Arguments are unnecessary to prove the existence of prostitution. The evil is so notorious that none can possibly gainsay it. But when its extent, its causes, or its effects are questioned, a remarkable degree of ignorance or carelessness is manifested. Few care to know the secret springs from which prostitution emanates; few are anxious to know how wide the stream extends; few have any desire to know the devastation it causes. Society has formally laid a prohibition on the subject, and he who presumes to argue that what affects one may injure all; he who believes that the malady in his neighbor’s family to-day may visit his own to-morrow; he who dares to intimate that a vice which has blighted the happiness of one parent, and ruined the character of one daughter, may produce, must inevitably produce, the same sad results in another circle; in short, he who dares allude to the subject of prostitution in any other than a mysterious and whispered manner, must prepare to meet the frowns and censure of society.

Keen was the knowledge of human nature, acute the perception of worldly sentiment in the breast of an accomplished woman lately deceased, when she wrote, “To such grievances as society can not readily cure, it usually forbids utterance on pain of its scorn; this scorn being only a sort of tinseled cloak to its deformed weakness.” How true the idea, many a man who has attempted to unveil a hidden crime, or probe a secret sorrow, but too well knows.

Not then to prove that prostitution exists, for that is so glaringly palpable that all must perforce concede it, but to ascertain its origin, progress, and end, is the object of these pages. The finger of scorn may be pointed at the labor; the self-righteous world may wrap itself in a mantle of prudery, and close its ears against sickening details; the complacent public may demur at an approach to sin and misery; the self-satisfied community may object to view wretchedness drawn from the obscurity of its hiding-place to the full light of investigation: nevertheless, there is now existing a moral pestilence which creeps insidiously into the privacy of the domestic circle, and draws thence the myriads of its victims, and which saps the foundation of that holy confidence, the first, the most beautiful attraction of home. There is an ever-present physical danger, so fatally destructive that the world would recoil, as from the spring of a serpent, could they but appreciate its malignity; a malignity which is daily and hourly threatening every man, woman, and child in the community; which for hundreds of years has been slowly but steadily making its way onward, leaving a track marked with broken hopes, ruined frames, and sad recollections of stricken friends; and which now, in the full force of an impetus acquired and aggravated by concealment, almost defies opposition. There is a social wrong which forces upon the community vast expenditures for an object of which they are ignorant; which swells the public taxes and increases individual outlay for a vice which has hitherto been studiously kept in concealment. These reasons were sufficiently powerful to induce the necessary researches for the accomplishment of this work, and they are considered sufficient to justify its publication.

An unseen evil, of which only the effects are visible, is more frightful than one whose dimensions are apparent. No statesman would grapple with a political question until he knew its “form and pressure;” no philanthropist can satisfactorily encounter an unknown misery. Both may judge, to some slight extent, of the evil they can not see, but the one can not venture to remove it, nor the other to modify its woes until its power is fully known. This has so far been the case with prostitution. The world has studiously drawn a screen before it, and when the sufferings of its victims became so apparent that the vice was palpable, an additional mystery was thrown around it, and the people of the nineteenth century know it but as a sin with which they can not interfere. It has all the imagined force of a monster, because of its obscurity; all the virulence of an avenging fiend, because its true powers are hidden; and even those who suffered from its poison have been led to believe that its mysteries were so inscrutable as to defy all approach.

Hitherto reticence has been the policy. This position has been held too long, for it is false in principle and injurious in tendency. The day has arrived when the shroud must be removed; when the public safety imperiously demands an investigation into the matter; when those who regard it as a small wrong may have their attention directed to its real proportions; and when those who have viewed it as an unmanageable giant may be alike undeceived.

A small matter it decidedly is not: the eternal ruin of one misguided woman would effectually preclude such an opinion; the physical ruin of an impetuous man would prohibit such an estimate, and both these are among those daily consequences which call for an investigation. There is scarcely a person in the community who can not recall some circumstance he has known to support this assertion; for so wide-spread has been the baneful influence of prostitution, that there are comparatively few but have suffered, through friends or relatives, if not in their own persons.

Nor is it unmanageable, except when concealed. Stripped of the veil of secrecy which has enveloped it, there appears a vice arising from an inextinguishable natural impulse on the part of one sex, fostered by confiding weakness in the other; from social disabilities on one side, and social oppression on the other; from the wiles of the deceiver working upon unsuspecting credulity; and, finally, from the stern necessity to live.

