of women, extended their knowledge of affairs, increased their practical capacity, and given them that interest in association for the management of common concerns which is the basis of all political movements. In particular, their attention had been directed to foreign countries like the United States, Australia, and Norway, where women had recently been enfranchised, and more than one international association linked up the English movement with the rest of the universal progress of women. But the most influential of all the causes of the new strength of the agitation was the increased knowledge of physical facts and the consequences of sexual vice. The development of sick nursing since Florence Nightingale, the experience of work among prostitutes since Josephine Butler, and the study of medicine since Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake, had revealed to an increasing number of women the dreadful consequences of a moral standard which indulged men and degraded women. Prostitution appears to the Suffragist to be a direct consequence of the political supremacy of one sex over the other, to be the result of that encouragement of egoism which always follows the disposition of the political affairs of one class by another. There are in the United Kingdom at the {353} present day not less than one hundred thousand women who are kept, through no desire of their own, for no other purpose than that of the destruction of their bodies and souls for the gratification of their political superiors. In 1899 Englishmen went to war, as they supposed, to rescue some of their countrymen from oppressive taxation and the abuse of the machinery of justice. The Suffragists since 1906 have been conducting a political agitation of a milder sort, as they suppose, to rescue some of their fellow-creatures from an infinitely more dreadful fate. Those who require an explanation of their earnestness, or an excuse for their extravagance, will find it in their belief that social degradation is the inevitable consequence of political inferiority. The White Slave Traffic Act of 1913, flung by Parliament as a sop to womanhood in revolt, merely touches the surface of the problem. The whole system of sexual ethics is put in issue by the Woman Suffrage movement.[364]