f the rich
man; the exploiter and the exploited meeting in the dens of vice. Such
is the case with gambling hells, with dens for prostitution and
sexual anomalies, where the poor blackmail the rich, while the latter
in their capacity as social exploiters help to maintain poverty and
prostitution.

Money makes sexual intercourse unnatural; in place of letting coitus
take its natural course, it makes it an object of amusement and
pleasure, and also of speculation, and it debases the bodies of
wretched girls by making them objects of commerce.

Unfortunately, the increasing facility of obtaining money without
working for it, due to civilization, not only corrupts the sexual life
of the wealthy and the poverty stricken, but has the same effect on
the middle classes. A healthy and normal sexual life must be
associated with honest and arduous work. We have already remarked that
the solution of the sexual question depends partly on the suppression
of alcoholic drink. We may add that another side of the question
depends on the extirpation of the greed for money. If human beings
could work for the social welfare without private interest, sexual
relations would soon take their natural course. But it must be
admitted that it is difficult to find a practical solution for the
problem of social economy.

=Rank and Social Position.=--Class distinction and social position
have always played a part in sexual life. This is especially the case
where certain class customs and prejudices prescribe a special code
for marriage. The consanguinity of the nobility and of royal families,
who can only marry among themselves, has resulted in obvious
degeneration. Originally there was the desire to preserve the purity
of noble blood, and rules formulated with this object at first had
some success; but in the long run the exclusiveness of such selection
produces degeneration of the group which puts it into practice.

On the other hand, the severe rules which govern marriages among the
nobility have resulted in driving the latter to extra-nuptial sexual
intercourse. In their sexual excesses, the nobility, and even crowned
heads, seldom amuse themselves with honest and virtuous girls of the
working classes, but more generally with actresses of loose morals,
dancing girls, and hysterical sirens and adventuresses of all kinds,
so long as they are pretty. Since the time of the feudal system, the
nobility, having lost its real reason for existence, on