Keeping a portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man’s mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of all pure love or capacity of it.  This is the fact we have to face....  To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery:  now see the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health we pay the crushing of another girl into hell.  We give that for it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution; we have prostitutes made for that....  We devote some women recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the rest....  One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women are perishing for lack of these very pleasures.  If marriage is this, is it not embodied lust?  The happy Christian homes are the true dark places of the earth....  Prostitution for man, restraint for woman—­they are two sides of the same thing, and both are denials of love, like luxury and asceticism.  The mountains of restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury.”

Some of Hinton’s views were set forth by a writer intimately acquainted with him in a pamphlet entitled The Future of Marriage:  An Eirenicon for a Question of To-day, by a Respectable Woman (1885).  “When once the conviction is forced home upon the ‘good’ women,” the writer remarks, “that their place of honor and privilege rests upon the degradation of others as its basis, they will never rest till they have either abandoned it or sought for it some other pedestal.  If our inflexible marriage system has for its essential condition the existence side by side with it of prostitution, then one of two things follows:  either prostitution must be shown to be compatible with the well-being, moral and physical, of the women who practice it, or our marriage system must be condemned.  If it was clearly put before anyone, he could not seriously assert that to be ‘virtue’ which could only be practiced at the expense of another’s vice....  Whilst the laws of physics are becoming so universally recognized that no one dreams of attempting to annihilate a particle of matter, or of force, yet we do not instinctively apply the same conception to moral forces, but think and act as if we could simply do away with an evil, while leaving unchanged that which gives it its strength.  This is the only view of the social problem which can give us hope.  That prostitution should simply cease, leaving everything else as it is, would be disastrous if it were possible.  But it is not possible.  The weakness of all existing efforts to put down prostitution is that they are directed against it as an isolated thing, whereas it is only one of the symptoms proceeding from a common disease.”

Ellen Key, who during recent years has been the chief apostle of a gospel of sexual morality