the author of the Fable of the Bees, and an acute thinker, was a pioneer in the advocacy of this system.  In 1724, in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews, he argues that “the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most of the mischievous effects of this vice, but even lessen the quantity of whoring in general, and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can possibly be contained in.”  He proposed to discourage private prostitution by giving special privileges and immunities to brothels by Act of Parliament.  His scheme involved the erection of one hundred brothels in a special quarter of the city, to contain two thousand prostitutes and one hundred matrons of ability and experience with physicians and surgeons, as well as commissioners to oversee the whole.  Mandeville was regarded merely as a cynic or worse, and his scheme was ignored or treated with contempt.  It was left to the genius of Napoleon, eighty years later, to establish the system of “maisons de tolerance,” which had so great an influence over modern European practice during a large part of the last century and even still in its numerous survivals forms the subject of widely divergent opinions.

On the whole, however, it must be said that the system of registering, examining, and regularizing prostitutes now belongs to the past.  Many great battles have been fought over this question; the most important is that which raged for many years in England over the Contagious Diseases Acts, and is embodied in the 600 pages of a Report by a Select Committee on these Acts issued in 1882.  The majority of the members of the Committee reported favorably to the Acts which were, notwithstanding, repealed in 1886, since which date no serious attempt has been made in England to establish them again.

At the present time, although the old system still stands in many countries with the inert stolidity of established institutions, it no longer commands general approval.  As Paul and Victor Margueritte have truly stated, in the course of an acute examination of the phenomena of state-regulated prostitution as found in Paris, the system is “barbarous to start with and almost inefficacious as well.”  The expert is every day more clearly demonstrating its inefficacy while the psychologist and the sociologist are constantly becoming more convinced that it is barbarous.

It can indeed by no means be said that any unanimity has been attained.  It is obviously so urgently necessary to combat the flood of disease and misery which proceeds directly from the spread of syphilis and gonorrhoea, and indirectly from the prostitution which is the chief propagator of these diseases, that we cannot be surprised that many should eagerly catch at any system which seems to promise a palliation of the evils.  At the present time, however, it is those best acquainted with the operation of the system of control who have most clearly realized that the supposed palliation is for the most part illusory,[157]