propinquity of city excitements and eager to share them, to keep to the
gray and monotonous path of regular work. Almost every such girl of the
hundreds who have come to grief, "begins" by accepting invitations to
dinners and places of amusement. She is always impressed with the ease
for concealment which the city affords, although at the same time
vaguely resentful that it is so indifferent to her individual existence.
It is impossible to estimate the amount of clandestine prostitution
which the modern city contains, but there is no doubt that the growth of
the social evil at the present moment, lies in this direction. Another
of its less sinister developments is perhaps a contemporary
manifestation of that break, long considered necessary, between
established morality and artistic freedom represented by the hetaira in
Athens, the gifted actress in Paris, the geisha in Japan. Insofar as
such women have been treated as independent human beings and prized for
their mental and social charm, even although they are on a commercial
basis, it makes for a humanization of this most sordid business. Such
open manifestations of prostitution hasten social control, because
publicity has ever been the first step toward community understanding
and discipline.

Doubtless the attitude toward the victims of commercialized vice will be
modified by many reactions upon the public consciousness, through a
thousand manifestations of the great democratic movement which is
developing all about us. Certainly we are safe in predicting that when
the solidarity of human interest is actually realized, it will become
unthinkable that one class of human beings should be sacrificed to the
supposed needs of another; when the rights of human life have
successfully asserted themselves in contrast to the rights of property,
it will become impossible to sell the young and heedless into
degradation. An age marked by its vigorous protests against slavery and