owledged
incentive to this vice on the part of man is his own abnormal passion;
while on the part of woman, in the great majority of cases, it is
conceded to be destitution--absolute want of the necessaries of life.
Lecky, the famous historian of European morals, says: "The statistics of
prostitution show that a great proportion of those women who have fallen
into it have been impelled by the most extreme poverty, in many
instances verging on starvation." All other conscientious students of
this terrible problem, on both continents, agree with Mr. Lecky. Hence,
there is no escape from the conclusion that, while woman's want of bread
induces her to pursue this vice, man's love of the vice itself leads him
into it and holds him there. While statistics show no lessening of the
passional demand on the part of man, they reveal a most frightful
increase of the temptations, the necessities, on the part of woman.

In the olden times, when the daughters of the family, as well as the
wife, were occupied with useful and profitable work in the household,
getting the meals and washing the dishes three times in every day of
every year, doing the baking, the brewing, the washing and the ironing,
the whitewashing, the butter and cheese and soap making, the mending and
the making of clothes for the entire family, the carding, spinning and
weaving of the cloth--when everything to eat, to drink and to wear was
manufactured in the home, almost no young women "went out to work." But
now, when nearly all these handicrafts are turned over to men and to
machinery, tens of thousands, nay, millions, of the women of both
hemispheres are thrust into the world's outer market of work to earn
their own subsistence. Society, ever slow to change its conditions,
presents to these millions but few and meager chances. Only the barest
necessaries, and oftentimes not even those, can be purchased with the
proceeds of the most excessive and exhausting labor.

Hence, the reward of virtue for the homeless, friendless, penniless
woman is ever a scanty larder, a pinched, patched, faded wardrobe, a
dank basement or rickety garret, with the colder, shabbier scorn and
neglect of the more fortunate of her sex. Nightly, as weary and worn
from her day's toil she wends her way through the dark alleys toward her
still darker abode, where only cold and hunger await her, she sees on
every side and at every turn the gilded hand of vice and crime
outstretched, beckoning her