was her oft-quoted answer.  It is, indeed, a solitary phrase that slips in, perhaps as the expression of a momentary mood; one may make too much of it.  More truly characteristic is the fine saying in which her Epicurean philosophy seems to stretch out towards Nietzsche:  “La joie de l’esprit en marque la force.”

The frank acceptance of prostitution by the spiritual or even the temporal power has since the Renaissance become more and more exceptional.  The opposite extreme of attempting to uproot prostitution has also in practice been altogether abandoned.  Sporadic attempts have indeed been made, here and there, to put down prostitution with a strong hand even in quite modern times.  It is now, however, realized that in such a case the remedy is worse than the disease.

In 1860 a Mayor of Portsmouth felt it his duty to attempt to suppress prostitution.  “In the early part of his mayoralty,” according to a witness before the Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts (p. 393), “there was an order passed that every beerhouse-keeper and licensed victualer in the borough known to harbor these women would be dealt with, and probably lose his license.  On a given day about three hundred or four hundred of these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for several days.  They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for many reasons they were refused admittance....  These women wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the women were allowed to go back to their former places.”

Similar experiments have been made even more recently in America.  “In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the houses of prostitutes were closed, the inmates turned out upon the streets, and were refused lodging and even food by the citizens of that place.  A wave of popular remonstrance, all over the country, at the outrage on humanity, created a reaction which resulted in a last condition by no means better than the first.”  In the same year also a similar incident occurred in New York with the same unfortunate results (Isidore Dyer, “The Municipal Control of Prostitution in the United States,” report presented to the Brussels International Conference in 1899).

There grew up instead the tendency to regulate prostitution, to give it a semi-official toleration which enabled the authorities to exercise a control over it, and to guard as far as possible against its evil by medical and police inspection.  The new brothel system differed from the ancient mediaeval houses of prostitution in important respects; it involved a routine of medical inspection and it endeavored to suppress any rivalry by unlicensed prostitutes outside.  Bernard Mandeville,