1. _The Economic Causation of Prostitution_.--Writers on prostitution

frequently assert that economic conditions lie at the root of prostitution and that its chief cause is poverty, while prostitutes themselves often declare that the difficulty of earning a livelihood in other ways was a main cause in inducing them to adopt this career. "Of all the causes of prostitution," Parent-Duchâtelet wrote a century ago, "particularly in Paris, and probably in all large cities, none is more active than lack of work and the misery which is the inevitable result of insufficient wages." In England, also, to a large extent, Sherwell states, "morals fluctuate with trade."[164] It is equally so in Berlin where the number of registered prostitutes increases during bad years.[165] It is so also in America. It is the same in Japan; "the cause of causes is poverty."[166] Thus the broad and general statement that prostitution is largely or mainly an economic phenomenon, due to the low wages of women or to sudden depressions in trade, is everywhere made by investigators. It must, however, be added that these general statements are considerably qualified in the light of the detailed investigations made by careful inquirers. Thus Ströhmberg, who minutely investigated 462 prostitutes, found that only one assigned destitution as the reason for adopting her career, and on investigation this was found to be an impudent lie.[167] Hammer found that of ninety registered German prostitutes not one had entered on the career out of want or to support a child, while some went on the street while in the possession of money, or without wishing to be paid.[168] Pastor Buschmann, of the Teltow Magdalene Home in Berlin, finds that it is not want but indifference to moral considerations which leads girls to become prostitutes. In Germany, before a girl is put on the police register, due care is always taken to give her a chance of entering a Home and getting work; in Berlin, in the course of ten years, only two girls--out of thousands--were willing to take advantage of this opportunity. The difficulty experienced by English Rescue Homes in finding girls who are willing to be "rescued" is notorious. The same difficulty is found in other cities, even where entirely different conditions prevail; thus it is found in Madrid, according to Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo, that the prostitutes who enter the Homes, notwithstanding all the devotion of the nuns, on leaving at once return to their old life. While the economic factor in prostitution undoubtedly exists, the undue frequency and emphasis with which it is put forward and accepted is clearly due, in part to ignorance of the real facts, in part to the fact that such an assumption appeals to those whose weakness it is to explain all social phenomena by economic causes, and in part to its obvious plausibility.[169] Prostitutes are mainly recruited from the ranks of factory girls, domestic servants, shop girls, and waitresses. In some of these occupations it is difficult to obtain employment all the year round. In this way many milliners, dressmakers and tailoresses become prostitutes when business is slack, and return to business when the season begins. Sometimes the regular work of the day is supplemented concurrently by prostitution in the street in the evening. It is said, possibly with some truth, that amateur prostitution of this kind is extremely prevalent in England, as it is not checked by the precautions which, in countries where prostitution is regulated, the clandestine prostitute must adopt in order to avoid registration. Certain public lavatories and dressing-rooms in central London are said to be used by the girls for putting on, and finally washing off before going home, the customary paint.[170] It is certain that in England a large proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle class ranks are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own daughters. It must be added, also, that occasionally this conduct of the daughter is winked at or encouraged by the parents; thus a correspondent writes that he "knows some towns in England where prostitution is not regarded as anything disgraceful, and can remember many cases where the mother's house has been used by the daughter with the mother's knowledge." Acton, in a well-informed book on London prostitution, written in the middle of the last century, said that prostitution is "a transitory stage, through which an untold number of British women are ever on their passage."[171] This statement was strenuously denied at the time by many earnest moralists who refused to admit that it was possible for a woman who had sunk into so deep a pit of degradation ever to climb out again, respectably safe and sound. Yet it is certainly true as regards a considerable proportion of women, not only in England, but in other countries also. Thus Parent-Duchâtelet, the greatest authority on French prostitution, stated that "prostitution is for the majority only a transitory stage; it is quitted usually during the first year; very few prostitutes continue until extinction." It is difficult, however, to ascertain precisely of how large a proportion this is true; there are no data which would serve as a basis for exact estimation,[172] and it is impossible to expect that respectable married women would admit that they had ever been "on the streets"; they would not, perhaps, always admit it even to themselves. The following case, though noted down over twenty years ago, is fairly typical of a certain class, among the lower ranks of