The subject of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1866 and 1869 is dreadful to contemplate and to describe. But its significance is so immense, and its neglect by all ordinary historians is so marked, that it must be treated in this book. The conflict between the disposing and the sympathetic minds, between the {256} blind and largely unconscious egoism of a governing class and the interest of its depreciated subjects, has never been elsewhere so terribly illustrated. Prostitution has always been regarded by a male society either as a danger or as a convenience. By such women as have known of its existence it has been more justly considered as an example of heartless oppression and abuse. Only a minority of the women who engage in it are there out of their own choice. The great bulk of this trade, which is now not improperly described as the White Slave Traffic, is supplied by unwilling victims. They are entrapped in childhood, or in early youth, they are corrupted by bad housing and overcrowding, they are betrayed by seducers, or they are driven by starvation wages to earn their living on the streets. Their condition is the most wretched of any people in the world. No other trade is so dangerous to those who are employed in it, or so quickly uses up their lives. No other trade so swiftly devours in its workpeople those noble qualities of the mind which would enable them to support the heaviest physical burdens. In prostitution everything is sooner or later destroyed that most adorns body, mind, and soul.