might perhaps come about by a better organization of prostitutes, a more careful selection among those who desired admission to their ranks and the cultivation of professional virtues which would raise their moral level.  “If courtesans fulfil a need,” Balzac had already said in his Physiologie du Mariage, “they must become an institution.”

This moral attitude is supported and enforced by the inevitable democratic tendency of civilization which, although it by no means destroys the idea of class, undermines that idea as the mark of fundamental human distinctions and renders it superficial.  Prostitution no longer makes a woman a slave; it ought not to make her even a pariah:  “My body is my own,” said the young German prostitute of to-day, “and what I do with it is nobody else’s concern.”  When the prostitute was literally a slave moral duty towards her was by no means necessarily identical with moral duty towards the free woman.  But when, even in the same family, the prostitute may be separated by a great and impassable social gulf from her married sister, it becomes possible to see, and in the opinion of many imperatively necessary to see, that a readjustment of moral values is required.  For thousands of years prostitution has been defended on the ground that the prostitute is necessary to ensure the “purity of women.”  In a democratic age it begins to be realized that prostitutes also are women.

The developing sense of a fundamental human equality underlying the surface divisions of class tends to make the usual attitude towards the prostitute, the attitude of her clients even more than that of society generally, seem painfully cruel.  The callous and coarsely frivolous tone of so many young men about prostitutes, it has been said, is “simply cruelty of a peculiarly brutal kind,” not to be discerned in any other relation of life.[217] And if this attitude is cruel even in speech it is still more cruel in action, whatever attempts may be made to disguise its cruelty.

Canon Lyttelton’s remarks may be taken to refer chiefly to young men of the upper middle class.  Concerning what is perhaps the usual attitude of lower middle class people towards prostitution, I may quote from a remarkable communication which has reached me from Australia:  “What are the views of a young man brought up in a middle-class Christian English family on prostitutes?  Take my father, for instance.  He first mentioned prostitutes to me, if I remember rightly, when speaking of his life before marriage.  And he spoke of them as he would speak of a horse he had hired, paid for, and dismissed from his mind when it had rendered him service.  Although my mother was so kind and good she spoke of abandoned women with disgust and scorn as of some unclean animal.  As it flatters vanity and pride to be able with good countenance and universal consent to look down on something, I soon grasped the situation and adopted an attitude which is, in the main, that