CHAPTER III

THE SUPPLY

Relation of demand and supply.—Demand increased by forcing supply.—Supply derived mainly from lower working-classes.—Occupations of parents.—Occupations of women themselves.—Is the prostitute a born degenerate?—Importance of the milieu.—Effect of loosening home ties.—Broken homes.—Demoralization of minors.—Unmarried mothers.—Influence of bad example.—Economic pressure.—Low and irregular wages.—Perilous employments.—Efforts to improve conditions.—Rescue work.—Volume of supply.—Forced supply.—White slavery.—Employment agencies.—The pimp, bars, variety theaters, etc.—Rescue and preventive work.—Supply capable of modification through laws and social conditions.

The supply, which after a fashion responds to the demand just described, must be considered from three distinct points of view: its sources, its volume, its reaction on demand itself. On the face of it, the general relation of demand and supply appears simple and mechanical: a demand exists; somehow, thereupon, a supply springs up to meet it. The demand thus recognized, a moving equilibrium is established. Unquestionably, as the situation now stands, prostitution to a certain extent illustrates this purely mechanical conception. There is a demand of such strength and upon such terms that a supply is forthcoming: in so far as this particular demand is concerned, outright efforts simply to deny its satisfaction would for the most part lead to higher bidding or to circuitous methods of gratification. Demand itself must be affected before this situation can be essentially or fundamentally altered. There is also a supply on hand, which will employ a high degree of ingenuity to bring itself into relation with actual or potential demand. But, after all, however important, this is only one aspect of the problem. The modern merchant, in whatever commodity he may deal, is a practical, if not a trained, psychologist. He knows that appetite not only exists, but may be both created and developed: that, in the absence of strong restraint, supply can be worked up to almost any extent; and that there is no more efficient way to manufacture and to develop demand than to crowd supply in an attractive form upon the possible buyer’s attention, when he is most amenable to suggestion of the requisite kind. True of every article of commerce, be the need for it native or acquired, this principle is nowhere more valid than in respect of a vice that starts with a tremendously powerful momentum, and is easily susceptible of still further stimulation. The volume of the business is, moreover, not only a question of the number of women engaged in it, but of the intensity with which the vocation is plied. A thousand women may consort with a thousand men in the course of a night; or, conditions favoring, they may entertain five or ten times that number. The definition adopted in the preceding chapter looked ahead to precisely this fact,—a fact that will become increasingly important as we proceed. For prostitution represents not only the periodic coming together of demand and supply; it represents also the exploitation of artificial, instigated appetite and overworked supply. The prostitute may indeed satisfy her own or another’s passion; but there is no passion in the sexual drudgery which as a rule she performs. So far then from dealing with a simple natural or mechanical process of satisfaction, demand and supply in this matter tend to display rather more than the complications and interrelations characteristic of enterprise in general.

The most striking fact in connection with the source of supply is its practically total derivation from the lower working-classes, and mainly the unmarried women of those classes.[111] The victims come in a highly preponderant ratio from this definitely circumscribed milieu. Half a century ago, Parent-Duchatelet, studying their social origins, found that Parisian prostitutes are recruited well nigh exclusively from artisan families; among 828 fathers, there was a bare sprinkling of better-conditioned men.[112] These conditions still obtain. Of 11,413 women prisoners incarcerated during several years in Milbank prison, 10,646 were the daughters of working-men, or the equivalent; 544, of small shopkeepers; 128, of professional men; 82, of small officials; 13, of gentlemen.[113] Of 565 Stuttgart women, the fathers were, in 172 instances, artisans; in 84 instances, day laborers; in 60 instances, peasants; in 31 instances, small shopkeepers. Skilled occupations were barely represented.[114] Of 173 registered women in Munich, 95 of the fathers were artisans; 46, day laborers; 17, peasants. Of 2,574 so-called clandestines in the same city, the fathers were: artisans, 1,147; laborers, 944; peasants, 248; under-officials, 140.[115] Two thousand one hundred and three women appeared on the inscription lists of the Stockholm police between 1885 and 1904: in 179 cases, the fathers were small landowners and lease-holders; in 42 cases, merchants; in 14 cases, national or municipal officials: the rest were gardeners, peasants, fishermen, mechanics, publicans, unskilled laborers, etc.[116]

The occupations of the women themselves suggest the same conclusions. They are the unskilled daughters of the unskilled classes. Out of 1,327 street women of Geneva examined between 1907 and 1911, 503 had been servants; 236, tailoresses and laundresses; 120, factory workers;[117] of 173 registered Munich prostitutes (1911), 52 had been barmaids;[118] 29, domestic servants; 29, factory workers; 15, seamstresses; 8 had no particular employment. Of 2,574 clandestines in the same city, 721 had been servants; 608, barmaids; 255, factory hands; 60, stage-dancers or singers; 170, without definite calling.[119] Of 1,200 women enrolled in Berlin 1909–10, 431 had been servants; 445, factory operatives; 479, seamstresses and laundresses; 145 were without vocation.[120] One thousand five hundred women who were sent to the hospital on account of venereal disease show the same vocations: 431 were servants; 445, factory hands; 112 without special employment. Of 2,275 inscribed Viennese women, 44.52% were servants; 20.55%, factory workers; 16% without calling.[121] Of 427 admitted to a London Reformatory, 275 were servants, 25 laundry workers; 20, factory hands; 11, dressmakers; 6, barmaids; 33, without a vocation.[122] Of 675 cases included in another study, 283 were servants; 114 without occupation; 52, factory girls; 12, barmaids.[123] Another London list of 168 girls shows 2 described as “typist and clerk,”—all the others engaged in unskilled domestic, industrial, or mercantile labor.[124] Among Merrick’s thousands, already referred to, one-half had been servants; one-tenth each, laundresses, charwomen, factory hands and seamstresses; another large contingent were barmaids: a few described themselves as governesses.[125] In the Stockholm cases, the facts are identical: 996 were servants; 395, unskilled workers; 266, sewing-girls; 57 were shop girls; 6 connected with the stage.[126] Almost 7,000 Paris women, inscribed between 1878 and 1887 illustrate the same principle.[127]

Merrick’s data as to the educational opportunities enjoyed are also generally sustained: less than one-tenth of his cases had had anything beyond the most rudimentary training;[128] the German prostitutes show at the most only the compulsory “Volksschule” education. Of the minors apprehended during the year 1901, only 36% of those over 12 years of age had completed the popular elementary schools; only one-fifth of 1% had advanced further.[129] Very few indeed have acquired in any direction a substantial degree of skill. They belong to the intellectual as well as to the social proletariat. And this is just as true of the elaborately dressed denizens of the Palais de Dance as of the unpretending street-walker of Potsdamer Platz: they are, generally speaking, all of the same origin and the same capacity.

