should be portrayed the luxurious conditions that are apparently enjoyed
by those who have taken "the easiest way." In ancient society the status
of the prostitute was that of slave: to-day it is that of an industrial
citizen.[29] If the program of social hygiene comprehended only talking
about sex to working-girls--to laundry-girls, for example, who, after a
day's work of ten hours at the machines, go at night to their
boarding-houses where they wash dishes to eke out a living,--then this
program would not be unlike the advice of a physician who tells a poor man
with tuberculosis that he must go to the country for a year and live on
cream and eggs.

Even in the case of wage-earning girls who adopt loose ways to satisfy
extravagant desires, their tastes are established by women of the wealthy
and middle classes. The leisure of these women is due to their
wage-earning sisters, who in factories and mills make the cloth, prepare
food-stuffs, and do all sorts of tasks that formerly kept women of the
upper classes at home. Through the instinct of imitation, combined with
the American feeling of democracy, the habits of the well-to-do determine
the ambition of many a working-girl.

Other factors are industrial arrangements which segregate men in
construction and lumber camps for a part of the year, and then, without
providing for their further employment, turn them loose into cities where
only saloons welcome them and cash their checks, and where
disease-infected lodging-houses are their only places of abode.
Furthermore, standing armies take thousands of able-bodied men out of
normal industrial relationships, and keep them in camps that become the
congregating places of prostitutes.

The most hopeful phase of the whole problem that it lies within the power