of the prostitute. She defends
her profession with much skill, and argues that while men imagine
that prostitutes are merely the despised victims of their
pleasures, these would-be tyrants are really dupes who are
ministering to the needs of the women they trample beneath their
feet, and themselves equally deserve the contempt they bestow.
"We return disgust for disgust, as they must surely perceive. We
often abandon to them merely a statue, and while inflamed by
their own desires they consume themselves on insensible charms,
our tranquil coldness leisurely enjoys their sensibility. Then it
is we resume all our rights. A little hot blood has brought
these proud creatures to our feet, and rendered us mistresses of
their fate. On which side, I ask, is the advantage?" But all men,
she adds, are not so unjust towards the prostitute, and she
proceeds to pronounce a eulogy, not without a slight touch of
irony in it, of the utility, facility, and convenience of the
brothel.

A large number of the modern writers on prostitution insist on
its socially beneficial character. Thus Charles Richard concludes
his book on the subject with the words: "The conduct of society
with regard to prostitution must proceed from the principle of
gratitude without false shame for its utility, and compassion for
the poor creatures at whose expense this is attained" (_La
Prostitution devant le Philosophe_, 1882, p. 171). "To make
marriage permanent is to make it difficult," an American medical
writer observes; "to make it difficult is to defer it; to defer
it is to maintain in the community an increasing number of
sexually perfect individuals, with normal, or, in cases where
repression is prolonged, excessive sexual appetites. The social
evil is the natural outcome of the physical nature of man, his
inherited impulses, and the artificial conditions under which he
is compelled to live" ("The Social Evil," _Medicine_, August and
September, 1906). Woods Hutchinson, while speaking with strong
disapproval of prostitution and regarding prostitutes as "the
worst specimens of the sex," yet regards prostitution as a social
agency of the highest value. "From a medico-economic point of
view I venture to claim it as one of the grand selective and
eliminative agencies of nature, and of highest value to the
comm