hat the number of men who
frequent the resorts is not less than fifteen times the number of
women, and that in most cases the proportion is larger, it is not
difficult to conceive of the immense profits to the exploiters, but
also of the enormous economic waste, the widely prevalent physical
disease, and the untold misery of the women who sin, and of the
innocent women at home who are sinned against by those who should be
their protectors.

A "white-slave traffic" seems to have developed in recent years that
has not only increased the number of local prostitutes, but has united
far-distant urban centres. It is very difficult to prove an intercity
trade, but investigation has produced sufficient evidence to show that
there is an organized business of procuring victims and that they have
been exported to distant parts of the world, including South America,
South Africa, and the Far East.

89. =The Causes.=--The social evil has usually been blamed upon the
perversity of women and their pecuniary need, but investigation makes
it plain that the causes go deeper than that. The first cause is the
ignorance of girls who are permitted to grow up and go out into the
world innocently, unaware of the snares in which they are liable to
become enmeshed. Added to this ignorance is the lack of moral and
religious training, so that there is often no firm conviction of right
and wrong, an evil which is intensified in the city tenements by the
conditions of congested population. A third grave cause is the public
neglect of persons of defective mentality and morality. Women who are
not capable of taking care of themselves are allowed full liberty of
conduct, and frequently fall victims to the seducer. An investigation
of cases in the New York Reformatory for Women at Bedford in 1913
showed one-third very deficient mentally; the Massachusetts Vice
Commission in 1914 reported one-half to three-fourths of three hundred
cases to be of the same class. It seems clear that a large proportion
of prostitutes generally belong in this category. It has been
estimated that there are now (1915) as many defective women at large
in Massachusetts as there are in public institutions.

Poverty is an important factor in the extension of the sexual evil. It
is notorious that thousands of women workers are underpaid. In
factories, restaurants, and department stores they frequently receive
wages much less than the eight dollars a week required by women to
ma