to the
active and sustaining labours of her society. She had attained to the
full development of that type which, whether in modern Paris or New York
or London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in
its features, its nature, and its results. She was the "fine lady,"
the human female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make its
appearance on the surface of any social organism. (The relation of
female parasitism generally, to the peculiar phenomenon of prostitution,
is fundamental. Prostitution can never be adequately dealt with, either
from the moral or the scientific standpoint, unless its relation to the
general phenomenon of female parasitism be fully recognised. It is the
failure to do this which leaves so painful a sense of abortion on the
mind, after listening to most modern utterances on the question,
whether made from the emotional platform of the moral reformer, or the
intellectual platform of the would-be scientist. We are left with a
feeling that the matter has been handled but not dealt with: that the
knife has not reached the core.)

Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its full
development and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to any
dominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece,
Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions have
produced the same social disease among wealthy and dominant races; and
again and again when the nation so affected has come into contact
with nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has
contributed to its destruction.

In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile youth, its womanhood was
richly and even heavily endowed with duties and occupations. Not the
mass of the woman alone, but the king's wife and the prince's daughter
do we find going to the well to bear water, cleansing the household
linen in the streams, feeding and doctoring their households,
manufacturing the clothing of their race, and performing even a share
of the highest social functions as priestesses and prophetesses. It was
from the bodies of such women as these that sprang that race of heroes,
thinkers, and artists who laid the foundations of Grecian greatness.
These females underlay their society as the solid and deeply buried
foundations underlay the more visible and ornate portions of a great
temple, making its structure and persistence possible. In Greece, after
a certain lapse of t