prostitution, in which the economic factor counts for much, but in which we ought not too hastily to assume that it is the sole factor. Widow, aged thirty, with two children. Works in an umbrella manufactory in the East End of London, earning eighteen shillings a week by hard work, and increasing her income by occasionally going out on the streets in the evenings. She haunts a quiet side street which is one of the approaches to a large city railway terminus. She is a comfortable, almost matronly-looking woman, quietly dressed in a way that is only noticeable from the skirts being rather short. If spoken to she may remark that she is "waiting for a lady friend," talks in an affected way about the weather, and parenthetically introduces her offers. She will either lead a man into one of the silent neighboring lanes filled with warehouses, or will take him home with her. She is willing to accept any sum the man may be willing or able to give; occasionally it is a sovereign, sometimes it is only a sixpence; on an average she earns a few shillings in an evening. She had only been in London for ten months; before that she lived in Newcastle. She did not go on the streets there; "circumstances alter cases," she sagely remarks. Though not speaking well of the police, she says they do not interfere with her as they do with some of the girls. She never gives them money, but hints that it is sometimes necessary to gratify their desires in order to keep on good terms with them. It must always be remembered, for it is sometimes forgotten by socialists and social reformers, that while the pressure of poverty exerts a markedly modifying influence on prostitution, in that it increases the ranks of the women who thereby seek a livelihood and may thus be properly regarded as a factor of prostitution, no practicable raising of the rate of women's wages could possibly serve, directly and alone, to abolish prostitution. De Molinari, an economist, after remarking that "prostitution is an industry" and that if other competing industries can offer women sufficiently high pecuniary inducements they will not be so frequently attracted to prostitution, proceeds to point out that that by no means settles the question. "Like every other industry prostitution is governed by the demand of the need to which it responds. As long as that need and that demand persist, they will provoke an offer. It is the need and the demand that we must act on, and perhaps science will furnish us the means to do so."[173] In what way Molinari expects science to diminish the demand for prostitutes, however, is not clearly brought out. Not only have we to admit that no practicable rise in the rate of wages paid to women in ordinary industries can possibly compete with the wages which fairly attractive women of quite ordinary ability can earn by prostitution,[174] but we have also to realize that a rise in general prosperity--which alone can render a rise of women's wages healthy and normal--involves a rise in the wages of prostitution, and an increase in the number of prostitutes. So that if good wages is to be regarded as the antagonist of prostitution, we can only say that it more than gives back with one hand what it takes with the other. To so marked a degree is this the case that Després in a detailed moral and demographic study of the distribution of prostitution in France comes to the conclusion that we must reverse the ancient doctrine that "poverty engenders prostitution" since prostitution regularly increases with wealth,[175] and as a département rises in wealth and prosperity, so the number both of its inscribed and its free prostitutes rises also. There is indeed a fallacy here, for while it is true, as Després argues, that wealth demands prostitution, it is also true that a wealthy community involves the extreme of poverty as well as of riches and that it is among the poorer elements that prostitution chiefly finds its recruits. The ancient dictum that "poverty engenders prostitution" still stands, but it is complicated and qualified by the complex conditions of civilization. Bonger, in his able discussion of the economic side of the question, has realized the wide and deep basis of prostitution when he reaches the conclusion that it is "on the one hand the inevitable complement of the existing legal monogamy, and on the other hand the result of the bad conditions in which many young girls grow up, the result of the physical and psychical wretchedness in which the women of the people live, and the consequence also of the inferior position of women in our actual society."[176] A narrowly economic consideration of prostitution can by no means bring us to the root of the matter. One circumstance alone should have sufficed to indicate that the inability of many women to secure "a living wage," is far from being the most fundamental cause of prostitution: a large proportion of prostitutes come from the ranks of domestic service. Of all the great groups of female workers, domestic servants are the freest from economic anxieties; they do not pay for food or for lodging; they often live as well as their mistresses, and in a large proportion of cases they have fewer money anxieties than their mistresses. Moreover, they supply an almost universal demand, so that there is never any need for even very moderately competent servants to be in want of work. They constitute, it is true, a very large body which could not fail to supply a certain contingent of recruits to prostitution. But when we see that domestic service is the chief reservoir from which prostitutes are drawn, it