, who, by day and in
society, strut about with grave and dignified mien as "representatives
and guardians of morality, of order, of marriage, and of the family,"
and who stand at the head of the Christian charity societies and of
societies for the "suppression of prostitution." Modern capitalist
society resembles a huge carnival festival, at which all seek to deceive
and fool one another. Each carries his official disguise with dignity,
in order later, unofficially and with all the less restraint, to give a
loose to his inclinations and passions. All the while, public life is
running over with "Morality," "Religion" and "Propriety." In no age was
there greater hypocrisy than in ours. The number of the augurs swells
daily.

The supply of women for purposes of lust rises even more rapidly than
the demand. Our increasingly precarious social conditions--want,
seduction, the love for an externally brilliant and apparently easy
life--furnish the female candidates from all social strata. Quite
typically does a novel of Hans Wachenhusen[109] depict the state of
things in the capital of the German Empire. The author expresses himself
on the purpose of his work in these words: "My book deals mainly with
the victims of the female sex and its steady depreciation, due to the
unnatural plight of our social and civic state, through its own fault,
through neglect of education, through the craving of luxury and the
increasing light-headed supply in the market of life. It speaks of this
sex's increasing surplus, which renders daily more hopeless the new-born
ones, more prospectless those that grow up.... I wrote much in the same
way as the District Attorney puts together the past life of a criminal,
in order to establish therefrom the measure of his guilt. Novels being
generally considered works of fiction, permissible opposites of Truth,
the following is, in that sense, no novel, but a true picture of life,
without coloring." In Berlin, things are no better and no worse than in
other large cities. Whether Greek-Orthodox St. Petersburg or Catholic
Rome, Germanic-Christian Berlin or heathen Paris, puritanic London or
gay Vienna, approach nearer to Babylon of old is hard to decide.
"Prostitution possesses its written and its unwritten laws, its
resources, its various resorts, from the poorest cottage to the most
splendid palace, its numberless grades from the lowest to the most
refined and cultivated; it has its special amusements and publ