The Story of the Chicago Vice Commission
Graham Taylor
The Vice Commission of the city of Chicago is the first municipal body constituted by ordinance of a city council, appointed by a mayor, and supported by appropriations from a city treasury, in order, as specified in the ordinance creating it, "to inquire into conditions existing within the limits of the city with reference to vice of various forms, including all practices which are physically and morally debasing and degrading and which affect the moral and physical welfare of the inhabitants of the city." Appropriations of $10,000 were granted by the council for expenses but the members served without compensation.
PREPARING THE WAY
The agitation against an intolerable situation, which led up to this action, was varied and prolonged. The most constructive part of it was done by various groups, in different ways, and without organized co-operation with one another. An effective law against pandering was secured by some reform organizations, women's clubs, and settlement workers, all of whom have aided in executing it in flagrant and typical cases. Its efficacy was thus tested and attested by each of these thoroughly worked-up concrete cases. Thus publicity was also given to this new advantage in attacking the most dangerous aggressions upon both the innocent and guilty victims of social vice. The Society for Social Hygiene had presented literature and lectures which united thoughtful people by effective presentation of facts and experiences. The Immigrants' Protective Association had secured the intervention of the United States Bureaus of Justice and Immigration to break up the international trade in immigrant women in Chicago. A local committee, without title or public appeal for support, began vigorous and successful efforts to detect and to convict white slavers in interstate and city trade. Its attorney became the most effective prosecutor of these cases. The Juvenile Protective Association made an aggressive campaign to prevent the crime "of contributing to juvenile delinquency." With the active co-operation of the Juvenile Court, many other exploiters of girls and children were severely punished, and others were deterred from preying upon them so boldly.
Long before the Chicago Law and Order League and the Chicago Midnight Mission
had pressed their agitation and attacks against some strongholds of the evil by
meetings in streets and churches, by newspaper stories, by speaking tours to
other towns and cities, by raiding houses, by prosecuting police court trials,
and by appealing to the Legislature for stricter laws. Then the churches, many
of which had participated individually in the movement, took federated action.
At a meeting in the Young Men's Christian Association Building under the
auspices of the Chicago Federation of Churches, representing about 600
Protestant congregations, the whole situation was openly discussed. Dean Walter
T. Sumner of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Chicago spoke out of the
experience of his work in one of the segregated districts, that surrounding the
cathedral and parish house. He presented a resolution calling for the
appointment of a commission. To the grateful surprise of the city Mayor Busse
promptly appointed the commission in March, 1910, and secured its confirmation,
official status, and financial appropriations by ordinance.
THE PERSONNEL
The personnel of the commission was representative of the occupations, nationalities, and religious interests of the city. Its thirty members included four lawyers, the chief justice of the Municipal Court, the judge of the Juvenile Court, the United States district attor-
( 240) -ney, and an attorney prominently identified with the Roman Catholic archdiocese and the Irish fellowship of the city. There were four physicians, all specialists, one the expert conducting the research of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, another the city's ablest commissioner of health, and a woman physician who had been medical examiner of children in schools. The second of the two women who rendered effective service on the commission is widely connected socially and in philanthropic and reform work, especially for delinquent girls. Among the other social workers were prominent representatives of Jewish charities, the superintendent of the House of Correction, and a settlement head-resident. One of the four business men was recently president of the Chicago Association of Commerce. Five professors represented Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Of the seven pastors, three were Roman Catholic parish priests, one a Jewish rabbi, another a bishop of the African Methodist Church, another the most distinguished preacher in the city, and the chairman, who is the dean of the cathedral.
How much or little the members of the commission knew of actual conditions, whatever their predilections might have been as to policy, they showed a wide open-mindedness to the facts of the investigation and a remarkable readiness to abide by decisions demanded by the conditions discovered. Their chairman thus accurately describes the remarkable experience which rendered a unanimous report possible.
As time went on solid facts were presented uncertainty as to the best solution of the problem gradually disappeared. A period of revulsion against conditions and of doubt as to the best course to pursue followed. Then began the constructive period, months filled with progressive studies based upon incontrovertible facts, with never a backward step. Illuminating conferences, widespread investigations in other cities as well as in Chicago, the fullest possible discussion and debate amongst its members in frequent meetings, often from four to twelve hours in duration, with the result that uncertainty was changed to certainty and thirty minds were absolutely unanimous in their conclusions.
