misery that is brought on an innocent and confiding girl by
the perfidy and desertion of her seducer. The stage presents the picture
with all its accessories of light, color and morbid emotion. The pulpit
takes up the theme and howls its evangelical horrors, picturing those
women as being a continuous prey to "the long-beaked, filthy vulture of
unending despair." Women who in youth have lost their virtue, often
contrive to retain their reputation, and even when this is not the case,
frequently amalgamate with the purer portion of the population, and
become, to all outward appearance, good members of society.

The love of woman is usually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her
affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to
sacrifice all she holds dear for his gratification. Actuated by a noble
self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge
that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded,
and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she
abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the
highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the
recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our
social system.

The crime of prostitution can be witnessed in New York in every phase in
which it invites or repels the passions of men. There are the splendid
parlor houses distributed in the most fashionable parts of the city;
there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the
miserable basements where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity,
divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios.
The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances
sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive
arsenals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most
becoming shade over the inmates, while the pictures on the walls usually
suggest resplendent sensuality. Many of these gilded palaces are
patronized by prominent citizens, officials in the government, state and
civic employ. Many of them, already married, keep mistresses in these
establishments, while others are content to be recognized as "lovers" of
the inmates. Many of the country merchants who periodically visit New
York insist on being taken the "grand rounds," as it is termed, before
they will order goods or attend to business at all. The salesmen