in the town, this career has not usually much attraction, unless she has been brought up from the first in an environment that predisposes her to adopt it.  She is familiar from childhood with the excitements of urban civilization and they do not intoxicate her; she is, moreover, more shrewd to take care of herself than the country girl, and too well acquainted with the real facts of the prostitute’s life to be very anxious to adopt her career.  Beyond this, also, it is probable that the stocks she belongs to possess a native or acquired power of resistance to unbalancing influences which has enabled them to survive in urban life.  She has become immune to the poisons of that life.[209]

In all great cities a large proportion, if not the majority, of the inhabitants have usually been born outside the city (in London only about fifty per cent. of heads of households are definitely reported as born in London); and it is not therefore surprising that prostitutes also should often be outsiders.  Still it remains a significant fact that so typically urban a phenomenon as prostitution should be so largely recruited from the country.  This is everywhere the case.  Merrick enumerates the regions from which came some 14,000 prostitutes who passed through Millbank Prison.  Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Essex and Devon are the counties that stand at the head, and Merrick estimates that the contingent of London from the four counties which make up London was 7000, or one-half of the whole; military towns like Colchester and naval ports like Plymouth supply many prostitutes to London; Ireland furnished many more than Scotland, and Germany far more than any other European country, France being scarcely represented at all (Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, 1890, pp. 14-18).  It is, of course, possible that the proportions among those who pass through a prison do not accurately represent the proportions among prostitutes generally.  The registers of the London Salvation Army Rescue Home show that sixty per cent. of the girls and women come from the provinces (A.  Sherwell, Life in West London, Ch.  V).  This is exactly the same proportion as Tait found among prostitutes generally, half a century earlier, in Edinburgh.  Sanger found that of 2000 prostitutes in New York as many as 1238 were born abroad (706 in Ireland), while of the remaining 762 only half were born in the State of New York, and clearly (though the exact figures are not given) a still smaller proportion in New York City.  Prostitutes come from the North—­where the climate is uncongenial, and manufacturing and sedentary occupations prevail—­much more than from the South; thus Maine, a cold bleak maritime State, sent twenty-four of these prostitutes to New York, while equidistant Virginia, which at the same rate should have sent seventy-two, only sent nine; there was a similar difference between Rhode Island and Maryland (Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 452).  It is instructive to see here the