Note 31 — III.
Reading edition
I cannot allude to the subject of Intelligence-offices without saying, that all such institutions ought to be brought, in some new and effective manner, under public supervision and control.
A private Intelligence-office, kept in the superintendent's own house, cannot be interfered with, unless it can be proved a nuisance; and how difficult it is to abate a nuisance I need not tell anybody who has ever tried the experiment.
The keeper of a General or Public Intelligence-office makes application for a license to the city government, sustained by a certain number of respectable vouchers, and pays, I believe, a yearly fee of one dollar.
This looks fair enough; and, if every officer of the city government, from the lowest police-officer to the mayor, were immaculate, it would be so; but we all know what the fact is. It is an open secret, that, in all our largest cities, the marts of vice are stocked from these places, and that they serve the purposes of bad men better than houses of professedly vicious resort. One of the most excellent and respectable women I know, who superintends one of these offices, told me herself that four women made assignations on her premises, and went out of her office to keep them, without her having power to prevent it. She proved the correctness of her suspicions by employing one of her vouchers to watch the result. If this happens under the eyes of the virtuous and vigilant, what may not happen when the head of the establishment is in the pay of interested parties? I do not know in what way this wickedness can be broken up; but, in the words of Dr. Gannett, "what must be done, can be." Is it not a terrible thought, that fashionable women and tender girls should supply themselves with servants from the very brink of that hell they believe they have never touched? Is it not a far more terrible thought, that an innocent stranger cannot seek her daily bread without running the risk of certain perdition? How real these possibilities are, there are those in this city able to testify.
Ought not the ministers at large, of all denominations, and our overseers of the poor, to unite in prompt and efficient action in this regard?