But in this generation, which has thrown open the broad gates of education to women, and which has enormously extended the range of employments into which they are invited to enter, the causes which Mill suggests (overcrowding, injustice, etc.) do not seem to give a sufficient economic reason. One powerful and growing cause of derangement in the natural rewards of labour has been overlooked--viz., the unequal competition with male labour which must result, when the wages given by vice are allowed to supplement the under-payment for honest work, and the street-door key makes up for the deficient salary. Whilst this phase of human slavery exists, and the female body remains an article of merchandise, the increasing competition with male labour will make itself more severely felt as wider fields of industry are extended to women and they develop increasing ability to enter them. The wages of women can never permanently rise to a just scale of labour value, until this slavish principle is eliminated, because this purchase introduces an uneconomical element into the remuneration of labour which destroys any legitimate effect of demand and supply. It enables competitive employers solely intent on profit to beat down the price of male as well as female labour indefinitely. Indeed, we have by no means reached the limits of this injustice. The practice of purchase is still more dangerous in an economic point of view, because whilst the labour of all women tends to sink to the lowest point of remuneration, this lowest point can be reached in the labour of the young and strong, who are most eagerly sought for as merchandise. The increasing employment of less remunerated female labour while male labour stands idle, is an alarming fact. The family is barely held together by the earnings, of a daughter, whilst father and brother lounge about the pot-house. The results of any sudden stoppage of a factory where large amounts of this cheap labour has been employed (as in the Barking jute factory, where 800 girls were suddenly thrown out of employment) is an object-lesson in the suicidal policy of degrading women. The natural order of industry by which the man is the chief material support of the family, is disturbed and destroyed by this unnatural practice. The purchase of young women adds cruelty to fraud. Youth must always fail to realize results which are only known through the experience of age. No amount of cautious or theoretic teaching given to the young can ever place them on an equality with the experienced adult. Moreover, it is Nature’s law for youth that sexual attraction is quite out of proportion to intellectual development. The fact of this great natural law of slower mental growth is the Creator’s imperative command laid upon the older generation, to protect and guide the youth of both sexes. The corruption of the young by the adult is not only fraud, it is dastardly cruelty.