A large number of the modern writers on prostitution insist on its socially beneficial character.  Thus Charles Richard concludes his book on the subject with the words:  “The conduct of society with regard to prostitution must proceed from the principle of gratitude without false shame for its utility, and compassion for the poor creatures at whose expense this is attained” (La Prostitution devant le Philosophe, 1882, p. 171).  “To make marriage permanent is to make it difficult,” an American medical writer observes; “to make it difficult is to defer it; to defer it is to maintain in the community an increasing number of sexually perfect individuals, with normal, or, in cases where repression is prolonged, excessive sexual appetites.  The social evil is the natural outcome of the physical nature of man, his inherited impulses, and the artificial conditions under which he is compelled to live” ("The Social Evil,” Medicine, August and September, 1906).  Woods Hutchinson, while speaking with strong disapproval of prostitution and regarding prostitutes as “the worst specimens of the sex,” yet regards prostitution as a social agency of the highest value.  “From a medico-economic point of view I venture to claim it as one of the grand selective and eliminative agencies of nature, and of highest value to the community.  It may be roughly characterized as a safety valve for the institution of marriage” (The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 193; cf. the same author’s article on “The Economics of Prostitution,” summarized in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, November 21, 1895).  Adolf Gerson, in a somewhat similar spirit, argues ("Die Ursache der Prostitution,” Sexual-Probleme, September, 1908) that “prostitution is one of the means used by Nature to limit the procreative activity of men, and especially to postpone the period of sexual maturity.”  Molinari considers that the social benefits of prostitution have been manifested in various ways from the first; by sterilizing, for instance, the more excessive manifestations of the sexual impulse prostitution suppressed the necessity for the infanticide of superfluous children, and led to the prohibition of that primitive method of limiting the population (G. de Molinari, La Viriculture, p. 45).  In quite another way than that mentioned by Molinari, prostitution has even in very recent times led to the abandonment of infanticide.  In the Chinese province of Ping-Yang, Matignon states, it was usual not many years ago for poor parents to kill forty per cent. of the girl children, or even all of them, at birth, for they were too expensive to rear and brought nothing in, since men who wished to marry could easily obtain a wife in the neighboring province of Wenchu, where women were very easy to obtain.  Now, however, the line of steamships along the coast makes it very easy for girls to reach the brothels of Shang-Hai, where they can earn money for their families; the custom of killing