k of nervous balance, have been latent in the dull
monotony of country life and heightened by the spectacle of luxury acting
on the unrelieved drudgery of town life, find at last their complete
gratification in the career of a prostitute. To the town girl, born and
bred in the town, this career has not usually much attraction, unless she
has been brought up from the first in an environment that predisposes her
to adopt it. She is familiar from childhood with the excitements of urban
civilization and they do not intoxicate her; she is, moreover, more shrewd
to take care of herself than the country girl, and too well acquainted
with the real facts of the prostitute's life to be very anxious to adopt
her career. Beyond this, also, it is probable that the stocks she belongs
to possess a native or acquired power of resistance to unbalancing
influences which has enabled them to survive in urban life. She has become
immune to the poisons of that life.[209]

In all great cities a large proportion, if not the majority, of
the inhabitants have usually been born outside the city (in
London only about fifty per cent. of heads of households are
definitely reported as born in London); and it is not therefore
surprising that prostitutes also should often be outsiders. Still
it remains a significant fact that so typically urban a
phenomenon as prostitution should be so largely recruited from
the country. This is everywhere the case. Merrick enumerates the
regions from which came some 14,000 prostitutes who passed
through Millbank Prison. Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Essex and Devon
are the counties that stand at the head, and Merrick estimates
that the contingent of London from the four counties which make
up London was 7000, or one-half of the whole; military towns like
Colchester and naval ports like Plymouth supply many prostitutes
to London; Ireland furnished many more than Scotland, and Germany
far more than any other European country, France being scarcely
represented at all (Merrick, _Work Among the Fallen_, 1890, pp.
14-18). It is, of course, possible that the proportions among
those who pass through a prison do not accurately represent the
proportions among prostitutes generally. The registers of the
London Salvation Army Rescue Home show that sixty per cent. of
the girls and women come from the provinces (A. Sherwell, _Life
in West London_