than in 1866. In sight of this, a special Commission, appointed in 1873, to investigate the effect of that law, arrived at the unanimous conclusion that "the periodical inspection of the women who usually have s.e.xual intercourse with the _personnel_ of the army and navy, _had, at best, not occasioned the slightest diminution in the number of cases_," and it _recommended the suspension_ of periodical inspections.

The effects of the Act of Inspection on the women subjected thereto were, however, quite different from those on the troops. In 1866, there were, to every 1,000 prost.i.tutes, 121 diseases; in 1868, after the law had been in force two years, there were 202. The number then gradually dropped, but, nevertheless, still exceeded in 1874 the figure for 1866 by 16 cases. Under the Act, deaths also increased frightfully among the prost.i.tutes. In 1865 the proportion was 9.8 to every 1,000 prost.i.tutes, whereas, in 1874 it had risen to 23. When, towards the close of the sixties, the English Government made the attempt to extend the Act of Inspection to all English cities, a storm of indignation arose from the women. The law was considered an affront to the whole s.e.x. The Habeas Corpus Act,--that fundamental law, that protects the English citizen against police usurpation--would, such was the sentiment, be suspended for women: any brutal policeman, animated by revenge or any other base motive, would be free to seize any decent woman on the suspicion of her being a prost.i.tute, whereas the licentiousness of the men would remain unmolested, aye, would be protected and fed, by just such a law.

Although this intervention in behalf of the outcasts of their s.e.x readily exposed the English women to misrepresentation and degrading remarks from the quarter of narrow-minded men, the women did not allow themselves to be held back from energetically opposing the introduction of the law that was an insult to their s.e.x. In newspaper articles and pamphlets the "pros" and "cons" were discussed by men and women; in Parliament, the extension of the law was, first, prevented; its repeal followed later. The German police is vested with a similar power, and cases that have forced themselves into publicity from Berlin, Leipsic and other cities, prove that its abuse--or be it "mistakes" in its exercise--is easy; nevertheless, of an energetic opposition to such regulations naught is heard. Even in middle cla.s.s Norway, brothels were forbidden in 1884; in 1888 the compulsory registration of the prost.i.tutes and the inspection connected therewith were abolished in the capital, Christiania; and in January, 1893, the enactment was made general for the whole country. Very rightly does Mrs. Guillaume-Schack remark upon the "protective" measures adopted by the State in behalf of the men: "To what end do we teach our sons to respect virtue and morality if the State p.r.o.nounces immorality a necessary evil; and if, before the young man has at all reached mental maturity, the State leads woman to him stamped by the authorities as a merchandise, as a toy for his pa.s.sion?"

Let a s.e.xually diseased man, in his unbridled career of licentiousness, contaminate ever so many of these poor beings--who, to the honor of woman be it said, are mostly driven by bitter want or through seduction to ply their disgraceful trade,--the scurvy fellow remains unmolested.

But woe to the woman who does not forthwith submit to inspection and treatment! The garrison cities, university towns, etc., with their congestion of vigorous, healthy men, are the chief centers of prost.i.tution and of its dangerous diseases, that are carried thence into the remotest corners of the land, and everywhere spread infection. The same holds with the sea towns. What the moral qualifications are with a large number of our students the following utterance in a publication for the promotion of morality may give an idea of: "_With by far the larger number of students, the views entertained upon matters of morality are shockingly low, aye, they are downright unclean._"[105] And these are the circles--boastful of their "German breed," and "German morals"--from which our administrative officers, our District Attorneys and our Judges are in part recruited.

"Thy sins shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." This Bible sentence falls upon the dissipated and s.e.xually diseased man in the fullest sense of the word, unhappily also upon the innocent woman. "Attacks of apoplexy with young men and also women, several manifestations of spinal debility and softening of the brains, all manner of nervous diseases, affections of the eyes, cariosity, inflammation of the intestines, sterility and atrophy, _frequently proceed from nothing else than chronic and neglected, and, often for special reasons, concealed syphilis_.... As things now are, ignorance and lightheadedness also contribute towards _turning blooming daughters of the land into anaemic, listless creatures_, who, under the burden of a chronic inflammation of the pelvis, _have to atone for the excesses committed by their husbands before and after marriage_."[106] In the same sense does Dr. Blaschke utter himself:[107] "Epidemics like cholera and smallpox, diphtheria and typhus, whose visible effects are, by reason of their suddenness, realized by all, although hardly equal to syphilis in point of virulence, and, in point of diffusion, not to be compared therewith, yet are they the terror of the population ... while before syphilis society stands, one feels inclined to say, with frightful indifference." The fault lies in the circ.u.mstance that it is considered "improper" to talk openly of such things. Did not even the German Reichstag stop short before a resolution to provide by law that s.e.xual diseases, as well as all others, shall be treated by Sick-Benefit a.s.sociations?