This unanimity was due to the overwhelming logic of the facts found and attests the fearlessly loyal acceptance of every conclusion to which they led. The high average of attendance upon the general meetings; the personal participation by some of the busiest members upon the almost continuous conferences with witnesses; the laboring oars pulled by some of the hardest-worked men and women in the city in the patient, always arduous, and sometimes repellent work of the committees; the painstaking care in preparing, criticising, verifying, and finishing the voluminous report amply demonstrates the rare fidelity to a public trust upon the part of the commission as a whole. In this burden-bearing, personal friendship and good fellowship steadily grew and found fitting expression in a closing social occasion which may have given initiative to a voluntary organization to aid in conserving and realizing the results of the commission's work. The harmony and efficiency of the commission are in the members' own opinion due in no small part to the chairman who "proved himself to be adequate to the exacting task both in constructive ability and in the spirit of concession to the opinions of his colleagues."
FACTS CAME FIRST
The procedure of the committee practically developed in strict accordance with the phases of its complex, delicate, and difficult work as they successively evolved. Facts came first both in the order and as the basis of procedure. To find, classify, and interpret information as to widely prevalent and variant conditions required rare qualifications, especially for the personal direction of the whole investigation. Certain superficial facts, and others deeply hidden might be secured by those who had made the ways of the underworld their own. Some such investigators had to be used on special lines of inquiry and to a limited degree. But their reports were checked op and verified by going over the ground twice and in many instances were clinched by affidavits. The filing of documentary evidence to substantiate every statement open to challenge was a fixed
(241) policy of the investigation which was strictly adhered to throughout. To project the inquiry and to select investigators best adapted to its many specific lines of investigation ; to know what these lines should be, how to enter upon them and where to expect them to lead; to sift facts from assertions, significance from mere appearance, real meanings from deceptions; to deal not only with the easily accessible professionals, but with the illusive principals, bluffing police and other officials in connivance with crime, the real estate agents and Owners, employment bureau and hotel runners, charlatan doctors and vendors of illicit goods, wily politicians and secretive merchants and property-owners, required a combination of qualities hard to find.
But they were found in the person of George J. Kneeland who came to the commission from New York, where he was director of field investigations for the Committee of Fourteen. Trained in Illinois College and by part of a theological course in Yale Divinity School, he brought to this task, which tests social intelligence as severely as it does personal character, a sound judgment difficult to deceive, a single-purposed vision seldom confused, and a manhood which could neither be trapped nor smirched.
Fearlessly this investigation was pressed straight through every situation, however perilous or repellent. Such a mass of original material was gathered and filed as is probably not to be found elsewhere in the world. Much of it is unprintable, all of it is so relevant and substantiating, that it is securely deposited in a safe deposit vault in the custody of three of the commissioners who hold it in trust.
Next to the first hand knowledge of fact thus gained from those directly involved, at the places and times they were seeking their prey, information was sought from many who came in various contacts with the sources and effects of the social evil. Ninety-eight conferences were held with a great variety of informants. Sometimes they were in the nature of public hearings, at others they were strictly private interviews. In sequence, sometimes startling, but always cumulatively impressive, interviews were held with inspectors and subordinate officers of the police, keepers and inmates of disorderly resorts, and representatives from many philanthropic, civic, social, reform, and business organizations. Among the latter were the Brewers' Exchange, the Retail Liquor Dealers' Protective Association, and the Anti-Saloon League. Among the former were refuges and rescue agencies for girls, many children's protective and home finding organizations, maternity homes, legal aid and law enforcement societies, social settlements, church organizations, and representatives of the Juvenile Court. Stenographic reports of these interviews in typewritten form, some of them of weird, pathetic, and uncanny interest, were distributed among the committees to whose subjects they pertained, and were filed for the use of all members.
The whole field was divided into ten subjects of inquiry and a committee was assigned to each. In the final report, however, the facts and recommendations presented by three committees were combined with seven others whose assigned subjects are the headings of the seven chapters in which the voluminous material was condensed. Such was the entire unity of the commission in arriving at its conclusions, that in order that all the commissioners naught accept responsibility for the whole report, nothing was left in it to indicate the individuals who are to be credited with or held accountable for any part.
