Other economic conditions serve to promote and intrench the business of prostitution.  These conditions are as real as any other factors and will block reform until they are squarely met.  One of these is the excessive profit on property used for immoral purposes.  The fact that such property is often owned by persons who pass as respectable members of society does not make the problem easier.  Then there is the intimate connection between the sale of intoxicating liquors and commercialized prostitution, as definitely revealed by the investigations of every vice commission.

Another economic factor intrenching prostitution as a business is the commercial organization which continues to do an international and interstate business, partly because of our inadequate white-slave laws and inadequate appropriation for enforcement.

Most important among the economic aids to prostitution as a business are the high immediate wages of vice in contrast with the low wages of virtue.  A girl in the shop, or factory, or office may be capitalized at six thousand dollars; in the clutches of a procurer, she may become worth twenty-six thousand dollars.  As a prostitute, she “earns more than four times as much as she is worth as a factor in the social and industrial economy, where brains, intelligence, virtue and womanly charm should bring a premium.”  In an average lifetime, to be sure, the wages of one woman in industry are greater than the earnings in the short life of one prostitute; but from the viewpoint of the man who pockets most of the earnings, it is more profitable to kill off a dozen women than to keep one at decent work through an average lifetime.  This economic condition is revealed to the cast-out woman after a few years, on the brink of the grave; but at the outset of her brief career, she sees the immediate gain, not the ultimate ruin.

There are other economic factors which will aid all movements for social hygiene when they are more clearly perceived by those engaged in reputable business:  first, the loss to honest industry due to the reduced efficiency of sexual perverts, of the diseased, and of those who, through their ignorance, have been kept in worry by “leading specialists”; and, in the second place, the inevitable reduction in the profits of legitimate business due to the excessive profits of illegitimate business.

The recreational pursuits of young people are other factors of immediate concern to those who would see the problems of social hygiene in their entirety.  Adolescent boys and girls spend most of their leisure time either in wholesome physical activity conducive to normal sex life or in various forms of amusement fraught with danger.  In seeking innocent recreation, young people can hardly escape contact with amusements cunningly devised to excite sex impulses and at the same time to lower respect for woman.  The bill-boards and the picture post-cards, the penny-in-the-slot machines and the motion pictures, the exhibits of quack