The syphilitic virus is in its effects the most tenacious and hardest poison to stamp out. Many years after an outbreak has been overcome, and the patient believes every trace to be wiped out, the sequels frequently crop up afresh in the wife or the new-born child;[108] and a swarm of ailments among wives and children trace their causes back, respectively, to marital and parental venereal diseases. With some who are born blind, the misfortune is due to the father's sins, the consequences of which transmitted themselves to the wife, and from her to the child.

Weak-minded and idiotic children may frequently ascribe their infirmity to the same cause. Finally, what dire disaster may be achieved through vaccination by an insignificant drop of syphilitic blood, our own days can furnish cra.s.s ill.u.s.trations of.

In the measure that men, willingly or otherwise, renounce marriage, and seek the gratification of natural impulses through illegitimate channels, seductive allurements increase also. The great profits yielded by all undertakings that cater to immorality, attract numerous and unscrupulous business men, who spare no artifice of refinement to draw and keep customers. Account is taken of every demand, according to the rank and position of the custom, also of its means and readiness to bleed. If some of these "public houses" in our large cities were to blab out their secrets, the fact would appear that their female tenants--mostly of low extraction, without either culture or education, often unable to write their own names, but possessed of all the mere physical charms--stand in the most intimate relations with "leaders of society," with men of high intelligence and culture. There would be found among these Cabinet Ministers, high military dignitaries, Councillors, members of Legislatures, Judges, etc., going in and out, and side by side with representatives of the aristocracy of birth, of finance, of commerce and of industry,--all of them, who, by day and in society, strut about with grave and dignified mien as "representatives and guardians of morality, of order, of marriage, and of the family,"

and who stand at the head of the Christian charity societies and of societies for the "suppression of prost.i.tution." Modern capitalist society resembles a huge carnival festival, at which all seek to deceive and fool one another. Each carries his official disguise with dignity, in order later, unofficially and with all the less restraint, to give a loose to his inclinations and pa.s.sions. All the while, public life is running over with "Morality," "Religion" and "Propriety." In no age was there greater hypocrisy than in ours. The number of the augurs swells daily.

The supply of women for purposes of l.u.s.t rises even more rapidly than the demand. Our increasingly precarious social conditions--want, seduction, the love for an externally brilliant and apparently easy life--furnish the female candidates from all social strata. Quite typically does a novel of Hans Wachenhusen[109] depict the state of things in the capital of the German Empire. The author expresses himself on the purpose of his work in these words: "My book deals mainly with the victims of the female s.e.x and its steady depreciation, due to the unnatural plight of our social and civic state, through its own fault, through neglect of education, through the craving of luxury and the increasing light-headed supply in the market of life. It speaks of this s.e.x's increasing surplus, which renders daily more hopeless the new-born ones, more prospectless those that grow up.... I wrote much in the same way as the District Attorney puts together the past life of a criminal, in order to establish therefrom the measure of his guilt. Novels being generally considered works of fiction, permissible opposites of Truth, the following is, in that sense, no novel, but a true picture of life, without coloring." In Berlin, things are no better and no worse than in other large cities. Whether Greek-Orthodox St. Petersburg or Catholic Rome, Germanic-Christian Berlin or heathen Paris, puritanic London or gay Vienna, approach nearer to Babylon of old is hard to decide.

"Prost.i.tution possesses its written and its unwritten laws, its resources, its various resorts, from the poorest cottage to the most splendid palace, its numberless grades from the lowest to the most refined and cultivated; it has its special amus.e.m.e.nts and public places of meeting, its police, its hospitals, its prisons and its literature."[110] "We no longer celebrate the festival of Osiris, the Baccha.n.a.lia and the Indian orgies of the spring month; but in Paris and other large cities, under the black cloak of night, behind the walls of 'public' and 'private' houses, people give themselves over to orgies and Baccha.n.a.lia that the boldest pen dare not describe."[111]

Under such conditions, the traffic in female flesh has a.s.sumed mammoth proportions. It is conducted on a most extensive scale, and is most admirably organized in the very midst of the seats of civilization and culture, rarely attracting the notice of the police. A swarm of brokers, agents, carriers, male and female, ply the trade with the same unconcern as if they dealt in any other merchandise. Birth certificates are forged, and bills of lading are drawn up with accurate descriptions of the qualifications of the several "articles," and are handed over to the carriers as directions for the purchasers. As with all merchandise, the price depends upon the quality, and the several categories are a.s.sorted and consigned, according to the taste and the requirements of the customers in different places and countries. The slyest manipulations are resorted to in order to evade the snares and escape the vigilance of the police; not infrequently large sums are used to shut the eyes of the guardians of the law. A number of such cases have been established, especially in Paris.