The foregoing statistics are obviously, however, not fully representative, derived as they are mainly from the records of the hospital, the police, the prison, and the rescue home. Professionals of low grade and failures are perhaps too largely included,—the women of the street and the brothel; the dull drudges, who are most likely to fall into the hands of the law; the stupid, who most readily give up in despair. The vocational designations are also in one respect somewhat deceptive: the women involved not infrequently describe themselves in terms not of an habitual vocation or of a position held at the moment, but of perhaps their last occupation, or some occupation capriciously selected from the various jobs on which they have been more or less transiently employed. Low grade help is as a rule thus variable and casual. For instance: 1,689 women were inscribed by the police of Berlin in twelve months following March 1900; all declared some sort of employment; yet only 352 had work at the moment.[130] The returns are therefore not precisely accurate; yet from the standpoint of our interest in them, they do more than justice to the quality of the women, for to the extent of implying preference or capacity for one kind of work rather than indicating aimless shifting from one to another and then again to nothing, the impression created is more favorable than the facts warrant. In any case, the economic competency of the prostitute is not higher than the statistics indicate and may be lower. Exceptions, of course, are bound to occur. One finds here and there a stenographer, an elementary teacher, a former actress;[131] but in most of these cases, the woman is, socially speaking, of inferior origin and intellectually not more prepossessing than others of her type. Very rarely indeed a person of some education, social standing, and personal charm is met with. A Parisian woman to whom this description is fairly applicable was asked as to the possibility of finding others like herself. “I am one in a million,” she proudly—and truthfully—answered.

The particular features of the milieu that involve peril I shall discuss in a moment. Meanwhile, the fact that prostitution recruits itself from a single social class is itself fatal to the contention that the prostitute is necessarily a born degenerate; for if prostitution involved born degeneracy; and if, vice versa, congenital degeneracy made straight for prostitution, a single milieu would not furnish practically the total supply. The definiteness of the type is, of course, indisputable. Characteristic traits, external and internal, mark the scarlet woman; she has a distinct gait, smile, leer; she is lazy, unveracious, pleasure-loving, easily led, fond of liquor, heedless of the future, and usually devoid of moral sense. Defect undoubtedly accounts for certain cases, and especially so where a psychopathic family strain is continuously implicated. Of 21 girls recently admitted into a newly-established observation home in Berlin, 5 were reported as mentally below par; of Mrs. Booth’s 150 cases discussed below,[132] 12% were feeble-minded. In the case of prostitutes committed under the British Inebriate Acts, the percentage naturally runs much higher: in 1909, out of 219 such immoral women, only 70 are described as of “good” mental state; 118 were “defective”; 23, “very defective”; 8, “insane”; _i. e._, almost 70% were below normal. “There is,” writes Dr. Branthwaite, “almost consistent evidence here of some causative relationship between mental defect and prostitution; but the evidence is by no means overwhelming enough to justify more than a general conclusion that mental defect is one of many causes for its prevalence.”[133] Bonhöffer, studying 190 prostitutes incarcerated in prison at Breslau, found that one hundred came from alcoholic families and that two-thirds of them were mentally defective—hysterical, epileptic or feeble-minded; his judgment is adverse to the existence of the “born prostitute,” but in favor of congenital defect as providing soil favorable to immorality.[134] One hundred and fifty-five Berlin cases between 12 and 21 years of age, yield an equally striking result; 30% are reported as “intact,” 23%, as feeble; 43%, as psychopathic; 66% are therefore abnormal.[135] Premature development on the sex side is also frequently encountered. Among Lindblad’s 800 cases, 52 had had sexual intercourse before they were 15 years old; 111 more, before they were sixteen.[136] In these instances there was presumably a lack of self-control, but not necessarily always a lack of the very possibility of acquiring it, such as the degeneration argument requires. How far these statistics are reliable, representative, or significant, it is impossible to determine. Expert scientific study of large numbers of women from each of the different strata of prostitution, without as well as within prisons, reformatories, hospitals and refuges is needed in order to clear up the question. For though degeneracy and native depravity may account for the prostitute alone or in connection with other facts, her conduct and qualities are also otherwise explicable. The women involved have, as we have learned, undeveloped intelligence to begin with; riotous sex-indulgence, the loss of shame, alcohol, irregular hours, disease, combine to bring about speedy and far-reaching demoralization. Moral idiocy, covetousness, aversion to work, vanity, inclination to steal, libidinousness, may be acquired as well as native traits; they may be qualities exaggerated, even if not altogether bred in the course of the career. “The personality of the prostitute,” Bloch contends, “is the result rather than the reason of her occupation.”[137] Branthwaite holds that even the so-called “temperamental prostitute,” with morbidly violent sexual desire, is apt to be the product of her way of life: in the majority of his cases he believes the symptom to be a “characteristic acquired by habit.”[138] Undoubtedly personal or anthropological factors are usually involved: for if it were a question of milieu alone, all affected by it would succumb. But the exact extent to which the anthropological factor is congenital defect or only imperfect education and protection remains as yet to be settled.