EXISTING CONDITIONS
Within the scope of the first committee fell the comprehensive survey of existing conditions. It included a description of the kinds of places, the different forms, the varying methods, the allurements, and the accessories of the social evil. For the sake of a comparative study, inquiries of conditions were made of the city clerk, the Health Department, and the superintendent of police in fifty-two municipalities. Personal investigations supplemented these in fifteen of the largest cities. So far as the replies and the first hand observation enabled the commissioners to judge, they concluded that "Chicago is far better proportionately to its population than most of the
( 242) other large cities of the country." The social evil in Chicago, differing from what it is elsewhere less in form than in its huge proportions, gives an insight, as thus shown forth, into its bald brutality, its monstrous perversion of nature, its naked ugliness when stripped of its cheap glamour, and its hideous proportions when left standing in the open to be viewed in the glare of common day light.
In the forefront of it all stands the fact that the social vice is commercialized. This fact of "the middlemen who arc profit sharers in vice," which was so clearly stated in the report of the Committee of Fourteen, and the further fact of their informal business association with one another, which was presented by the additional Grand Jury in New York, are both abundantly substantiated by the Chicago investigation. Estimated by the number of men in proportion to each woman publicly practicing this vice, and by the income of the inmates and keepers of disorderly resorts as discovered in the financial accounts kept between them for each day, week, and month, the sum of $'5,000,000 is considered a conservative calculation of the annual profit from the social evil in Chicago. The greed which has commercialized this vice to wring from it such enormous profits, artificially and even coercively stimulates, increases, perpetuates, and spreads its growth far beyond what might be considered its natural supply and demand. The Negro population—as least self-protective —suffers the most exploitation of its women and girls, but its men get their frightful reprisals.
THE NUMBER OF VICTIMS
As to the number of public places and their inmates the commission could get from the police information of not more than half the resorts of various sorts, and of their inmates and keepers. For its own investigators in a partial survey of the same territory found as many more such places not included on the police list. Together the two total 1,020 places, and 4,194 women now authentically all known and reported as publicly practicing the social vice. These figures, however, by no means cover the whole city with respect to this public form of the vice, which, at the lowest estimate, is practiced by at least 5,000 women. As to the number of men involved with them in so doing, the proportion is fifteen to one, as is proven both by count and by the accounts of the resort keepers, who reckon upon the service of this number of patrons by each inmate. So that the number of women on the police lists alone accounts for at least 15,180 men as daily patrons of the resorts in which these women are inmates. The number of visits made to these places by men would at this rate be 5,540,700 a year. Clandestine practice was not investigated or estimated.
To test the relation of the police to the social evil, an interesting field investigation was undertaken. The basis upon which it started was a list of vicious resorts and their inmates furnished to the general superintendent of police by the inspectors of the districts in which they were officially tolerated. This list included 1,825 women, inmates or keepers, at 374 separate addresses. The investigators of the commission then made independent investigations in the same territory. Of the 150 places they visited, 45 were on the police list and 105 were not, and 150 such places were soon found of which the police apparently had no record. Of 275 saloons frequented for immoral purposes, 46 were on the police list and 229 were not. There were thus found no less than 379 places where immoral and dissolute persons habitually congregated which were not on this first police list.
When these facts were reported to the general superintendent, he ordered the inspectors to prepare another list. The second list had some strange contrasts and comparisons with the first. The commission's investigators again went to work to check up with their own observation. and as large discrepancies appeared as before. The commission's comment upon this result is that "the above facts show beyond question one of two things, first, that the inspectors of police divisions or captains of police precincts in these divisions are ignorant of conditions as they actually exist in their districts ; or second, that they have
( 243) withheld the exact information asked for by the general superintendent of police." It is naively added, "From these facts the reader can draw his own conclusion as to the knowledge of the police of these conditions. The remedy is so obvious it need not be stated."
Yet the system is condemned more than the personnel of the police force as a whole. At the root of this system which demoralizes the police is the policy of leaving to their discretion the toleration and regulation of a crime which is absolutely prohibited by law. This makes it easier for the police to accept graft from the great profits reaped from toleration than honestly to do their duty. Other public officials, equally responsible for conditions, are held up to the same criticism. Citizens of Chicago are also held accountable for the constant evasion of the problem, for their ignorance and indifference to it, and for their lack of united effort in demanding a change in the intolerable conditions as they exist.
