itution,
although it is by no means correct to assert that they form its main
cause. There is another question which has exercised many investigators:
To what extent are prostitutes predestined to this career by organic
constitution? It is generally admitted that economic and other conditions
are an exciting cause of prostitution; in how far are those who succumb
predisposed by the possession of abnormal personal characteristics? Some
inquirers have argued that this predisposition is so marked that
prostitution may fairly be regarded as a feminine equivalent for
criminality, and that in a family in which the men instinctively turn to
crime, the women instinctively turn to prostitution. Others have as
strenuously denied this conclusion.

Lombroso has more especially advocated the doctrine that
prostitution is the vicarious equivalent of criminality. In this
he was developing the results reached, in the important study of
the Jukes family, by Dugdale, who found that "there where the
brothers commit crime, the sisters adopt prostitution;" the fines
and imprisonments of the women of the family were not for
violations of the right of property, but mainly for offences
against public decency. "The psychological as well as anatomical
identity of the criminal and the born prostitute," Lombroso and
Ferrero concluded, "could not be more complete: both are
identical with the moral insane, and therefore, according to the
axiom, equal to each other. There is the same lack of moral
sense, the same hardness of heart, the same precocious taste for
evil, the same indifference to social infamy, the same
volatility, love of idleness, and lack of foresight, the same
taste for facile pleasures, for the orgy and for alcohol, the
same, or almost the same, vanity. Prostitution is only the
feminine side of criminality. And so true is it that prostitution
and criminality are two analogous, or, so to say, parallel,
phenomena, that at their extremes they meet. The prostitute is,
therefore, psychologically a criminal: if she commits no offenses
it is because her physical weakness, her small intelligence, the
facility of acquiring what she wants by more easy methods,
dispenses her from the necessity of crime, and on these very
grounds prostitution represents the specific form of feminine
criminality." The authors add that "prostitution is, in a ce