However this may turn out, the peril of the milieu remains. It increases in geometric ratio with the feebleness of the girl, to whatever cause that feebleness be due. The reason of this may best be comprehended, if the question is approached from the opposite end. Let us ask, not why some women fall, but why others go straight. A certain number, undoubtedly, because of sheer character; these are the women who lead righteous lives under all circumstances whatsoever; for they are made of the hardy fiber that withstands any kind of wear and tear. A proportion, one has no way of knowing how large, keep straight for the mere lack of sufficient temptation to do otherwise: “The happy accident of the absence of opportunity has helped to the rescue of many eminent virgins at critical moments,” George Meredith caustically remarks.[139] But a still larger number, though doubtless persuaded of their own ethical superiority, attribute to positive character what is really due to the unnoticed pressure of clan opinion, and the imperceptible barriers by which they are completely surrounded. The certain disapproval of family and friends, the sure ostracism that attends a serious departure from the accepted code of behavior consciously or unconsciously act as powerful deterrents; the esteem we are taught to crave, the warnings, expostulations, and demands of family and friends constantly on the lookout, keep the growing child within a well-marked path; established habit, position, responsibility for others, and ripe reason ultimately approving the same—these function in many cases as a substitute for fundamentally hardy character. The superiority in such instances is trained, not inherent; and not so much narrowly educational as widely social. The whole organization of certain strata of society supports those who pass their lives securely within it.

In many cases—we have as yet no way of knowing how many—the girls who fall differ from those who go straight in lacking precisely these supports; they are born in a stratum in which no strong supporting bulwark of opinion and habit has been developed; or the bulwark, such as it is, has been in one way or another broken down. The strong characters—and they are immensely more abundant than is usually supposed—do without it; the weaker too often succumb. Even so, their collapse is rarely sudden. It is a hopeful fact that decency is often only gradually and cunningly undermined. The buyer dealing with the seasoned prostitute may go straight to his object; his purpose must be veiled in negotiations with the beginner, who is led on by pretty clothes, amusements, wine and glitter. There is no reason to believe that, as a rule, promiscuity is congenial to the woman from the start; it is sometimes increasingly odious. Low as the barrier may be, the prostitute has rarely once and for all deliberately stepped across it. Her demoralization is a progressive, not a summary, process. With her, the sex instinct is, for reasons already given, less apt to be valued at its real worth, or to be properly safeguarded by deference to exacting opinion; less apt, too, to be reduced in comparative urgency by the volume and abundance of other satisfactions. The girl has, however, no notion in the first place of becoming a prostitute. She begins by giving away what ultimately she learns to sell.

From the above discussion, it appears that, as far as we now know, it may be not so much individuals as environments, that are superior. Danger lies where the environment puts up no high barrier; still more so when the low barrier, the strong temptation, and the weak resistance, coincide. How completely the untrained daughters of the proletariat lack the positive protections and supports by means of which better-conditioned girls are, even in default of their own strength, held upright, a somewhat closer study of the facts will soon show.

There is, in the first place, no quicker way of evading the immaterial forces that assist in maintaining an approved line of conduct than abrupt transplantation of an immature person into an environment within which no such forces operate on the individual in question. Accordingly, a heavy percentage of urban prostitutes are girls who have left home: of 168 girls in a London rescue home, 85 were born abroad; not all the 83 English girls were London born.[140] “The servants in Manchester,” I was told, “come almost invariably from remote counties; they have been familiar at home with the men, with whom they walk out.” In a strange city, without work, or with hard work, they obtain through the too lightly prized sex function, at least for the moment, what their lot otherwise lacks. Out of 12,707 women inscribed in Paris, two-thirds were born outside the department of the Seine.[141] Only 213 out of 781 girls newly enrolled in Paris in a single year were natives of the city.[142] Of 1,376 inscribed prostitutes of Stockholm (1890–1904), only 21.1% were natives of that city; the same proportion were born in other Swedish cities; 57% were country girls; the rest, foreigners.[143] Many of the prostitutes of Vienna were born in the poor districts of Galicia and Poland. The studies of Lindblad and Welander in Stockholm show how closely immorality has followed detachment from home in hundreds of instances.[144]

The home barrier is itself often so low as to constitute little or no obstacle to demoralization,—often indeed, demoralization is of domestic origin. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, dealing with London destitution, describe a situation existing in all crowded European cities: “The herding together, by day and by night, of men and women, of young and old, of boys and girls, of all degrees of relationship or no relationship, not only destroys health, but makes, to the ordinary human being, the particular virtue upon which the integrity of the family depends, wholly impracticable. Any person who has dwelt among the denizens of the slums, cannot fail to have brought home to him the existence of a stratum of society of no inconsiderable magnitude in which children part with their innocence long before puberty, in which personal chastity is virtually unknown, and in which ‘to have a baby by your father’ is laughed at as a comic mishap.”[145] In a close in High Street, Edinburgh, I visited with the city physician a family consisting of father, mother, grandmother, daughter of 13, and two younger children, all of whom slept in a single bed. Professor Blaschko declares that “what Robert Koch once said of tuberculosis, viz., that it is a question of living conditions, holds equally of prostitution. Living conditions are responsible for the fact that children learn all forms of evil prematurely and forego all natural enjoyments.”[146] Of the inhabitants in Berlin in 1900, 73.7% lived in dwellings of two rooms or less; 785,000 lived in single rooms; 561,000 in two rooms; 5,450 in one unheated room; 7,759 in a kitchen.[147] Too frequently, the home, such as it is, is broken besides. Not infrequently, necessity drives the mother herself to become a wage-earner. Something above 2,000,000 German women are engaged in factories, one-third of whom are married, widowed or divorced. The children of these families,—boys and girls alike,—lack the rearing which would be their most important safeguard. Unfortunately, too, the tide is rising: the married women workers of Bavaria increased absolutely in number 72% from 1895 to 1907;[148] throughout Germany a similar rise is taking place.[149] As this increase involves especially women between 30 and 50 years of age, it is clear that they are driven into factories in order to support children whose welfare requires that the mother should stay at home. In other instances, the home is fractured by death, desertion or immorality: of 565 Stuttgart prostitutes, 64.2% were wholly or partially orphaned;[150] of 384 London cases, only 24% had both parents alive.[151] In Lindblad’s cases, 219 out of 772 homes are classified as “bad” or “very bad.”[152] Ominous is the rôle played by alcohol in dissolving the home and in undermining the constitution of the children.[153]

