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By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and void.

The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black sisters are mentioned in another one.

Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white street-walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored ones, it goes up to 99 percent.

Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young; it takes some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the nerve to hustle in high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15 and 16 hawking their bodies on the public highways. Many of these children, who should be home doing their schoolwork, left the hills when they were 12, after first having been raped by a local lout, usually a relative.

This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was formally charged by the arresting officer with “practicing prostitution.”

“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any more. I know how now.”

The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down. Pretty fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5. These prices are low compared with the current tariffs in other large cities, the reason being the extraordinary amateur competition.