Prostitution tends to arise, as Schurtz has pointed out, in every society in which early marriage is difficult and intercourse outside marriage is socially disapproved.  “Venal women everywhere appear as soon as the free sexual intercourse of young people is repressed, without the necessary consequences being impeded by unusually early marriages."[130] The repression of sexual intimacies outside marriage is a phenomenon of civilization, but it is not itself by any means a measure of a people’s general level, and may, therefore, begin to appear at an early period.  But it is important to remember that the primitive and rudimentary forms of prostitution, when they occur, are merely temporary, and frequently—­though not invariably—­involve no degrading influence on the woman in public estimation, sometimes indeed increasing her value as a wife.  The woman who sells herself for money purely as a professional matter, without any thought of love or passion, and who, by virtue of her profession, belongs to a pariah class definitely and rigidly excluded from the main body of her sex, is a phenomenon which can seldom be found except in developed civilization.  It is altogether incorrect to speak of prostitutes as a mere survival from primitive times.

On the whole, while among savages sexual relationships are sometimes free before marriage, as well as on the occasion of special festivals, they are rarely truly promiscuous and still more rarely venal.  When savage women nowadays sell themselves, or are sold by their husbands, it has usually been found that we are concerned with the contamination of European civilization.

The definite ways in which professional prostitution may arise are no doubt many.[131] We may assent to the general principle, laid down by Schurtz, that whenever the free union of young people is impeded under conditions in which early marriage is also difficult prostitution must certainly arise.  There are, however, different ways in which this principle may take shape.  So far as our western civilization is concerned—­the civilization, that is to say, which has its cradle in the Mediterranean basin—­it would seem that the origin of prostitution is to be found primarily in a religious custom, religion, the great conserver of social traditions, preserving in a transformed shape a primitive freedom that was passing out of general social life.[132] The typical example is that recorded by Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ, at the temple of Mylitta, the Babylonian Venus, where every woman once in her life had to come and give herself to the first stranger who threw a coin in her lap, in worship of the goddess.  The money could not be refused, however small the amount, but it was given as an offertory to the temple, and the woman, having followed the man and thus made oblation to Mylitta, returned home and lived chastely ever afterwards.[133] Very similar customs existed in other parts of Western Asia, in North Africa, in