The inordinately large contingent of servants is partially accounted for on these lines; for the servant has given up her own home and does not always make for herself another in the house she serves. She has come from the landless country proletariat, where sexual intercourse is either customary or not forbidden; in the city, exposure and weak resistance make her a frequent victim. Servants between 16 and 30 years old form one-fourth of the female population of Berlin; they bear one-third of the illegitimate children of the population. Of the registered prostitutes of Berlin in 1900, 60% had traveled this road.[154] In Paris, of 6,842 clandestine prostitutes arrested and found ill within the decade 1878–1887, 2,681—i. e., 39.18%—were domestics.[155] Two hundred and eighty-four of Lindblad’s 800 patients were servants, 80 more were attendants on little children, 170 charwomen.[156]

If the urban home often leaves its girls defenceless[157] or demoralized, the daughters of the rural proletariat fare even worse. The children of the landless peasant are a sheer drain—they have no economic value to the family. I recall a characteristic instance of a girl of 27, one of fourteen children belonging to a peasant family, eleven of whom had died in infancy. She herself had had no rearing whatsoever. Drifting from pillar to post, she had come to Munich, where at 17 she had a child; since then, five others, of whom one survives, maintained by her on her illicit earnings.[158]

It is early demoralization that is most dangerous, and it is precisely to early demoralization that the bad or broken home most surely leads. In all great European cities the rapid increase of the prostitution of minors has been noted. Without domestic protection, the girl seeks her amusement on the streets and wittingly or unwittingly is led to her fall. Between 1880 and 1903 the average number of minors annually arrested for prostitution by the Paris police was 1,370,—the total, 32,885.[159] Nine hundred and seventy-five minors were arrested there for this offence 1,638 times in 1908,—91 of them under 16; 988 minors were arrested 1,739 times the next year,—221 under eighteen.[160] In general it has been estimated that one-half of the minors arrested have not yet finished their seventeenth year.[161] The Viennese authorities declare that “clandestine prostitution in its varied forms is made up for the most part of youthful persons. Clandestine prostitutes, especially in so far as they are incidentally engaged as waitresses in “Animierkneipen” and restaurants, singers and dancers, are usually young, since, among other reasons, youth is a condition _sine qua non_ of employment. While out of 1,000 inscribed prostitutes only 16% were under 21 years of age, among the same number of non-inscribed arrested on the streets, over 57% were minors.”[162] In the year 1910, of 1,319 arrests, 823 were minors whose utter isolation is proved by the fact that efforts to preserve some sort of family guardianship failed in 802 instances.[163] In Cologne, 1,626 arrests were made in 1911,—1,296 of them minors,—79 under 18 years of age. German authorities hold in general that the danger period lies between the 12th and the 21st year: “only a small percentage go wrong after the 21st year.”[164] Among 846 newly inscribed prostitutes in Berlin in 1898, 229 were minors, despite a settled policy in favor of registering adults only. There is perhaps no better proof of the extent of demoralization during girlhood: seven of these were mere children,—15 years old; 21 were 16 years old; and 33, seventeen years of age.[165] Nor are conditions any better in smaller towns. Bendig, studying prostitution in Stuttgart from 1894 to 1908, finds 55% of the women deflowered under seventeen years of age; 70%, between sixteen and eighteen; 97.3%, between fourteen and twenty-five.[166] Over one-half were under twenty years of age at the time of their registration as professional prostitutes by the police. Through some English Rescue Homes, 745 children between eight and fifteen years of age passed in the course of three years.[167] The confidential memorandum dealing with 168 cases already referred to shows that all but 30 were under twenty-one years of age. So, of 92 girls admitted to a London Rescue Home, 50 were less than twenty-one years old. Of 1,882 prostitutes arrested on the streets of Glasgow for drunkenness or soliciting, seven were between fourteen and sixteen; and 314 between sixteen and twenty-one.[168] Of this type are usually the white slave cases,—young girls for the most part enticed from poor rural or urban homes by the promise of employment or marriage in a great city; as also instances not altogether unknown in which mothers sell their own children. A brisk demand for the child prostitute constitutes a strong inducement.[169]

Exposure sometimes originates otherwise. Sometimes the seduced servant or shop girl, or the pregnant country lass, may lose position or caste, and, besides, find herself responsible for the maintenance of herself and her child, law and custom bearing all too lightly on her partner. In point of character the girl has no longer anything to lose; meanwhile, need presses. Eighty-three out of the 168 London cases already discussed were of this type. In Berlin, 1,531 girls were newly inscribed in the years 1908–9–10; of these, 636—i. e., over 41%, had borne children.[170] Mrs. Bramwell Booth furnished me a detailed study of 150 cases, out of which 11% were believed to be attributable to pregnancy following seduction. Lindblad found that 62 of 800 women—7¾%—insisted that they had become prostitutes in order to support children: of these 10 were widowed or divorced; 34 were unmarried, but confessed to a succession of lovers; 18 were unmarried and with but one child.[171] Children born under such conditions represent at times the most aggravated form of the broken home, and not a few of the girls afterwards take to irregular lives: nevertheless, by no means universally. For, as Adele Schreiber has forcibly pointed out, illegitimacy is a complicated phenomenon, by no means universally involving recklessness and irresponsibility.[172] The premarital intercourse of European boy and girl may result in an illegitimate birth which is either preliminary to marriage or is regarded as equivalent thereto. This fact enables us to understand why the researches of Johansson in Stockholm[173] and Pinkus in Berlin appear to indicate that illegitimate children contribute somewhat less than their expected quota to the recruiting of the prostitute army. While 17.3% of the births in Berlin during certain specified years were illegitimate, only 13.7% of the inscribed prostitutes in the same period were of illegitimate origin.[174] Johansson calculated that one would expect to find 12% to 14% of the enrolled women of Stockholm to be illegitimates: they make up only 9% to 11% of the entries.[175] Meanwhile the situation is charged with danger, unless the father meets his responsibility. Too often this is not the case; and a relationship that perhaps began in passion deteriorates—the man seeking other women, the women turning to prostitution.

