But it is not the seamstress slowly starving in her garret, nor the mass of struggling poverty that is alone, or even chiefly, beset by the fiery temptations of gain, and the enticing pleasures which money can provide. The deterioration of character, which is the gravest result of a false system of political economy, extends to much wider circles of society. This serious fact is sufficient to prove the error of those who look to the industrial independence of women, as the chief means of destroying licentiousness. Although freedom to obtain decent remunerative employment will secure an important condition for checking social evil, it will be a means only, it can never attain the end. The great army of domestic servants, whether in public or private dwellings, are surrounded by constant temptations to supplement their wages or relieve their monotonous labour by selling themselves. When we remember the conditions under which the vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures and privations of their homes, their undeveloped mental state in relation to social duties, the exhausting work upon which the majority of them enter in hotels, lodging-houses, struggling households, or the special danger of rich, careless establishments, and realize both the condition under which their service drags on and the natural instincts of the human being, then it is easy to understand why to a frightfully increasing extent they yield to the solicitations to which they are exposed. The five shillings secretly gained at night becomes an important addition to scanty wages, the stolen pleasures an intoxicating relief to drudgery. The economic effect of thus bringing the lightly-earned wages of vice into competition with the hard-earned wages of honest industry is to discredit the latter, and to produce discontent and careless, unwilling service in industries for which women are naturally better fitted than men; for the same state of things that is injuring domestic service, exists in dress-making, millinery, and all peculiarly feminine industries.