aps come about
by a better organization of prostitutes, a more careful selection
among those who desired admission to their ranks and the
cultivation of professional virtues which would raise their moral
level. "If courtesans fulfil a need," Balzac had already said in
his _Physiologie du Mariage_, "they must become an institution."

This moral attitude is supported and enforced by the inevitable democratic
tendency of civilization which, although it by no means destroys the idea
of class, undermines that idea as the mark of fundamental human
distinctions and renders it superficial. Prostitution no longer makes a
woman a slave; it ought not to make her even a pariah: "My body is my
own," said the young German prostitute of to-day, "and what I do with it
is nobody else's concern." When the prostitute was literally a slave moral
duty towards her was by no means necessarily identical with moral duty
towards the free woman. But when, even in the same family, the prostitute
may be separated by a great and impassable social gulf from her married
sister, it becomes possible to see, and in the opinion of many
imperatively necessary to see, that a readjustment of moral values is
required. For thousands of years prostitution has been defended on the
ground that the prostitute is necessary to ensure the "purity of women."
In a democratic age it begins to be realized that prostitutes also are
women.

The developing sense of a fundamental human equality underlying the
surface divisions of class tends to make the usual attitude towards the
prostitute, the attitude of her clients even more than that of society
generally, seem painfully cruel. The callous and coarsely frivolous tone
of so many young men about prostitutes, it has been said, is "simply
cruelty of a peculiarly brutal kind," not to be discerned in any other
relation of life.[217] And if this attitude is cruel even in speech it is
still more cruel in action, whatever attempts may be made to disguise its
cruelty.

Canon Lyttelton's remarks may be taken to refer chiefly to young
men of the upper middle class. Concerning what is perhaps the
usual attitude of lower middle class people towards prostitution,
I may quote from a remarkable communication which has reached me
from Australia: "What are the views of a young man brought up in
a middle-class Christian English family on prostitutes? Take my
father, for instance. He first m