One more consideration ought to be separately mentioned, because it is mainly and most fatally operative in the milieu with which we are dealing,—the influence of evil example. From vicious suggestion practically no child is free; but the children to whom our attention has been directed may be so loosely anchored that they are easily carried away. The ruined girl, glancing back over the path she has come, overlooks the fundamental facts of environment and disposition and sees only the older comrade or chance acquaintance, whose easy attainment of fun, clothes, trinkets, she envies. Of the 800 Stockholm cases to which I have already frequently referred, 71% attributed their final decision to advice from tainted sources; 217, from professional prostitutes; 215, from clandestines; 81, from immoral girls; 4, from their own mothers.[176]

I need hardly call attention to what the reader will already have observed, viz., that I have frequently cited the same statistics in different connections: for the same girl may appear as orphaned, as servant, as ignorant, as illegitimate, as badly advised. No one circumstance can be regarded as alone fatal; the complicated skein of influences and associations cannot be completely disentangled. The facts that have been adduced,—broken homes, bad homes, exposure,—do not then act directly as causes, in the sense that the girls involved take to prostitution “as the sparks fly upward.” Of several sisters, all placed in precisely the same situation, only one may succumb; personal or anthropological forces may successfully defend all the others, despite their apparently identical position. The environment is, however, not thus freed of responsibility,—it is merely freed of direct, simple or sole responsibility. It does not cause prostitution; but the huge proletariat is the reservoir from which victims can be readily drawn. Nor are single factors characteristic of the proletariat causally responsible; but the phenomenon attaches itself to a chain of factors belonging in their totality to this milieu alone. Bad fathers, loose mothers, alcoholism, poor associations, physical defect, occur sporadically in every social stratum; but all together combined with defective education, low economic capacity, absence of oversight and restraint, rampant desires and meager satisfactions occur only in the proletariat.

We are in position now to judge the part played by economic pressure. The preponderance of servants suggests the proper interpretation: for the servant does not lack food or shelter, and her services are everywhere in demand. She does not therefore resort to prostitution as an alternative to starvation. Animated by a natural desire to excuse their conduct, as most human beings are, the direct pressure of need is rarely assigned by prostitutes in exculpation of their conduct. Mrs. Bramwell Booth, than whom there is no more competent or sympathetic authority, found among 150 successive and unusually varied cases only 2% who explained their prostitution by inability to earn a livelihood; Ströhmberg discovered among 462 enrolled women at Dorpat only one who protested poverty as her justification;[177] Pinkus,[178] studying the incomes of 1,550 Berlin women before embarking on the life, decides that 1,389 had earned enough for self-support.[179] But it would be obviously unfair to say of these 1,389 women capable of earning a living that social-economic conditions had nothing to do with their fall; for precisely these conditions create a situation capable of being exploited. Undeveloped moral character, early and careless infringement of the sex function, drudgery, on the one hand, unsatisfied and uncontrolled cravings, on the other,—these are all largely social-economic in their origin and scope. It happens all too often that girls born perhaps to pull canal boats, and with education and intelligence hardly above their lot, possess some little fancy, or love of pleasure, or taste in dress, without the strength of will or ideals to content themselves with an existence of mere endurance in a world full of enjoyment. They end by exploiting the sex function in order to obtain the satisfactions not otherwise accessible, or to escape difficulties and drudgeries from which they can contrive no other exit.

Prostitution is thus of economic origin and significance in so far as the region of economic pressure is mainly the region from which the prostitute comes. Whether or not the family lives in this region is primarily a question of the father’s income. The region is, however, not statistically definable: a specified income may keep a given family or a given individual under dangerous pressure; the same income may release from pressure another family or another individual. Severest, of course, where actual poverty exists, all those whose needs, desires and protests beat vainly against the limits imposed by their resources, live within the area of economic pressure. But the mere fact of living within the area, whether in its darkest tract or elsewhere, is not of itself conclusive. For the prostitute is, in the last resort, to use a biological phrase, “individually selected” in the manner already sketched.

The menace of unfavorable economic conditions can be clearly discerned in certain directions. Prostitution fluctuates with seasonal and casual labor; in certain employments it is looked upon as a regular source of incidental income to women workers; in other employments it offers to girls not living at home the readiest recourse. As bearing on the part played by casual and seasonal labor, it is important to note that the proportion of their female help permanently employed by certain London shops often falls as low as 25% of their maximum help; it rarely rises above 75%:[180] that is to say, something between one-quarter and three-quarters of the women employees of the London shops are casual hands, turned adrift in increasing numbers as the trade barometer falls. Charles Booth notes in addition to the “more regular members of this varied group of women, some who take to the life occasionally; tailoresses or dressmakers who return to their trade in busy times; girls from low neighborhoods, who eke out a living in this way.”[181] “It is true,” writes Wilbrandt of the irregularly employed girls in Germany, “that when out of work, many of them succeed from time to time in sewing more or less for private customers, or the lodging-house keepers give them credit (‘give food to the unfortunate also at times’), but for the majority this is no remedy. Even more than the isolated factory workers, these girls are fairly forced to prostitution. Where there is no serious obstacle, hardly one of this type, if isolated, but is given to occasional prostitution.”[182] The vagrant class in trade and industry and those dependent upon them are necessarily restless, improvident and irresponsible.[183]

Practically in the same category are the workers whose wages suffice only if they live at home, in which case part of their support is borne by other members of the family; where—as so often happens with those who come to the city to earn a living,—this is impossible, occasional or incidental immorality is a perilous temptation. Immorality may thus by low or irregular wages be almost woven into the very tissue of their lives. I was told, for example, that in certain English manufacturing towns, such as Bradford and Sheffield, a sliding-scale is accepted among some of the girl operatives; when wages rise above a certain point, a virtuous life is required by public opinion; when they fall below, the source of supplementary earnings is not scrutinized. The minimum wages of the sewing-women, factory hands, laundresses throughout Europe do not support the most meager sort of decent independence.[184] An official report states that out of 226 inscribed women at Frankfort-on-the-Main, 98 were laundresses and shop-help, earning from 1.50 marks to 1.80 marks a day,—less, that is, than 50 cents.[185] The same holds true of superior help—dressmakers, shop-assistants, whose standards are necessarily higher: “these girls accept wages which would not be enough to support them if they had not a friend to help them.”[186]

