In Paris it is even worse. The police look on stupefied and aghast at the awful condition which has grown up around them, and are forced to acknowledge that their vile system of tyranny can reach only one tenth of the women who live by prostitution.
And even with inspections the police surgeons do not begin to make efficient reports.
"Neisser, of Breslau, with several assistants, examined 673 prostitutes; and in 216 he found gonococci present (37.6 per cent). Dr. Passavant, of Paris, is quoted as saying that out of every 100 inscribed women, 35 to 50 per cent have venereal disease. Dr. Fiaux shows that in Belgium, in 1881-1889, one half of the inmates of the licensed houses had to be sent to the hospitals for treatment with venereal disease, of whom about 50 per cent were syphilitic. Of inscribed women, about one third were treated at the hospitals, about one sixth of these being syphilitic.
Laser, in an extensive examination of prostitutes for the presence of gonococci, found in the examination of the urethra of 353 patients that the gonococci could be demonstrated 112 times, although in four fifths of these cases there was no macroscopical evidence of gonorrhea. Several of these patients had been discharged from the hospitals as cured".
After prolonged trial of the method, the consensus of opinion among scientific men and among the police officials is that the system is inefficient.
The general opinion in the Berlin Congress was that venereal disease was on the increase, and that measures must be taken to check its advance.
Blaschko in his paper stated that, from the standpoint of public hygiene, no benefit whatever was received from the control as then practised.
A commission consisting of Yirchow, Blaschko, Meyer, Strassman, Langerhaus, Yillaret, B. Frankel, Pistor, Lewin, S. Neumann, B. and M. Wolf were appointed to consider the subject; and they reported that the sanitary conditions and measures existing in Berlin for the prevention and treatment of venereal disease were insufficient. And this was the general opinion arrived at by all the men throughout Europe who had the investigation in hand, that the protection did not protect, neither did the control check the advance of the evil.
"Having arrived at this definite conclusion, the next point was what should be done. Here the opinions varied greatly. One of the French ministers told Lassar that the conditions varied so in the different cities that no general law was possible, but that each municipality must deal with the problem as it was presented to it.
Another French minister, Gayot, who has given this subject a great deal of study and written a book upon prostitution, has reached the conclusion that abolition is the proper thing and prostitution is a moral and personal question, and that there was no reason why it should be recognized by protecting law, taking the "position that has so far been held in England and America".
If one city maintain the regulation system, the neighboring cities and towns suffer, because the women very naturally migrate from the "protected" districts, where they will be subjected to outrage, and even imprisonment if diseased. In the same manner, if one nation enforces this system, the contiguous nations suffer; thus, London is filled with the refuse of Europe's prostitutes.