----, expressed himself in the same sense. Of course, the lady
accepted a place in neither of the two establishments."

Seamstresses, female tailors, milliners, factory girls by the hundreds
of thousands find themselves in similar plight. Employers and their
subalterns--merchants, mill owners, landlords, etc.,--who keep female
hands and employes, frequently consider it a sort of privilege to find
these women handy to administer to their lusts. Our pious and
conservative folks love to represent the rural districts as truly
idyllic in point of morality, compared with the large cities and
industrial centers. Everyone acquainted with the actual state of things
knows that it is not so; and the fact was evidenced by the address,
delivered by a baronial landlord of Saxony in the fall of 1889, reported
as follows in the papers of the place:

"GRIMMA.--Baron Dr. v. Waechter of Roecknitz, recently delivered an
address, before a diocese meeting that took place here, upon the subject
of 'Sexual Immorality in Our Rural Communities.' Local conditions were
not presented by him in a rosy color. The speaker admitted with great
candor that _employers_, even _married_ ones, are frequently in _very
intimate relations_ with their female domestics, the consequences of
which were either cancelled with _cash_, or were removed from the eyes
of the world through a _crime_. The fact could, unfortunately, not be
cloaked over, that immorality was nursed in these communities, not alone
by girls, who, as nurses in cities, had taken in the poison, or by
fellows, who made its acquaintance in the military service, but that,
sad to say, also the _cultured classes_, through the stewards of
manorial estates, and through the officers on the occasions of field
manoeuvres, carried lax principles of morality into the country
districts. According to Dr. v. Waechter, there are _actually here in the
country few girls who reach the age of seventeen_ without having
fallen." The open-hearted speaker's love of truth was answered with a
social boycott, placed upon him by the officers who felt insulted. The
_jus primae noctis_ of the medieval feudal lord continues in another
form in these very days of ours.

The majority of prostitutes are thrown into the arms of this occupation
at a time when they can hardly be said to have arrived at the age of
discretion. Of 2,582 girls, arrested in Paris for the secret practice of
prostitution, 1,500 were minors; of 607 others,