There remain the employments in which only prostitutes engage or in which the perils are so enormous that a girl who has not fallen, soon will fall. Irregular earnings are tacitly assumed as the major or sole consideration in bargaining for a position. The chorus, ballet, or cabaret girl can usually afford “the stage” because she is already immoral and the glamor of the footlights increases her earning capacity; the same conditions of course tend to force into immorality a girl who has hitherto been honest. A monthly salary of 10 marks ($2.50) is paid the dancers at the Court Theater in Hanover; the leading lady at Eisenach draws 15 marks ($3.75) a month for a six months’ season; a prominent soubrette at Munich states that she received an annual salary of 3,600 marks, from which the outlay for wardrobe was 1,500 marks; one reads of salaries of 1,200 marks conjoined with wardrobe expenses of 2,000 marks; incomes of 5,400 marks and expenses of 8,000 marks.[187] If a decent girl objects to a salary of 20 marks a week ($5.00) on the ground that it will not supply her necessities—living, wardrobe, etc.—the Director retorts: “Why should you want any salary? You are a pretty girl.”[188] The maelstrom thus tends powerfully to suck in those not previously tainted. The English barmaids and continental waitresses[189] are not infrequently virtuous women, leading decent lives; but they are also often selected for the lively manners so certain to lead, if they have not already led, to extra remuneration, that only a nominal wage attaches to their posts. The 37,000 waitresses in Germany are recruited from among the country or urban proletariat, whose invaded chastity has already been noticed. Their wages are nominal—or less; one-fourth of them are under 20 years of age.[190] It is not surprising to find a Berlin insurance fund reporting that waitresses make up one-half of those of its numbers venereally afflicted.[191] In England and Wales, of 27,707 barmaids in the Census of 1901, 18,251 were under 25 years of age.[192] Their wages range from 5 to 15 shillings a week.[193] Mrs. Booth concludes that of the prostitutes in the West End of London, one-fourth were originally barmaids and a still higher estimate has been made.[194] In many establishments, irregularity either precedes employment or is common enough to be taken into account in determining the conditions of employment.

Nothing would be gained by going into the foregoing matters more thoroughly. Enough has been said to show why in the presence of the demand previously characterized, an ample supply is forthcoming, and why it is almost totally derived from a single social stratum. It is derived, of course, with all sorts and degrees of difficulty. Sometimes demoralization has set in so early, or there has been so little development of intelligence or character, that the girl is herself from the start not only willing, but the main instigator; in other cases, with intelligence too undeveloped and character too unformed to urge her away from temptation, a vague but profound instinct holds her back until her dumb resistance has been overcome by other inducements or weakened by alcohol, pretended affection or interest. Despite this dark picture, however, most girls in the various stations described do resist like a stone wall. Of all those marked at any time by a given characteristic, the number engaged in prostitution is rarely high. The huge total is to be ascribed to the variety of paths and cross-cuts by which the morass may be reached.

So much for the source of supply: let us turn for a moment to its volume. Prostitution is an urban phenomenon; its volume increases even more rapidly than population. For as the demand seeks particularly younger women, the older tend to become a drug on the market. It is therefore inevitable that, while there is a comparative dearth of the youthful, the total supply should be in excess of the requirements. This situation, of course, favors the exploiter; for he procures without difficulty and on easy terms the commodity which he pushes on the street, in the bar, the dancing hall, the café, and the brothel.

In the case of supply, as in the case of demand, two different problems present themselves. In so far as individual reasons alone lead a girl of mature years to prostitution or deliberately to persist in prostitution, preventive action is both practically and theoretically difficult; prostitution of this kind is a reply to demand or an invitation thereto, taken in its simplest, even if not purely physiological form. Very different is the situation as respects supply arbitrarily developed to satisfy a specialized or artificial appetite. The girls thus involved are forced into prostitution; demand in the sense just mentioned has not been brought to bear upon them. Once violently ruined, however, they become part of the army requiring that the mass of immorality be increased so as to sustain them. Of this type are the white slave cases, and those led into ruin through employment agencies. In both instances, innocent girls are lured into strange places, deceived with promises that fail to materialize, and coerced into an immoral life, which holds them easily enough after their demoralization is completed. How much of the present supply is of this forced character it is obviously impossible to say. Stead’s revelations in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1885 and such incidents as the “Process Riehl”[195] at Vienna disclosed the existence of a large and active trade in innocent girls of tender years.

We found that there is no reason to regard demand as a fixed quantity. The same is obviously true of supply. Girls may be forced into prostitution; they can also be kept out. To some extent, as they are kept out, demand also shrinks; for the provocation is thereby reduced. It must be altogether obvious that all social amelioration tends thus to reduce the supply, by diminishing exposure and strain. Within the scope of this volume it is impossible even to mention briefly the steps that have been taken in this direction in different European countries during recent years. Suffice it to say that every effort in social and economic reform, education, and sanitation has tended to reduce the number of prostitutes and to strengthen the resistance of those exposed to danger.

In addition to indirect and slow-working processes of this kind, the problem has been directly and in some respects effectively grappled with. Of these efforts, the international movement for suppression of the White Slave Traffic is the most conspicuous. There is no question that not many years ago an extensive, though but loosely organized, traffic in girls was carried on in large European cities. The bordells were thus recruited with young and attractive inmates. The subject was first brought to public notice in 1877; but little attention was paid to it until the _Pall Mall Gazette_ published a complete exposure in 1885. Shortly thereafter the British Vigilance Society was formed; similar organizations were then organized in other countries and in 1899 an international congress was held in London. Annual congresses now meet to review progress and to suggest legislation; societies are everywhere engaged in watching at steamboat landings and railroad stations in order to assist unaccompanied travelers or to locate suspicious couples; and associations in different countries endeavor by correspondence to run down offenders and to release their victims.

Successful prosecution is, however, as a rule, surrounded by many technicalities. In Germany the statute provides that any one who induces a female to leave the country for the purpose of prostitution by means of concealment of his object is liable to penal servitude for five years, to loss of citizenship and a fine of 150 to 6,000 marks.[196] But as a rule the culprit, if arrested, has made an attempt only, and thus escapes the severe penalty here imposed. To avoid this pitfall, the congress of 1910 urged as a model provision the following: “Whoever procures a female for purposes of prostitution, abducts, carries off, or leads her into prostitution, even if the steps thereto occur in different countries, shall be punished, etc.” Several countries have proceeded on this line, notably Hungary, in a law passed in 1908. The most advanced legislation is, however, the recent amendment of the British Criminal Law by a provision empowering a police officer to arrest a procurer caught with a suspected victim without the delay involved in procuring a warrant.