should be clear that the craving for food and shelter is by no means the chief cause of prostitution. It may be added that, although the significance of this predominance of servants among prostitutes is seldom realized by those who fancy that to remove poverty is to abolish prostitution, it has not been ignored by the more thoughtful students of social questions. Thus Sherwell, while pointing out truly that, to a large extent, "morals fluctuate with trade," adds that, against the importance of the economic factor, it is a suggestive and in every way impressive fact that the majority of the girls who frequent the West End of London (88 per cent., according to the Salvation Army's Registers) are drawn from domestic service where the economic struggle is not severely felt (Arthur Sherwell, _Life in West London_, Ch. V, "Prostitution"). It is at the same time worthy of note that by the conditions of their lives servants, more than any other class, resemble prostitutes (Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo have pointed this out in _La Mala Vida en Madrid_, p. 240). Like prostitutes, they are a class of women apart; they are not entitled to the considerations and the little courtesies usually paid to other women; in some countries they are even registered, like prostitutes; it is scarcely surprising that when they suffer from so many of the disadvantages of the prostitute, they should sometimes desire to possess also some of her advantages. Lily Braun (_Frauenfrage_, pp. 389 et seq.) has set forth in detail these unfavorable conditions of domestic labor as they bear on the tendency of servant-girls to become prostitutes. R. de Ryckère, in his important work, _La Servante Criminelle_ (1907, pp. 460 et seq.; cf., the same author's article, "La Criminalité Ancillaire," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, July and December, 1906), has studied the psychology of the servant-girl. He finds that she is specially marked by lack of foresight, vanity, lack of invention, tendency to imitation, and mobility of mind. These are characters which ally her to the prostitute. De Ryckère estimates the proportion of former servants among prostitutes generally as fifty per cent., and adds that what is called the "white slavery" here finds its most complacent and docile victims. He remarks, however, that the servant prostitute is, on the whole, not so much immoral as non-moral. In Paris Parent-Duchâtelet found that, in proportion to their number, servants furnished the largest contingent to prostitution, and his editors also found that they head the list (Parent-Duchâtelet, edition 1857, vol. i, p. 83). Among clandestine prostitutes at Paris, Commenge has more recently found that former servants constitute forty per cent. In Bordeaux Jeannel (_De le Prostitution Publique_, p. 102) also found that in 1860 forty per cent, of prostitutes had been servants, seamstresses coming next with thirty-seven per cent. In Germany and Austria it has long been recognized that domestic service furnishes the chief number of recruits to prostitution. Lippert, in Germany, and Gross-Hoffinger, in Austria, pointed out this predominance of maid-servants and its significance before the middle of the nineteenth century, and more recently Blaschko has stated ("Hygiene der Syphilis" in Weyl's _Handbuch der Hygiene_, Bd. ii, p. 40) that among Berlin prostitutes in 1898 maid-servants stand at the head with fifty-one per cent. Baumgarten has stated that in Vienna the proportion of servants is fifty-eight per cent. In England, according to the Report of a Select Committee of the Lords on the laws for the protection of children, sixty per cent, of prostitutes have been servants. F. Remo, in his _Vie Galante en Angleterre_, states the proportion as eighty per cent. It would appear to be even higher as regards the West End of London. Taking London as a whole the extensive statistics of Merrick (_Work Among the Fallen_), chaplain of the Millbank Prison, showed that out of 14,790 prostitutes, 5823, or about forty per cent., had previously been servants, laundresses coming next, and then dressmakers; classifying his data somewhat more summarily and roughly, Merrick found that the proportion of servants was fifty-three per cent. In America, among two thousand prostitutes, Sanger states that forty-three per cent, had been servants, dressmakers coming next, but at a long interval, with six per cent. (Sanger, _History of Prostitution_, p. 524). Among Philadelphia prostitutes, Goodchild states that "domestics are probably in largest proportion," although some recruits may be found from almost any occupation. It is the same in other countries. In Italy, according to Tammeo (_La Prostituzione_, p. 100), servants come first among prostitutes with a proportion of twenty-eight per cent., followed by the group of dressmakers, tailoresses and milliners, seventeen per cent. In Sardinia, A Mantegazza states, most prostitutes are servants from the country. In Russia, according to Fiaux, the proportion is forty-five per cent. In Madrid, according to Eslava (as quoted by Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (_La Mala Vida, en Madrid_, p. 239)), servants come at the head of registered prostitutes with twenty-seven per cent.--almost the same proportion as in Italy--and are followed by dressmakers. In Sweden, according to Welander (_Monatshefte für Praktische Dermatologie_, 1899, p. 477) among 2541 inscribed prostitutes, 1586 (or sixty-two per cent.) were domestic servants; at a long interval followed 210 seamstresses, then 168 factory workers, etc.