ivilization, whether it be under
the Rome of the Empire, or the Turkey of to-day, we know that disaster,
ruin, and death, are near the State and the people.

This crime, with the girl, seems to sap and rot the whole nature. She
loses self-respect, without which every human being soon sinks to the
lowest depths; she loses the habit of industry, and cannot be taught to
work. Having won her food at the table of Nature by unnatural means,
Nature seems to cast her out, and henceforth she cannot labor. Living in
a state of unnatural excitement, often worked up to a high pitch of
nervous tension by stimulants, becoming weak in body and mind, her
character loses fixedness of purpose and tenacity and true energy. The
diabolical women who support and plunder her, the vile society she
keeps, the literature she reads, the business she has chosen or fallen
into, serve continually more and more to degrade and defile her. If, in
a moment of remorse, she flee away and take honest work, her weakness
and bad habits follow her; she is inefficient, careless, unsteady, and
lazy; she craves the stimulus and hollow gayety of the wild life she has
led; her ill name dogs her; all the wicked have an instinct of her
former evil courses; the world and herself are against reform, and,
unless she chance to have a higher moral nature or stronger will than
most of her class, or unless Religion should touch even her polluted
soul, she soon falls back, and gives one more sad illustration of the
immense difficulty of a fallen woman rising again.

The great majority of prostitutes, it must be remembered, have had no
romantic or sensational history, though they always affect this. They
usually relate, and perhaps even imagine, that they have been seduced
from the paths of virtue suddenly and by the wiles of some heartless
seducer. Often they describe themselves as belonging to some virtuous,
respectable, and even wealthy family. Their real history, however, is
much more commonplace and matter-of-fact. They have been poor women's
daughters, and did not want to work as their mothers did; or they have
grown up in a tenement-room, crowded with boys and men, and lost purity
before they knew what it was; or they have liked gay company, and have
had no good influences around them, and sought pleasure in criminal
indulgences; or they have been street-children, poor, neglected, and
ignorant, and thus naturally and inevitably have become depraved women.
Their sad l