This legislation indicates the form to which the White Slave Traffic has been largely reduced in Europe. Beyond question an innocent girl might be entrapped, enticed, and immured in a European brothel; but if so, the instance would be an isolated crime, like a mysterious murder or robbery. Under existing conditions, there is absolutely no reason to think that such cases occur frequently, though there are those who would be quick to take advantage of any relaxation of vigilance on the part of governments, the police, and the private organizations constantly on the alert. In the cases to which from time to time attention has been sensationally called, the women involved are neither innocent nor deceived. On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that European cities and ports are utilized for purposes of transit to South American ports where the trade still flourishes. A trafficker may entice a girl from Poland and Galicia on the promise of marriage or work; indeed every police office in Europe has a list of men thus engaged. The countries from which women are procured are believed to be mainly Hungary, Galicia, Poland, and Roumania; the countries to which they are carried, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and the Levant.[197] The pair steal through Vienna and Berlin and appear at the dock in Hamburg, Rotterdam, London, or some less prominent port just as the boat sails for Rio Janeiro, Buenos Aires or a South African harbor—too late to procure a warrant or detailed proof. The new English law above mentioned is calculated to deal with just this emergency: for it authorizes the detention and arrest of such couples without warrant, on suspicion, and throws the burden of proof upon them.[198] The entire White Slave movement is thus forcible interference with the making of prostitutes.[199]

While the traffic in young girls has been thus greatly restricted, there is no question that a trade in already ruined women is still carried on. Prostitution is, as I have repeatedly insisted, a business,—a business, too, in which novelty is an important item. Deprived of a supply of fresh young girls, the bordell-keeper, the proprietor of cabaret, dance hall or Animierkneipe must at least have variety. The trafficker scours the market for the most attractive women he can procure and women are thus kept in circulation through his efforts. He carries on his business in European cities, in the Levant and in the large cities of South America.

The employment agency has been similarly employed as a means of forcibly increasing supply. Girls are sent out as servants into disreputable places, in the activities of which they have been induced or compelled to take part; or, they are sent out of the country as dancers or singers, only to find themselves, on reaching their destination, consigned to cabarets in which theatrical entertainment is but a cloak for the exploitation of prostitution. Newspaper advertisements and the _poste restante_ are deceptively employed for the same purposes. Of the numbers thus victimized no accurate statement can be given. But preventive measures are being taken. The London County Council has undertaken a strict regulation of the employment agency: establishments must be annually licensed, their records must be kept according to a specified form, inspectors are free to examine them at will. Agents are prohibited to arrange for the employment of females abroad unless the satisfactory nature of the employment has been clearly established; nor even then shall an agent arrange for the employment abroad of a girl under sixteen unless with the written consent of her parents or lawful guardian.[200] The worst of the agencies abandoned the business as soon as the new regulations went into effect.[201] In Austria, the Employment Agency is regulated by the trade ordinance; the establishment must be licensed, those conducting it must be sufficiently educated, and the business is subject to the inspection of the safety, health and morals police.[202] A special license must be obtained if international operations are contemplated. Books must be kept according to a prescribed form; girls under 18 years of age can in no case be sent out of the country except with the permission of the Court of Chancery; precautions are taken to insure good faith in the case of older girls; the license can be canceled by the government without notice.[203] There is a marked tendency to limit the business to societies or the commune.

The pimp is connected with the supply of prostitutes in two ways: he cultivates intimacies with the ultimate purpose of putting his victims or associates on the street; he then drives them to the utmost, forcing them to ply their trade with all possible intensity. He is thus an important factor in increasing the number of prostitutes and the volume of prostitution. How formidable an element he becomes is evident from the fact that nowhere less than 50% and in most cities as many as 90% of the professional prostitutes are declared by the police to support their lovers. In Paris the proportion is given as 80% to 90%; in London at 90%. Of 93 foreign prostitutes in Zurich 85 were proved to be working for souteneurs; of 204 at Rotterdam, 130 were known to be supporting their lovers.[204] In form they vary; now appearing as base hangers-on, now as paramours, again as husbands. No European city has, however, successfully coped with the system. During September and October 1891, 350 arrests were made in Paris with only 14 convictions.[205] In London, the numbers convicted have increased, though they are still almost negligible: in 1902, there were 132 arrests, with 105 convictions; in 1905, 123 arrests and 95 convictions, in 1909, 201 and 167 respectively, in 1910, 185 and 151.[206] Glasgow shows 25 successful convictions for the same offence in 1911.[207] The present Dutch law has been in operation since June, 1911; up to November 15, 1912, there were 39 arrests and 30 convictions. In Vienna there were 30 convictions in 1912. Wulffen has carefully compiled the statistics showing the extent to which panders of all kinds—the pimp, the owner of disorderly houses, hotels, etc.—have been prosecuted in Germany. Very striking are two points, viz.: that the number of convictions has risen, as public opinion has developed, and that the total represents even yet only a small fraction of the guilty. In the entire Empire, between 1883 and 1887, convictions were obtained in only 5.18% of the cases; in the period 1898–1902, this figure had risen to 7.37%, an increase of 50%. Meanwhile local differences are enormous: Berlin convicted 565,—43.92% of the accused; Cologne, 507,—39.36% of the accused; Hamburg, 193,—15.01% of the accused; Frankfort 26,—2.03% of the accused.[208] The statutes differ somewhat in principle and detail, but the difficulty arises partly from varying interest on the part of the authorities, partly—nay largely, from the inherent reluctance of the woman to testify. Perhaps this vilest on-hanger of prostitution is the most difficult to lay hold of.

