It is sometimes said that the relation of the isolated prostitute to her _souteneur_ constitutes a form of "white slavery." Undoubtedly that may sometimes be the case. We are here in a confused field where the facts are complicated by a number of considerations, and where circumstances may very widely differ, for the "fancy boy"--selected from affection by the prostitute herself--may easily become the _souteneur_, or "cadet" as he is termed in New York, who seduces and trains to prostitution a large number of girls. The prostitute is so often a little weak in character and a little defective in intelligence; she is so often regarded as a legitimate prey by the world in which she moves, and a legitimate object of contempt and oppression by the social world above her and its legal officers, that she easily becomes abjectly dependent on the man who in some degree protects her from this extortion, contempt, and oppression, even though he sometimes trains her to his own ends and exploits her professional activities for his own advantage. These circumstances so often occur that some investigators consider that they represent the general rule. No doubt they are the most conspicuous cases. But they can scarcely be regarded as representing the normal relations of the prostitute to the man she is attracted to. She is earning her own living, and if she possesses a little modicum of character and intelligence, she knows that she can choose her own lover and dismiss him when she so pleases. He may beat her occasionally, but all over the world this is not always displeasing to the primitively feminine woman. "It is indeed true," as Kneeland remarks, "that many prostitutes do not believe their lovers care for them unless they 'beat them up' occasionally." The woman in this position is not more of a "white slave" than many wives, and some husbands, who submit to the whims and tyrannies of their conjugal partners, with, indeed, the additional hardship and misfortune that they are legally bound to them. And the _souteneur_, although from the respectable point of view he has put himself into a low-down moral position, is, after all, not so very unlike those parasitic wives who, on a higher social level, live lazily on their husbands' professional earnings, and sometimes give much less than the _souteneur_ in return.