individual, whereas the quality of motherhood is something born in a woman, something deep-seated in her nature. It is this something that we must investigate.
That motherhood and prostitution are at extreme poles appears probable simply from the fact that motherly women bear far more children, whilst the frivolous have few childdren, and prostitutes are practically sterile. It must be remembered, of course, that it is not only prostitutes who belong to the prostitute type; very many so-called respectable girls and married women belong to it. Accurate analysis of the type will show that it reaches far beyond the mere women of the streets. The street-walker differs from the respectable coquette and the celebrated hetaira only through her incapacity for differentiation, her complete want of memory, and her habit of living from moment to moment. If there were but one man and one woman on the earth, the prostitute type would reveal itself in the relations of the woman to the man.
This fact of limited fertility ought by itself to relieve me from the necessity of comparing my view of prostitution with the popular view that would derive what is really deep-seated in the nature of women from mere social conditions, from the poverty of women and the economic stress of a society arranged by males, from the difficulty of women succeeding in a respectable career, or from the existence of a large bachelor class with the consequent demand for a system of prostitution. To these suggestions it may well be replied that prostitution is by no means confined to the poorer classes; that women without any economic necessity have frequently given way to its appeal; that there are many situations in shops, offices, post-offices, the telegraph and telephone services, wherever mere mechanical ability is required, where women are preferred because, from their lower degree of differentiation, their demands are smaller; and business men having discovered this in anticipation of science, readily employ them at a lower rate of wages. Young prostitutes have often quite as hard an economic battle to fight, as they must wear expensive clothes, and as
