that if we make it possible for every woman to live decently, there will be an immense reduction. It is in the highest degree unlikely that there are many women who would deliberately choose the horrible life. They drift, fall and are pushed into it and then cannot get out. One hears stories of actual starvation leading to it. These may be true, but there are far more cases (and this is proved by the fact that domestic servants and daughters at home form the largest classes of recruits) where the natural love of pleasure and finery, the natural sex attraction, and in many cases aversion from hard or monotonous work have been the temptations. It is an appalling thought that these, which are, at worst, faults and weaknesses, should be seized hold of by men, to make, of what should be a woman—
"A cipher of man's changeless sum
Of lust, past, present and to come,"
a creature whom law and society combine to treat as subhuman, a thing, not a person.
Much indiscriminate abuse is hurled by sentimentalists at the mistresses of households who discharge a servant leading an immoral or irregular life, and many most worthy mistresses, feeling acutely their responsibilities for young maids, and knowing of many temptations, endeavour, by severe restrictions, to keep the girls straight. Both seem to me mistaken. Employers of male labour do not keep workmen and pay them good wages when they do their work badly. Especially not
