This severity did not extend to the _victim_ of loose morals, to whom the path of re-instatement was ever open.[19] If we did not know how much unreasonableness and cruelty there are in a corrupt nation, we might learn it in the fact that France began to treat the common prostitute with severity at the close of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War had ruined the country, and when the excesses of the troops and the profligacy of the Court were beginning to extinguish the national morality; then, the birth of a free class developing personal responsibility, called for the means of livelihood for the friendless woman, who was getting them by the sale of her person; for the writers of that age attribute the progress of public corruption to the difficulty which women found in living by respectable means. The _Journal du Bourgeois de Paris_, 1445, thus expresses itself:—“At that time, when everyone learned how to earn, wages were so bad that respectable women, who had learned how to earn five or six _blancs_ a day, were willingly letting themselves out for two, and living on them.” This sad picture sufficiently resembles that of the _fifth quarter of the working day_, which disgraces our time. Let it be observed, however, that instead of trying to ameliorate woman’s position by work, she was punished for not finding any at all. The edicts of the time overwhelm her by extending indulgence to her purchasers, who, beginning from that period, acquired new prerogatives daily. A writer on morals is, with reason, astonished at the cruelty of the 16th century in this respect. “It is,” he says, “truly remarkable, that never were royal and municipal enactments against public women more frequent or severe than during this period of disorder. No pity was shown to public prostitutes at a period when decency and shame seemed banished from morals.”[20] This brutality is ever in the direct ratio to social profligacy. When the French people, wallowing at a later period in the unchastity of royalty and nobility, had caused the goddess of love to be enthroned on its altars, it offered, on the revolutionary scaffold, the innocence, beauty, and attractions of women who were slaughtered by hecatombs; then the guillotine gathered its harvest from the young girls of Verdun, as the scythe cuts off a basket of lilies.