The discouragement of honest industry is a very serious economic evil. Any discouragement to patient industry, thrift, and self-control is direct encouragement to reckless improvidence, vicious indulgence, and the creation of a dangerously increasing predatory horde. Through obstacles to honest labour, our prisons are now filled with criminals, our streets with the vicious, and our work-houses with paupers. The industrious workers are taxed beyond endurance to support the institutions rendered necessary by the suicidal policy of degrading labour. The discouraging difficulties which now surround all honest industry press with increased force upon women’s labour, and compel a moral heroism to resist the special temptation which crowds upon them. It is now a fact that in every large city, no woman with any pretension to natural attractiveness can fail to meet a purchaser. There are men who think it neither shame nor wrong to purchase for shillings or pounds, as the case may be, a temporary physical gratification, without reflection upon the inevitable results, individual and social, of their temporary action. The knowledge that money may be gained so easily, spreads from woman to woman. The contrast between the ease with which the wages of sin may be gained, and the laborious, even crushing methods of honest industry, becomes an ever present and burning temptation to working women. It is undoubtedly true that the numerical excess of women in Great Britain, with other economic facts, intensifies most heavily upon woman the grinding pressure of our present industrial system. All rescue workers seeking to help their fallen sisters are constantly confronted with the appalling answer, ‘Give me work; I cannot starve.’ The awful extent of woman’s industrial misery would now be more fully realized, had not well-meant benevolent efforts called in the harsh hand of the police to suppress begging, and thus crush it out of sight. The increasing and perplexing flood of women in the streets, begging to be bought, is a strange commentary on the effect of the stern repression of begging for alms. If in the future, in addition to the suppression of ordinary begging by men and women, another edict goes forth forbidding women to present themselves for sale, but not forbidding men to purchase them, gross injustice to women will be added to a cruel abuse of power, and fresh impulse given to male vice. Certainly, if it were in the nature of women to become murderous criminals, any increasingly harsh and unjust attempts to crush their misery and degradation out of sight, would drive them into violent crime.