Germany enjoys the sorry fame of being the woman market for half the world. The innate German migratory disposition seems to animate also a portion of the women. In larger numbers than those of any other people, the Austrian excepted, do they furnish their contingent to the supply of international prost.i.tution. German women populate the harems of the Turks, as well as the public houses of central Siberia, and as far away as Bombay, Singapore, San Francisco and Chicago. In a book of travels,[112] the author, W. Joest, speaks as follows on the German trade in girls: "People so often grow warm in our moral Germany over the slave trade that some African negro Prince may be carrying on, or over conditions in Cuba and Brazil, but they should rather keep in mind the beam in their own eyes: _in no country is there such a trade with white female slaves, from no country is the export of this living merchandise as large as it is from Germany and Austria_. The road that these girls take can be accurately followed. From Hamburg they are s.h.i.+pped to South America; Bahia and Rio de Janeiro receive their quotas; the largest part is destined for Montevideo and Buenos Ayres, while a small rest goes through the Straits of Magellan as far as Valparaiso.

Another stream is steered via England, or direct to North America, where, however, it can hold its own only with difficulty against the domestic product, and, consequently, splits up down the Mississippi as far as New Orleans and Texas, or westward to California. Thence, the coast is supplied as far south as Panama; while Cuba, the West Indies and Mexico draw their supplies from New Orleans. Under the t.i.tle of "Bohemians," further droves of German girls are exported over the Alps to Italy and thence further south to Alexandria, Suez, Bombay, Calcutta and Singapore, aye, even to Hongkong and as far as Shanghai. The Dutch Indies and Eastern Asia, j.a.pan, especially, are poor markets, seeing that Holland does not allow white girls of this kind in its colonies, while in j.a.pan the daughters of the soil are themselves too pretty and cheap. American compet.i.tion from San Francisco also tends to spoil the otherwise favorable chances. Russia is provided from East Prussia, Pomerania and Poland. The first station is usually Riga. Here the dealers from St. Petersburg and Moscow supply themselves, and s.h.i.+p their goods in large quant.i.ties to Nischni-Novgorod and beyond the Ural Mountains to Irbit and Krestofsky, aye as far as the interior of Siberia. I found, for instance, a German girl in Tschita who had been traded in this way. This wonderful trade is thoroughly organized, it is attended to by agents and commercial travelers. _If ever the Foreign Department of the German Empire were to demand of its consuls reports on this matter, quite interesting statistical tables could be put together._"

This trade flourishes to this day at its fullest, as proved in the autumn of 1893 by a Social Democratic delegate to the German Reichstag.

The number of prost.i.tutes is hard to estimate; accurately it can not be at all given. The police can state approximately the number of women whose princ.i.p.al occupation is prost.i.tution; but it can not do this with regard to the much larger number of those who resort to it as a side means of income. All the same, the figures approximately known are frightfully high. According to v. Oettingen, the number of prost.i.tutes in London was, as early as the close of the sixties, estimated at 80,000. In Paris the number of registered prost.i.tutes in 1892 was 4,700, but fully one-third escape police control. In all Paris, there were, in 1892, about sixty brothels, with 600 to 700 prost.i.tutes, and the number of brothels is steadily on the decline. On the other hand, based upon an investigation, inst.i.tuted by the Munic.i.p.al Council of Paris, in 1889, the number of women who prost.i.tute themselves is placed at the enormous figure of 120,000. In Berlin, the number of prost.i.tutes, registered with the police, was:--

1886 3,006 1887 3,063 1888 3,392 1889 3,703 1890 4,039

In 1890, there were six physicians employed, whose duty it was to devote two hours a day to inspection.[113] Since then the number of physicians has been increased. The prost.i.tutes, registered with the police, const.i.tute, however, in Berlin also, only a very small portion of the total. Expert sources estimate it at not less than 50,000. In the year 1890 alone, there were in 9,024 liquor saloons 2,022 bar-maids, almost all of whom yield to prost.i.tution. Furthermore, the, from year to year, rising number of girls, arrested for disorderly conduct, shows that prost.i.tution in Berlin is steadily on the increase. The numbers of these arrests were:--

1881 10,878 1884 11,157 1887 13,358 1890 16,605

Of the 16,605 girls, arrested in 1890, there were 9,162 carried for sentence before the Judge. There were, accordingly, 30 of these at every session of the court, and 128 of them were placed under the police by judicial decree. Already in 1860, it was calculated in Hamburg that every ninth woman was a prost.i.tute. Since then the proportion has become greatly worse.

In Germany, the number of prost.i.tutes probably runs up to 180,000.

Accordingly, we here have to do with a large female army, that considers prost.i.tution as a means of livelihood; and the number of victims, whom disease and death claim, is in proportion.[114]