It is a mere absurdity to assert that prostitution can ever be eradicated. Strenuous and well-directed efforts for this purpose have been made at different times. The whole power of the Church, where it possessed not merely a spiritual, but an actual secular arm, has been in vain directed against it. Nature defied the mandates of the clergy, and the threatened punishments of an after-life were futile to deter men from seeking, and women from granting, sinful pleasures in this world. Monarchs victorious in the field and unsurpassed in the council-chamber have bent all their energies of will, and brought all the aids of power to crush it out, but before these vice has not quailed. The guilty women have been banished, scourged, branded, executed; their partners have been subjected to the same punishment; held up to public opinion as immoral; denuded of their civil rights; have seen their offenses visited upon their families; have been led to the stake, the gibbet, and the block, and still prostitution exists. The teachings of morality and virtue have been powerless here. In some cases they restrain individuals; upon the aggregate they are inoperative. The researches of science have been unheeded. They have traced the physical results of vice, and have foreshadowed its course. They have demonstrated that the suffering parents of this generation will bequeath to their posterity a heritage of ruined powers; that the malady which illicit pleasure communicates is destructive to the hopes of man; that the human frame is perceptibly and regularly depreciating by the operation of this poison, and have shown that even the desire for health and long life, one of the most powerful motives that ever influences a human being, has been of no avail to stem the torrent.

But if history proves that prostitution can not be suppressed, it also demonstrates that it can be regulated, and directed into channels where its most injurious results can be encountered, and its dangerous tendencies either entirely arrested or materially weakened. This is the policy to which civilized communities are tending, and to aid the movement it is needful that the subject be examined, even at the risk of the world’s contumely.

In some of the countries of Continental Europe the examination has been made, and the natural consequences of a searching and philosophical investigation are there seen in legislation, which aims not to dam a wild torrent, but to lead it where its rage may be harmlessly spent. When a mighty river overflows its banks, the uncontrollable flood works wide-spread ruin and devastation along its course; but the same river, confined to its natural channel, may be of immense service in carrying off a vast amount of filth and debris that otherwise would cause pestilence and death. In this Western hemisphere, and in the mother-country, Anglo-Saxon prudery has stood aloof from inquiring into a vice which every one admits to be offensive to the moral sense of the people, and has submitted to an accumulation of evils rather than seek to abate them, until the suffering and the wrong have become so boldly defined that they force themselves upon the public eye.

Assuredly it is high time to inaugurate a new line of action; to cast aside as unworthy those puerile doubts of propriety and expediency which have stood in the way of an onward progress. The very meaning of the word “propriety” supplies an argument in favor of the proposed course. Conventionally, it has been construed to mean an indefinite something which every person has moulded to suit his own predilections. Upon the same principle that a man who makes his living dishonestly would consider it a glaring impropriety to examine the laws of fraud, has the world decided it an outrage against propriety to inquire into a vice which many secretly practice, but all publicly condemn. Reasoning like this has been too often applied, and with too great an effect. Can there possibly be an impropriety in investigating a vice which threatens the purity and peace of the community, because in so doing unpleasant facts will be disclosed? Is there not a far more striking inconsistency in supinely allowing the same vice to exist and increase, without hinderance or examination?

Again: it must be conceded that the demands of propriety are universal. They are not restricted to any person or place, but press with equal force upon every member of the community in every possible situation. The common welfare is involved in their general application, and he well merits the good opinion of his fellow-men who points them to a case where propriety is outraged, and asks their aid to apply the remedy. In a word, propriety demands an exposure of all acts of impropriety, and the application of the needful cure.