The saloon is so closely connected with the social evil in the report of the commission that the slight reference to the emphasis placed upon this fact by the Chicago newspapers in their first notice of the report was very significant. The thirty-four counts in this strong indictment are so abundantly supported by an overwhelming mass of references to documentary evidence, that neither the brewers and liquor dealers nor the city administration can long avoid reckoning with them.
WHERE THE VICTIMS COME FROM
The sources of supply of victims to the social vice were sought in the personal histories of thirty inmates of disorderly resorts carefully elicited and checked up; in the accounts casually given of themselves by 128 others; in the cases of fifty-one delinquent girls investigated by the Juvenile Protective Association; and in the records of 2,241 young girls in the custody of the Juvenile Court during the first ten years of its operation, which were critically studied by the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Four other investigations furnished original data on sources of supply; the special investigations of the Vice Commission on panders and cadets, dance halls, employment agencies, department stores, amusement parks under private management, lake steamers, and the general delivery windows of the post offices; the investigations of the United States Immigration Commission and the Immigrants' Protective League of Chicago on the relation of immigrant women and colonies of foreign laboring men in construction camps and lodging houses in cities to the social evil; inquiries now being prosecuted into the relation between subnormality and sex delinquency; court records, including the accounts of a keeper of a disorderly house with the inmates on account of their patrons, showing daily and monthly receipts upon which estimates are based of the number of males required to maintain and recruit the supply and the demand.
The sources whence these 2,420 women and girls under review were drawn into vice included bad or uncongenial houses; low wages, insufficient either to proper maintenance or to relieve the monotony of constant toil; the pursuit of pleasure and want of provision for recreation; procuring, through many agencies; involuntary entrance upon or continuance in "white slavery"; subnormality, rendering the victim susceptible to temptation or to exploitation; lack of education in sex physiology and hygiene. To these sources many concrete cases and groups of cases are traced, and conclusions are reached regarding the conditions involved, in a manner to point the way to the discovery and treatment of the sources of supply which exist in both small and large communities.
IMMORAL HOMES
To one or more of these conditions many cases and groups of cases are traced. Even in the scant snatches printed from these case histories, from which all traces which could lead to identification are eliminated, there are to be read between the lines and in the touches of real life that survived the process of investigation and censorship, life stories of
( 242) pathetic interest. While sonic declared themselves to be "born bad," "naturally bad," "always immoral," others were victims of conditions and circumstances for which they were less responsible than their families, their employers, or the community. In a large proportion of cases home conditions contributed to, if they did not cause, the downfall of daughters or wives. Intemperate or vicious parents, or brothers and sisters ; deserted, separated, and divorced fathers and mothers; homes which forced upon the children, rather than protected them from, immorality ; marriages that were sales into vice; childhood left to grow wild without religious training or any instruction to develop the instinct of self-preservation ; —these are some of the domestic conditions from which the cries of lost lives pierce the heart. Scores of them described conditions at home which were directly responsible for their downfall. Before the Juvenile Court, the wrong done to young girls and even to little children are with awful frequency charged to their own fathers, brothers, uncles, or cousins. Some were literally sold by their own mothers, others by their husbands.
ECONOMIC SOURCES OF VICE
Economic conditions, both on account of low wages and demoralizing influences in employment, stand next as the most fruitful source of vice. Here are some of the cries of distress as the life turned downward : "Could not earn enough to live on" "no money to buy clothes" "tired of drudgery"; "no work"; "to support husband and child."
In a group of twenty-five, the average wage before entering the life was five dollars a week. The occupations from which they fell were, in numerical order, domestic service, six; waitresses, five : clerks, three ; department stores, three ; sewing trades, three; factories and other employments, one each. In other groups averaging forty-five in number, the wages ran from four dollars and eighty-seven cents to six dollars a week, and for younger girls down to two dollars and a half. Their occupations were in each group mostly in department stores and in decreasing numbers, waitresses, domestic service, sewing trades, and surprisingly few in theaters. On an average the wage-earning capacity of these girls rose to twenty-five dollars a week after they abandoned themselves to a vicious life.
Street vending by children and messenger boy service are occupations which demoralize child life. Employment agencies, hotels, and restaurants are among the chief snares used to trap those seeking an honest living. Poverty, leading to overcrowding in the houses and to work under too high pressure and too long hours, also contributed its full quota.
