While it may be difficult for the federal authorities to accomplish this protection and will doubtless require an extension of the powers of the Department of Immigration, certainly no one will doubt that it is the business of the city itself to extend much more protection to young girls who so thoughtlessly walk upon its streets.  Yet, in spite of the grave consequences which lack of proper supervision implies, the municipal treatment of commercialized vice not only differs in each city but varies greatly in the same city under changing administrations.

The situation is enormously complicated by the pharisaic attitude of the public which wishes to have the comfort of declaring the social evil to be illegal, while at the same time it expects the police department to regulate it and to make it as little obvious as possible.  In reality the police, as they themselves know, are not expected to serve the public in this matter but to consult the desires of the politicians; for, next to the fast and loose police control of gambling, nothing affords better political material than the regulation of commercialized vice.  First in line is the ward politician who keeps a disorderly saloon which serves both as a meeting-place for the vicious young men engaged in the traffic and as a market for their wares.  Back of this the politician higher up receives his share of the toll which this business pays that it may remain undisturbed.  The very existence of a segregated district under police regulation means, of course, that the existing law must be nullified or at least rendered totally inoperative.  When police regulation takes the place of law enforcement a species of municipal blackmail inevitably becomes intrenched.  The police are forced to regulate an illicit trade, but because the men engaged in an unlawful business expect to pay money for its protection, the corruption of the police department is firmly established and, as the Chicago vice commission report points out, is merely called “protection to the business.”  The practice of grafting thereafter becomes almost official.  On the other hand, any man who attempts to show mercy to the victims of that business, or to regulate it from the victim’s point of view, is considered a traitor to the cause.  Quite recently a former inspector of police in Chicago established a requirement that every young girl who came to live in a disreputable house within a prescribed district must be reported to him within an hour after her arrival.  Each one was closely questioned as to her reasons for entering into the life.  If she was very young, she was warned of its inevitable consequences and urged to abandon her project.  Every assistance was offered her to return to work and to live a normal life.  Occasionally a girl was desperate and it was sometimes necessary that she be forcibly detained in the police station until her friends could be communicated with.  More often she was glad to avail herself of the chance of escape; practically always, unless she had already become romantically entangled with a disreputable young man, whom she firmly believed to be her genuine lover and protector.