🚀 go-pugleaf

that was the first name given them. But of
late years all such laws have met with such bitter opposition, that,
like an old criminal, the measures seek to hide themselves under all
sorts of _aliases_. Mrs. Josephine Butler describes such legislation
in general in the following simple, lucid manner:

    "By this law, policemen,--not the local police, but special
    Government police, in plain clothes,--are employed to look after
    all the poor women and girls in a town and its neighborhood. These
    police spies have power to take up any woman they please, on
    _suspicion_ that she is not a moral woman, and to register her
    name on a shameful register as a prostitute. She is then forced to
    submit to the horrible ordeal of a personal examination of a kind
    which cannot be described here. It is an act on the part of the
    Government doctor such as would be called an indecent or criminal
    assault if any other man were to force it upon a woman. And it is
    the _State_ which forces this indecent assault on the persons of
    the helpless daughters of the poor.

    "If a woman refuses to submit to it, she is punished by
    imprisonment, with or without hard labor, _until_ she does submit.

    "If, after she has endured this torture