Of the various forms which prostitution takes the bordell plays a peculiar part in creating and intensively working supply; but, for reasons that will appear, the bordell requires special treatment and will occupy a separate chapter.[209] It would carry us far afield to describe fully here the other establishments that cater to prostitutes, directly or indirectly inducing girls to enter the life or furnishing facilities for the intensive pursuit of the vocation. The Animierkneipe, the Variety Theater, the café and other establishments largely derive their profit, direct or indirect, through affording an ever increasing supply an abundant opportunity to work up a demand, that will overtake it. Prostitution in these forms doubtless answers in part what I have loosely termed the physiological craving: that is to say, men bent on gratifying appetite sometimes betake themselves to the Animierkneipe, in the absence of which they would betake themselves elsewhere. Beyond all doubt, however, a fair, perhaps a very large, share of the immorality connected with these establishments is incited in them.

In London, license to sell liquor was formerly granted to music halls; no further licenses of this kind are granted, and one by one licenses formerly granted are being canceled. A few well known establishments, however, still remain, in which prostitutes loiter about the bar and in the promenade. Regular dance halls where liquor is sold—as is the case everywhere on the Continent—do not exist in London, though special permits for dances in hotels and elsewhere where liquor is sold are obtainable. A determined effort has however been made in Great Britain to break up the close connection between prostitution and the sale of drink. The licensing act forbids an unaccompanied woman to remain in a café or public house longer than a reasonable time to consume her drink. In the provincial towns this law is vigorously enforced; saloons which violate it may be deprived of their license on the charge of harboring prostitutes. The danger to the proprietor is a real one, for the government takes advantage of every legitimate pretext for reducing the number of liquor establishments. In London the law is less consistently enforced than in the provinces: certain notorious resorts in and about Leicester Square remind one of the continental café.

On the Continent, however, little has been done to hinder the exploitation of prostitution in connection with drinking, dancing, and the theater. “In Paris, cafés, balls and theaters are from this point of view, not the object of any particular restriction.”[210] In German cities, these establishments fall under the regulations applicable to business establishments and, for practical purposes, are not molested as long as outer decency is preserved,—the term being as a rule rather broadly interpreted. Public dance halls where liquor is freely dispensed abound everywhere. A Zurich law sought to improve conditions by forbidding waiters to work beyond midnight; but the law is evaded by engaging a second set to work in the early morning hours! Stockholm closes all public dance halls, cafés, etc., at midnight. The police could proceed against a vicious establishment only by inducing the license bureau to revoke the permit, a step very rarely taken. Meanwhile of the pernicious character of these places in wrecking innocent girls and facilitating the operations of prostitute and pimp, there is nowhere any question. “Legitimate trade is not large enough to keep them going,” remarked the head of the Zurich police. “The women make them pay by increasing the amount that each customer drinks. They thus win customers for themselves.” The difficulty in dealing with problems of this sort arises from several factors—the overlapping of the legitimate and illegitimate purposes which they serve, the lack of a definite public opinion, and the dispersion of authority among various detached departments.

An increasingly active interference with the making and forcing of supply is represented by rescue and protective work. Religious and philanthropic societies maintain street workers who endeavor to reclaim fallen women, and homes in which those in distress are received and rehabilitated. These institutions are more highly developed in England than on the Continent; nevertheless attractive and wholesome retreats have been established in Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen and elsewhere. Nowhere, however, is the capacity equal to the demand or the opportunity. Of the outcome of rescue work, the police are naturally skeptical; but it is a striking fact that those who have been longest engaged are the most hopeful.

There is, however, no difference of opinion at all as to the superior importance of prevention. Children immediately exposed to demoralization must be removed from danger and trained to some useful and profitable avocation,—for the girl who possesses some form of industrial skill is least likely to err and most likely to recover herself. The French government has recently provided for homes answering this purpose, but the machinery by means of which children are to be got into them is so clumsy that the legislation has proved ineffective. The recent Prussian “Fürsorge Gesetz” of 1901 (Law on Guardianship) is much more satisfactory. The procedure is applicable to children under 18, but guardianship continues until the age of 21. In less serious cases, children are placed in families under supervision; if the situation warrants, they are interned in institutions. In Prussia, about 6,000 children are yearly cared for on these lines, ⅓ of them girls, of whom about 40% have already gone wrong. For the most part their domestic environment was bad,—their birth illegitimate, the father alcoholic, the mother immoral, etc. This law is a fair sample of modern effort on the part of the state to control the conditions under which imperiled children are reared.[211] Energy expended at this stage attacks the problem of supply at its very source.

Our consideration of demand and supply has shown the complicated character of modern prostitution. The important point to remember, from the standpoint of practical policy, is this. Supply is to some extent artificially created and demand is to some extent artificially forced; whatever may be true of minimum supply and demand, the artificial processes in question are in greater or less degree socially controllable or modifiable. This is, of course, not to say that powerful commercial interests and social habits would not resist interference; for the abnormalities in question are at once the product and for thousands the attraction of metropolitan life. The fascination and the curse of the great city lie thus close together,—perhaps inextricably so, as is so effectively portrayed in the concluding scene of Charpentier’s “Louise.” With this local pride to be a great city through forcing the sensual pace, modern Europe is fairly mad. Berlin and Vienna are rich and gay; the idle and curious throng thither from all quarters of the world. Smaller towns like Geneva, smitten with envy, struggle to imitate the license of those great capitals. In so far, prostitution is in the broadest sense a social problem,—the problem of rationalizing human life, and only indirectly to be grappled with.

Precisely therefore as there is nothing absolutely fixed, predetermined, and inevitable about the strength of demand, so there is nothing fatalistic about supply. In general, the two move together, one—either one—provoking the other. In the end, they have to be solved together; but within limits, effective action attacking one can itself ameliorate the other. Human nature is indeed weak enough on the sexual side; but the mass of existing vice is out of all proportion to what would exist on that account alone; and one way to abridge demand is to abridge supply, as it is being abridged by white slave legislation, by control of employment agencies, by care of the unprotected young and by rational management of the drink and amusement traffic. Moreover, whatever interferes with intensive exploitation virtually reduces supply. As forced supply increases demand, so diminished and hampered supply to some extent checks it.

NOTE.—Since the above was written the Report of the Fifth International Congress on the White Slave Traffic has appeared. It contains a complete account of the various movements and efforts above described. It is published by the National Vigilance Association, London.