To prove that the compulsory examination of women necessitates the regulations that always attend it, let us suppose that in a community this one point is provided for by law, and that the officers of the law are left to enforce the measure, by whatever regulations are necessary:--
The law demands merely that impure women must be examined regularly for the protection of the public health.
But the police officer sees at once that to secure this point a list must be kept of the women, when examined, that notice of requirement can be sent to those not coming voluntarily. Thus _registration_ of prostitutes comes to pass.
But after examination, those found diseased must be placed by themselves for treatment. Thus a hospital for prostitutes is established.
Then provision must be made to compel those who are unwilling to attend the examinations to do so, for it has been the invariable experience that few women will go regularly for examination unless compelled to do so, and also there must be means of enforcing them to remain in hospital. Thus the hospital becomes a _Lock Hospital_, and _fines and imprisonments_ are imposed on delinquents.
But compulsion cannot be secured without the aid of the police and the magistrate, and it is most difficult to follow up women, prove their identity, hale them to examination and to Lock Hospital without being able to keep them located in one tolerated quarter or house where they may be found--hence _segregation_ is introduced; and this is also done to keep women with whom association is supposed to be safe--because under constant medical and police surveillance--separate from those with whom it is supposed to be a risk to associate.
Now we discover that the compulsory periodical examination of women of impure life, when carried out in actual operation, creates a necessity for all the essential features of every C. D. Act that has ever been known, namely: _Compulsory examination_; _Registration_; _Lock Hospitals_; _Fines and Imprisonments_; _Police Surveillance_; _Segregation_.
Yet another thing is needful for the operation of this law requiring compulsory periodical examination, namely, measures for extending the operation of the law, so that, as new women are likely to become a source of contamination, they also may be brought under its operation, and for the practical and easy operation of the measure, compelled to take up their residence in segregated quarters. _This is the special field of activity in the operation of the law_, and is a deadly menace to the most ordinary liberties of women. People will loudly advocate that "something must be done" to confine the houses of ill-fame to certain quarters of a city, without the slightest care as to how it is done, so long as they need not become intimately acquainted with a disagreeable subject; they will advocate measures of the most deadly consequences to others more defenceless than themselves, and to the ultimate moral tone of the very society in which they move, and yet heartlessly refuse to consider the responsibility that rests upon them for their conduct. "Something must be done," they say, and the police force must attend to the details; they are too loathsome even to be considered, yet they refuse to understand that these very loathsome details which they require the police to work out _must utterly ruin the character of the police_ into whose hands they have betrayed all the decent rights of womanhood.