their rascality to alcohol.
No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the
slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into
a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes
her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers
comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to
the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good
living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it
egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains
of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations.
A starving lawyer always sees injustice, in the courts. A bad physician
is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman
is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution be almost
invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and
sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in
Holy Writ.

The high value set upon virginity by men, whose esteem of it is based
upon a mixture of vanity and voluptuousness, causes many women to
guard it in their own persons with a jealousy far beyond their private
inclinations and interests. It is their theory that the loss of it
would materially impair their chances of marriage. This theory is not
supported by the facts. The truth is that the woman who sacrifices her
chastity, everything else being equal, stands a much better chance of
making a creditable marriage than the woman who remains chaste. This
is especially true of women of the lower economic classes. At once they
come into contact, hitherto socially difficult and sometimes almost
impossible, with men of higher classes, and begin to take on, with the
curious facility of their sex, the refinements and tastes and points
of view of those classes. The mistress thus gathers charm, and what has
begun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal
marriage. The number of such marriages is enormously greater than
appears superficially, for both parties obviously make every effort to
conceal the facts. Within the circle of my necessarily limited personal
acquaintance I know of scores of men, some of them of wealth and
position, who have made such marriages, and who do not seem to regret
it. It is an old observation, indeed, that a woman who has previously
dispose of her virtue makes a good wife. The