capacity of it. This is the fact we have to
face.... To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed
by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery: now see
the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health
we pay the crushing of another girl into hell. We give that for
it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution;
we have prostitutes made for that.... We devote some women
recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the
rest.... One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure
pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women
are perishing for lack of these very pleasures. If marriage is
this, is it not embodied lust? The happy Christian homes are the
true dark places of the earth.... Prostitution for man, restraint
for woman--they are two sides of the same thing, and both are
denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of
restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury."

Some of Hinton's views were set forth by a writer intimately
acquainted with him in a pamphlet entitled _The Future of
Marriage: An Eirenicon for a Question of To-day_, by a
Respectable Woman (1885). "When once the conviction is forced
home upon the 'good' women," the writer remarks, "that their
place of honor and privilege rests upon the degradation of others
as its basis, they will never rest till they have either
abandoned it or sought for it some other pedestal. If our
inflexible marriage system has for its essential condition the
existence side by side with it of prostitution, then one of two
things follows: either prostitution must be shown to be
compatible with the well-being, moral and physical, of the women
who practice it, or our marriage system must be condemned. If it
was clearly put before anyone, he could not seriously assert that
to be 'virtue' which could only be practiced at the expense of
another's vice.... Whilst the laws of physics are becoming so
universally recognized that no one dreams of attempting to
annihilate a particle of matter, or of force, yet we do not
instinctively apply the same conception to moral forces, but
think and act as if we could simply do away with an evil, while
leaving unchanged that which gives it its strength. This is the
only view of the social problem which c