the prince. In Italy,
that land which for centuries led the world in art, women work in
squalor and degradation under the shadow of St. Peter's and the
Vatican for four-pence a day; while in America, under the Christianity
of the nineteenth century, until within twenty years, she worked on
rice and cotton plantations waist-deep in water, or under a burning
sun performed the tasks demanded by a cruel master, at whose hands she
also suffered the same kind of moral degradation exacted of the serf
under feudalism. In some portions of Christendom the "service"[224] of
young girls to-day implies their sacrifice to the Moloch of man's
unrestrained passions.

Augustine, in his work, "The City of God," taunts Rome with having
caused her own downfall. He speaks of her slaves, miserable men, put
to labors only fit for the beasts of the field, degraded below them;
their condition had brought Rome to its own destruction. If such
wrongs contributed to the overthrow of Rome, what can we not predict
of the Christian civilization which, in the twentieth century of its
existence, degrades its Christian women to labors fit only for the
beasts of the field; harnessing them with dogs to do the most menial
labors; which drags them below even this, holding their womanhood up
to sale, putting both Church and State sanction upon their moral
death; which, in some places, as in the city of Berlin, so far
recognizes the sale of women's bodies for the vilest purposes as part
of the Christian religion, that license for this life is refused until
they have partaken of the Sacrament; and which demands of the "10,000
licensed women of the town" of the city of Hamburg, certificates
showing that they regularly attend church and also partake of the
sacrament?

A civilization which even there has not reached its lowest depths, but
which has created in England, as a result of its highest Christian
civilization, a class of women under the protection of the State,
known as "Queen's women," or "Government women," with direct purpose
of more fully protecting man in his departure from the moral law, and
which makes woman the hopeless slave of man's lowest nature; a system
not confined to England, but already in practice in France, in Italy,
in Switzerland, in Germany, and nearly every country in Europe. A
system of morality which declares "the necessity" of woman's
degradation, and which annually sends its tens of thousands down to a
death from which society