Then the question arises, In what form shall the exposure be made? Truth admits of but one reply. It must be so explicit as to leave no doubt of its meaning; it must be so guarded as not to offend in its application. If the first of these rules is not observed, any disclosure will be worthless; if the remarks are vague, indefinite, or generalized, no good result can accrue. Take a simple illustration. It conveys no determinate idea to a benevolent man to say, “There is distress in a certain city;” but point him to the particular locality, and give him the precise circumstances, and his sympathy is at once aroused and effectively exerted. The same rule is equally applicable to a monster vice and to an individual hardship, and upon this principle have the disclosures of the following pages been based. The idea has been to particularize sufficiently to draw attention, but not enough to gratify a prurient inclination; to exhibit the evil in a truthful aspect, but not in a fascinating form. None can doubt the truth of Pope’s well-known lines:

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

The endeavor should be to fulfill the imperative demands of propriety, without disturbing the conventional prejudices implied by the same word.Then, as to expediency, or the fitness to effect some good end. It must be admitted that the mere fact of proving prostitution capable of control is a good object, and it is apparent that such proof can not be afforded while the vice remains a myth. Something must be known of its haunts and its customs ere any one can decide in what shape a supervisory power can be best applied. This knowledge must be obtained in defiance of deep-rooted prejudices. Commonplace objections about the danger of touching impure objects are best met by the remark that to the pure all things are pure. Though benevolence may at times lead its devotees through scenes where moral purity is shocked, and to neighborhoods where filth and obscenity vitiate the very air they breathe, there is no contamination to those whose motives are good. Inexpediency has been urged as often and as falsely as impropriety. In their application to this subject, both are perverted from their legitimate meaning; both are made subservient to a false taste, or a mawkish sensibility which fears to encounter an imaginary danger.

The safety of the community, so far as its sanitary condition is concerned, imperatively demands an inquiry like this. It is no longer necessary to prove that syphilitic taint is propagated by the direct agency of prostitution. That fact has been demonstrated years ago, and, reasoning from it, we rightly infer that the ravages of that poison can be checked by compelling abandoned women to certain judicious observances. One thing is absolutely certain, that the public health can not be endangered by the interference, and there is a moral certainty that it may be materially benefited. The value of this investigation, so far as relates to purely physical questions, consists in not merely pointing out where the evil is, but in showing to what extent it exists, and then contrasting the state of venereal disease, its rapid increase and augmenting virulence in this country, with its condition in those nations where similar investigations have resulted in practical measures.

Public safety imperatively demands this investigation as a means of tracing the habitual resorts of criminals. It is not necessary to inform any man conversant with city life that houses of ill fame are the common resort of the most abandoned of the male part of the community. There the assassin, against whose hand no life is secure, has a safe retreat. The burglar, who commits his depredations under cover of the shade of night; the swindler, who defrauds the honest trader by false representations; the counterfeiter, who earns a precarious living by his unholy trade—these hold there high carnival. There they meet to recount their exploits and divide the spoils; to devise new schemes of wickedness, or lay plans by which simple youths may be allured to vilest practices.

There is another phase of public safety which demands this investigation, namely, the preservation of female honor. Those who frequent these haunts of vice are forever employed in casting about snares to entrap the young, the unwary, or the friendless woman. They tempt her to minister to their libidinous desires, and swell the already overcrowded ranks of frailty. While these resorts are secret, there is every facility for such infamous conduct, with but slight probability of its detection, and still slighter opportunities for prevention. Thither, too, young men, and even boys, are inveigled by those who have grown old in vice, and there are they taught the horrid mysteries of unhallowed passion. Many a promising youth has left such haunts as these not only with a ruined constitution, but with loss of character and honor; many whose names swell the criminal records of the day date their first step in crime from the hour they entered a common brothel.

Again: Public safety demands this investigation because of the superior opportunities it will afford to reformatory measures. Start not at the supposition of reforming courtesans. There is hope even for them, for they are human beings, though depraved. Their hearts throb with the same sympathies that move the more favored of their sex. Their minds are susceptible to the same emotions as those of other females. Few of them become vile from natural instincts: poor victims of circumstances, many of them would gladly amend if the proper means were used at the proper time.

“There is in every human heart
Some not entirely barren part,
Where flowers of richest scent may blow,
And fruit in glorious sunlight grow.”

This consummation can be achieved only when the pseudo-virtue of the world shall yield to true benevolence, and charity be in deed what it professes in name.

If public safety is thus urgent, private interest also has arguments in favor of investigating prostitution. No one need be told that public aid is required to give medical treatment to the unfortunate men and women tainted by this vice; nor need any one be assured that such aid, administered with every regard to economy, requires yearly a large portion of the taxes paid by individuals. It would be sheer folly to assert that any measures which can follow this inquiry will be efficacious in eradicating syphilis, but experience proves that an effective supervision would materially abate its influence, render it curable in a much shorter space of time, and reduce the expenses for each patient in a corresponding ratio.

