War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace be an incessant struggle--for more wealth with the privileged classes; for existence with the exploited masses--and war will be, as it has always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. So long as human beings may starve in the midst of plenty, so long will woman be under temptation to sell the use of her body. She may prostitute herself because she has literally no other way to get a living; she may do so in order to eke out an insufficient wage; she may do so because prostitution seems to offer a relief from hopeless drudgery; she may do so because she has made what the world calls a misstep and is cut off thereby from respectability and the chance to earn a decent living; or she may prostitute herself legally, in marriage, as women have been forced to do from time immemorial. In every case there is one motive force, and that motive force is economic pressure, which bears hardest upon women because of the social, educational, and economic disadvantages from which they are forced to suffer in a world dominated by men. No amount of masculine chivalry has ever mitigated this evil, and no amount ever will; for chivalry is not compulsory, while prostitution is. No amount of exhortation, no amount of devoted labour on the part of reformers will touch it; for it is not a question of morality. No amount of persecution--of arrests, of manhandling, of night-courts, public insult, fine and imprisonment--will check it, for the necessity which prompts it is too imperious to be balked by the uncomprehending guardians of public decency. The peril of this necessity threatens all womankind; one turn of fortune’s wheel may bring its stark aspect before the eyes of the most sheltered of women. It is the sheltered women, indeed, who are peculiarly in danger; those women whose preparation for the struggle to wrest a living from economic injustice has consisted in waiting for men to marry and support them. The parent who, in a world where celibacy and prostitution are on the increase, fails to give a girl child education or training which will enable her to get her living by her own efforts, forces her to take a dangerous risk; for the woman who is brought up in the expectation of getting her living by her sex may ultimately be driven to accept prostitution if she fails to find a husband, or, having found one, loses him.