RECREATIONAL SOURCES OF VICE
Among the recreational conditions directly tributory to the increase of its victims are privately managed amusement parks, and public parks when not properly lighted, policed, and managed; dance halls, especially where bar permits are granted; candy, ice cream and fruit stores, generally kept by single men of foreign birth, without family relationship in this country; immoral shows, moving pictures and plays; saloons where music, vaudeville, and other recreational attractions are accessory to the drink habit.
Warnings against procurers describe who and where they are. They are bartenders, waiters, theater employes, runners for nickel shows and penny arcades, floor walkers and inspectors in stores and shops, hackmen and expressmen, employment agents, fortune tellers and midwives. They seek their prey at places of amusement, railway stations and boat landings, in the rest rooms of department stores, and even at the counters, wherever employment is sought at agencies or mercantile and industrial establishments, at the general delivery windows of post offices, and through advertisement in newspapers, especially those published in foreign languages.
Perhaps the point of most fatal default, which is yet the point of the most fruitful promise, is the period of life at which the girl aπd boy lack or get information, training, and discipline for sexual self-control. The lack of it appears at every point of the inquiry for the
( 245) sources of supply of victims of vice, either as the cause of the perversion of children and youth, or as the complication of all other causes.
This stern unveiling of vice leaves public prostitution on the pages of this terrible arraignment, standing in the open, stripped of all veiled appeal to the imagination; in all its bare, coarse, sordid, cruel, outraging, repulsive infamy ; ruthless alike to childhood and motherhood, innocence and weakness, confiding affection and the desperation of poverty; and as heedless to the cry of the child for protection as it is toward the feeble appeal of the outcast for mercy, after her protest against injustice has long since been abandoned; a thing to be feared and hated, guarded against and attacked, kept under the ban of the law and ultimately stamped out to annihilation. Such is the uncompromising end toward which all the ways and means taken by the commission to find and face the facts of the vice situation inevitably led all its members and to which they were irrevocably held. Toward this end they were led not only, or perhaps chiefly, by the depths of demoralization and degradation they sounded, the bottom of which was reached in the research of the doctors into sex perversion and its male perverts, but quite as much, if not more, by the very partial successes and many failures of existing agencies for rescue and reform; for medical safeguards and legal regulation, as well as by the inadequacy of all the additional measures suggested to reinforce them.
RECOMMENDATIONS
In good faith and hope, however, recommendations are urged and offered by the commission upon parents to fulfill their responsibility by informing themselves how to safeguard their children's sex life and relationship; by carefully supervising their children's reading, especially along this line; by regulating their children's liberty, and accompanying them or providing guardians for them in places of amusement, on excursions, and on other occasions of special temptation or danger. Social and philanthropic agencies are recommended to make intensive studies of the working condition and wages of girls and women in order to ascertain the living wage and standard of living requisite for a decent life; to give publicity to the moral dangers surrounding recreation, while working eliminate them; to safeguard immigrant girls and working women by providing safe homes for their abode and keeping them out of the reach of procurers while seeking work. Boards of education are advised to investigate the advisability and methods of teaching social hygiene to the older pupils in public schools; to afford definite vocational training in continuation schools to girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen; to extend the use of public schools as social centers; and to place the school grounds under close supervision when open to the children.
Investigations by boards of health are recommended into the extent and sources of venereal diseases, the practice of midwifery, the use of cocaine and other noxious drugs, and massage practice. As health precautions the necessity is urged of the inspection, the quarantine, and the registration of persons infected with venereal disease; of larger hospital provision for their free treatment, and of the requirement of a certificate from legally qualified physicians guaranteeing the freedom from venereal disease of both parties to a marriage contract before it can legally be consummated.
Upon park commissioners is urged the need of better policing, playground supervision, management of dance pavilions, protection to unaccompanied girls, and rigid exclusion of disreputable people from opportunity to ply their vicious arts. Better lighting and the use of search lights are suggested.
