i, an economist, after remarking that "prostitution is an
industry" and that if other competing industries can offer women
sufficiently high pecuniary inducements they will not be so frequently
attracted to prostitution, proceeds to point out that that by no means
settles the question. "Like every other industry prostitution is governed
by the demand of the need to which it responds. As long as that need and
that demand persist, they will provoke an offer. It is the need and the
demand that we must act on, and perhaps science will furnish us the means
to do so."[173] In what way Molinari expects science to diminish the
demand for prostitutes, however, is not clearly brought out.

Not only have we to admit that no practicable rise in the rate of wages
paid to women in ordinary industries can possibly compete with the wages
which fairly attractive women of quite ordinary ability can earn by
prostitution,[174] but we have also to realize that a rise in general
prosperity--which alone can render a rise of women's wages healthy and
normal--involves a rise in the wages of prostitution, and an increase in
the number of prostitutes. So that if good wages is to be regarded as the
antagonist of prostitution, we can only say that it more than gives back
with one hand what it takes with the other. To so marked a degree is this
the case that Despres in a detailed moral and demographic study of the
distribution of prostitution in France comes to the conclusion that we
must reverse the ancient doctrine that "poverty engenders prostitution"
since prostitution regularly increases with wealth,[175] and as a
departement rises in wealth and prosperity, so the number both of its
inscribed and its free prostitutes rises also. There is indeed a fallacy
here, for while it is true, as Despres argues, that wealth demands
prostitution, it is also true that a wealthy community involves the
extreme of poverty as well as of riches and that it is among the poorer
elements that prostitution chiefly finds its recruits. The ancient dictum
that "poverty engenders prostitution" still stands, but it is complicated
and qualified by the complex conditions of civilization. Bonger, in his
able discussion of the economic side of the question, has realized the
wide and deep basis of prostitution when he reaches the conclusion that it
is "on the one hand the inevitable complement of the existing legal
monogamy, and on the other hand the result of the bad conditions