Another large claim upon the public funds arises from the necessity of employing an extensive judicial and police organization to deal with the crime and the criminals generated and fostered in houses of ill fame. Nests of vice as they are now in their darkness and seclusion, it would be impossible to suppose a more fitting nursery for crime, or one whence more criminals would emanate. As with disease, so with crime. It can not be suppressed by placing its retreats under public notice, but it can be watched, and, once brought to the light of day, half its dangers and difficulties become surmountable.

Finally, private interest demands this investigation on mere private grounds—the individual and personal expenses caused by diseases contracted by debauchery. There is the money a working man must pay for his cure: this is his share of the loss. There is the unproductive time, and the loss of profits upon his labor: this is his employer’s sacrifice. There is the deprivation of comforts and necessaries experienced by his family and dependents: this is their penalty. Society is thus involved in a general loss on account of an act of folly, or passion, or crime (call it which you please), committed in a concealed and secret haunt, and such loss could be saved by the intervention of proper means.

Common sense asks for a full investigation of all the evils attending prostitution. In the every-day affairs of life, any man who feels the pressure of a particular evil looks at once for its cause. He may be neither a philosopher nor a logician, and may never have heard of or read any of the luminous treatises which professedly simplify science, yet he knows very well that for every effect there must be some adequate cause, and for this he generally searches diligently till he can find and remove it. But here, in the city of New York, is a population who claim to be as intelligent as any on the Western continent, who have been for years suffering from the effects of a vice in purse and person; who have paid and are paying every year large sums of money on account of it; who witness every day some broken constitution or ruined character resulting from it, and who yet have never thought of seeking out the cause! Is it now too late to enlist your sympathies in the undertaking?

Hence we conclude that propriety, expediency, public safety, private interest, and common sense demand an investigation like this now submitted to the reader. And what is the argument brought forward to oppose it? The world’s scorn—“this scorn being only a sort of tinseled cloak to its deformed weakness.” But is not this scorn powerless against the array of favoring motives? Will it stand the test of comparison with any one of them, much less of all? Is not its influence lost when its real character is known? The reckless carelessness which has suffered a growing vice to increase and multiply, which has permitted a deadly Upas-tree to take root and blossom in the community until its poisonous exhalations threaten universal infection; which has, by its actual indifference, fostered vice, promoted seduction, perpetuated disease, and entailed death; shall this deformed weakness now raise its trembling hands, and exhibit its tottering frame, and lift its puny voice to forbid an examination into the sources of the danger? Has not the finger of this scorn too long forbid the search for truth? Has not the hour arrived when truth will speak trumpet-tongued, and when her voice must be heard?

Now the question will arise, Has the world’s indifference produced these evils? Undoubtedly it has, and in the following manner: Laws have been placed upon the statute-book declaring prostitutes, and houses of prostitution, and all who live by such means, illegal and immoral. There the law yet stands. At uncertain intervals some poor and friendless woman is arrested as a vagrant, and, to appease the offended majesty of law, she is sent to prison, a scapegoat for five thousand of her class. It also sometimes happens that another woman equally guilty, but with money or influence, is arrested at the same time and for the same offense, and before she reaches the prison walls a legal quibble has been raised and she is free. Is there no culpable indifference in this? Houses of prostitution are proscribed by law. How many of them are ever indicted, or, if indicted, how many are suppressed? This, too, is owing to criminal neglect, and it is aggravated by the injurious effects arising from the mere circumstance of allowing a law to exist, and making no efforts to enforce it. The character of a people is judged, not by the laws that are made, but by the strictness with which those that do exist are enforced and observed. In regard to the first, there may be exhibited an acute perception of an existing evil, and a desire to reform it by legislation; but a second glance may reveal no wish to make this legislation effective. In the special matter of prostitution, the opinion is expressed elsewhere that prohibitory laws are worse than useless, and in the experience of New York City there is nothing to shake that opinion, notwithstanding the fact that the efforts made to enforce them are so “few and far between.” Had existing laws been more vigorously enforced, their inefficiency would long since have been much better understood than it now is, and people would not have rested under the delusion that every thing necessary has been done.

