in which
many young girls grow up, the result of the physical and psychical
wretchedness in which the women of the people live, and the consequence
also of the inferior position of women in our actual society."[176] A
narrowly economic consideration of prostitution can by no means bring us
to the root of the matter.

One circumstance alone should have sufficed to indicate that the
inability of many women to secure "a living wage," is far from
being the most fundamental cause of prostitution: a large
proportion of prostitutes come from the ranks of domestic
service. Of all the great groups of female workers, domestic
servants are the freest from economic anxieties; they do not pay
for food or for lodging; they often live as well as their
mistresses, and in a large proportion of cases they have fewer
money anxieties than their mistresses. Moreover, they supply an
almost universal demand, so that there is never any need for even
very moderately competent servants to be in want of work. They
constitute, it is true, a very large body which could not fail to
supply a certain contingent of recruits to prostitution. But when
we see that domestic service is the chief reservoir from which
prostitutes are drawn, it should be clear that the craving for
food and shelter is by no means the chief cause of prostitution.

It may be added that, although the significance of this
predominance of servants among prostitutes is seldom realized by
those who fancy that to remove poverty is to abolish
prostitution, it has not been ignored by the more thoughtful
students of social questions. Thus Sherwell, while pointing out
truly that, to a large extent, "morals fluctuate with trade,"
adds that, against the importance of the economic factor, it is a
suggestive and in every way impressive fact that the majority of
the girls who frequent the West End of London (88 per cent.,
according to the Salvation Army's Registers) are drawn from
domestic service where the economic struggle is not severely felt
(Arthur Sherwell, _Life in West London_, Ch. V, "Prostitution").

It is at the same time worthy of note that by the conditions of
their lives servants, more than any other class, resemble
prostitutes (Bernaldo de Quiros and Llanas Aguilaniedo have
pointed this out in _La Mala Vida en Madrid_, p. 240). Like
prostitutes,