BRANCH IMMIGRATION BUREAU
The federal government is requested to establish at Chicago and other pet :it distributive centers branches of the Bureau of Immigration, with provisions for the safe conduct of immigrants from ports of entry. The national authority is invoked to suppress the use of boats on all waters of the public domain for such evil purposes as assignation, gambling, and sale of intoxicating liquors to minors. The legislative and executive de-
( 246) -partments of the state government are called upon to regulate more strictly the practice of midwives, maternity hospitals, medical advertisements, the advertising of physicians, employment agencies, and the night messenger service; to specify infamous crimes more definitely in the law so that they may more readily and surely be punished; to prohibit night messenger service by persons under twenty-one; to declare houses of prostitution a public nuisance, giving to any citizen the right to institute simple and summary proceedings in equity for the abatement of the nuisance; to establish under the state law a system for the identification of prostitutes ; to substitute imprisonment or adult probation for fines in punishing them; to prohibit all access and means of communication between disorderly resorts and places of business or dwellings ; to establish a second school for wayward girls rather than to extend the one now overtaxed by the numbers committed to it; to provide a sympathetic agency, with paid agents, for the regular supervision of the children of unmarried mothers, for their medical care when sick and guardianship through their school age, and wherever possible, to hold the father of the child legally responsible for its care and support until its majority.
The city of Chicago is summoned to enforce the laws and ordinances it has απd to change and increase them where needed. Among the things thus to be accomplished are the prohibition of wine rooms and stalls in saloons, of the harboring of vicious men and women in them, of dance in the buildings where they are located, and of any connection with disorderly resorts; the stricter surveillance over the control which the police, the liquor dealers, the brewers associations. and the officials with authority regarding licenses have over saloons; the establishment of an industrial home with hospital accommodations for girls and women who wish to escape from vicious life; well-lighted halls for all moving picture shows ; a municipal lodging house for women and a municipal detention home controlled by probation officers; a farm on which a trade school and hospital shall be established to which professional prostitutes could be committed on indeterminate sentence.
Of the police officials the city administration should require accurate monthly reports of all places where immoral or dissolute persons congregate with the penalty of dismissal or reduction in rank for all superior officers who fail in this. duty. A special morals police squad. should form a part of the regular force. Women officers should be added, able to speak foreign languages, to be on guard and to render aid at all railway stations or other places where inexperienced women and girls are likely to need help. Children and young boys and girls under sixteen years of age found on the street, away from their home neighborhood and unattended by parents or guardians after nine o'clock in the evening, should be sent to their homes by the police.
A MORALS COMMISSION
For enforcing existing laws, securing-needful legislation, and rallying the social and moral forces of the community, the commission recommends the creation of a new agency, "Morals Commission of the City of Chicago," to consist of five persons, appointed by the mayor with the approval of the City Council, including the commissioner of health ex officio, all commissioners to serve without compensation; its duty as specified in the proposed ordinance being
to take all legal and necessary steps toward the effectual suppression of disorderly and similar houses within the limits of the city of Chicago, and within three miles of the outer boundaries of the city; to collect evidence of the violation of any state laws and city ordinances concerning any such houses, and the keepers, inmates, and patrons of the same; and to institute and carry on prosecution in the name of the city of Chicago against any of said houses, keepers, inmates, and patrons.
The direct references to segregation as a policy for regulating the public practice of the social evil by legal license or by police toleration and control are very brief, and the arguments against it are-not formally stated in the report. But the conclusions of European experts and officials in national conferences are cited to prove that this system of either licensing or regulating commercialized vice is
( 247) conceded to be not only unreliable and futile as a protective measure both from a moral and sanitary point of view, but also actually promotive of degeneracy and inefficiency among the people and the police everywhere it has been tried. As the whole investigation was considered by the commission to be a continuance and cumulative argument against segregation, the report takes for granted, what perhaps should have been definitely stated, that the "continental system" has been discarded, in theory if not in fact, as a failure, and therefore that its suggestion would be considered in America to be practically unjustifiable and intolerable to our moral ideals.
Above the almost brutal frankness with which this report handles the terrible facts which fill it, through all the cautions it takes and gives against easygoing optimism, there is a fine loyalty to American ideals of equal justice to man and woman and to the highest standard of American conscience. “It is a man and not a woman problem which we face today,” the report asserts, “commercialized by men, supported by men, the supply of fresh victims furnished by men who have lost that fine instinct of chivalry, and that splendid honor for womanhood where the destruction of a woman’s soul is abhorrent and when the defense of a woman’s purity is truly the occasion for a valiant fight.”
With the courage of its conviction born of incontrovertible facts, the commission puts its last word into the first sentence of its report, daring to sound the battle cry for a distant victory in insisting upon the present duty of "constant and persistent repression of prostitution, the immediate method; absolute annihilation, the ultimate ideal"!