There are yet other cases of culpable indifference. These same proscribed houses of prostitution are suffered to exist uncontrolled, and to spread disease and increase crime and vagrancy in all parts of the city. It has been generally conceded that they can not be suppressed. What effort has been made to hold in check their baneful influence? None—literally none. The statesman has looked on appalled at an evil of whose magnitude he could form no correct idea; the clergyman has hesitated to encounter those who he judged would not respectfully receive his admonitions; the masses of society have shrunk from considering a subject which was repugnant and distasteful. Is there no guilty indifference in this? There can be but one answer to this query; but one opinion as to the share this general apathy has had in fostering the evil.

To substitute for this apathy a healthy action is the object of this investigation. It is but the means to an end. In themselves, as mere matters of information, the facts and deductions presented in the following pages can do nothing but demonstrate the necessity of exertion; but of this necessity they do afford overwhelming demonstration.

Thus much for the general arguments as to the necessity of a work of this nature. There are other special and local causes which led to its accomplishment in the present form.

“The Governors of the Alms-House of the City and County of New York,” or, as they are more generally known, “The Ten Governors,” is a body called into existence by an act of the State Legislature passed April 6, 1849, specially to take charge of the vagrant and pauper institutions of the city. The present members of the Board are the following well-known citizens:[1]

C. Godfrey Gunther, Esq., President.
Isaac J. Oliver, Esq., Secretary.
Washington Smith, Esq.[2]
Anthony Dugro, Esq.[3]
Cornelius V. Anderson, Esq.
Isaac Townsend, Esq.
Daniel F. Tiemann, Esq.
Joseph S. Taylor, Esq.
P. G. Moloney, Esq.
Benjamin F. Pinckney, Esq.

At the time these investigations commenced two other prominent men were also members of the organization, Hon. Edward C. West (now Surrogate of the city) and Simeon Draper, Esq. Both of these gentlemen had served as President of the Board of Governors with honor to themselves and satisfaction to their colleagues and the public; both took a lively interest in the projected inquiry, and to both am I indebted for much valuable assistance.

The act establishing the Board of Governors assigned to them, with their other duties, the medical care of all persons who had contracted infectious diseases in the practice of debauchery, and who required charitable aid to restore them to health. The result was that a very large number of persons, both male and female, chargeable to the citizens of New York through the medium of the institutions on Blackwell’s Island, came under their cognizance, and they became convinced that some measures were necessary in connection therewith.

Individual members had held this opinion for some time before any official action was taken, and foremost among such was Governor Isaac Townsend. This gentleman was one of the originally appointed Governors, and has been connected with the Board by re-election ever since—a circumstance which made him perfectly acquainted with all the workings of the present system, and to him the public is indebted for the conception of this undertaking. For years has he labored to bring about this result, with an indomitable energy and perseverance equaled only by his known benevolence and honesty of purpose. He frequently made the practicability of such a measure the subject of conversation with the gentleman who preceded me as Resident Physician of Blackwell’s Island, and, on my appointment (1853), the subject was again urged by him; nor could I be unaware of its importance. No official action was taken until the commencement of the year 1855. At that time Mr. Townsend was President of the Board, and one of his first acts in that capacity was to submit a list of interrogatories on the subject, which were adopted and transmitted to me. I transcribe them from the Minutes of the Board:

“At a meeting of the Board of Governors of the Alms-House, held January 23, 1855, the following interrogatories were presented by the President:

“1. What proportion of the inmates of the institutions on Blackwell’s Island under your medical charge are, in your opinion, directly or indirectly suffering from syphilis?

“2. Are, or are not, the number of such inmates steadily on the increase?

“3. Do not patients in the different institutions, particularly in the Penitentiary Hospital, often leave before the disease is cured, so that they are liable to infect other persons after their departure?

“4. Are not the offspring of parents affected with constitutional syphilis subject to many diseases of like character, which cause them to become a charge upon the city for long periods of time, and often for life?

“5. What are your views in reference to the best means of checking and decreasing this disease, and what plan, in your opinion, could be adopted to relieve New York City of the enormous amount of misery and expense caused by syphilis?

“6. You will reply in full to the above queries at the earliest possible date.

“Resolved, That a copy of the above be sent to the Resident Physician, Blackwell’s Island.”