appears too often to be exercised, worthy of a better cause, in obtaining the largest possible amount of labor out of the domestic machine”; in addition she is “a kind of lightning conductor,” to receive the ill-temper and morbid feelings of her mistress and the young ladies; so that, as some have said, “I felt so miserable I did not care what became of me, I wished I was dead."[206] The servant is deprived of all human relationships; she must not betray the existence of any simple impulse, or natural need.  At the same time she lives on the fringe of luxury; she is surrounded by the tantalizing visions of pleasure and amusement for which her fresh young nature craves.[207] It is not surprising that, repelled by unrelieved drudgery and attracted by idle luxury, she should take the plunge which will alone enable her to enjoy the glittering aspects of civilization which seem so desirable to her.[208]

It is sometimes stated that the prevalence of prostitution among girls who were formerly servants is due to the immense numbers of servants who are seduced by their masters or the young men of the family, and are thus forced on to the streets.  Undoubtedly in a certain proportion of cases, perhaps sometimes a fairly considerable proportion, this is a decisive factor in the matter, but it scarcely seems to be the chief factor.  The existence of relationships between servants and masters, it must be remembered, by no means necessarily implies seduction.  In a large number of cases the servant in a household is, in sexual matters, the teacher rather than the pupil. (In “The Sexual Impulse in Women,” in the third volume of these Studies, I have discussed the part played by servants as sexual initiators of the young boys in the households in which they are placed.) The more precise statistics of the causes of prostitution seldom assign seduction as the main determining factor in more than about twenty per cent. of cases, though this is obviously one of the most easily avowable motives (see ante, p. 256).  Seduction by any kind of employer constitutes only a proportion (usually less than half) even of these cases.  The special case of seduction of servants by masters can thus play no very considerable part as a factor of prostitution.

The statistics of the parentage of illegitimate children have some bearing on this question.  In a series of 180 unmarried mothers assisted by the Berlin Bund fuer Mutterschutz, particulars are given of the occupations both of the mothers, and, as far as possible, of the fathers.  The former were one-third servant-girls, and the great majority of the remainder assistants in trades or girls carrying on work at home.  At the head of the fathers (among 120 cases) came artisans (33), followed by tradespeople (22); only a small proportion (20 to 25) could be described as “gentlemen,” and even this proportion loses some of its significance when it is pointed out that some of the girls were