Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the people--this world beneath a world--were to remain under the literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below could provoke weeping like those that are wept above. Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station. But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand, take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spare you no most hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to know about sexual pathology. Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have acquired this knowledge--when we have visited the hospitals and the jails and the brothels and the morgues--our minds are automatically led to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased.