And, again, the reclamation of corrupt women, if not impossible, is rarely successful, for ‘woman is at heart a rake,’ and, as Ouida says, who has, one might surmise, unique opportunities of knowing, she is generally ‘corrupt because she likes it.’ Thus, throughout the whole range of history, Pagan or Christian, courtesans have never been to seek. They have, these _filles de joie_, always succeeded in attracting to themselves wealth and genius, luxury and intellect; and through their paramount influence, Society at the present day is corrupt to extremity. The Evangelists of the New Purity, who hold that the innate viciousness of man is the cause of woman’s subjection and inferiority, can have no reading nor any knowledge of the world’s history while they continue to proclaim their views; or else they know themselves, even as they preach, for hypocrites. For woman has ever been the active cause of sin, from the Fall to the present time, and doubtless will so continue until the end. It is not always, as they would have you believe, from necessity that the virtuous woman turns her back upon virtue, but very frequently from choice and a delight in sin and wrong-doing. How then shall the New Purity arise from the Old Corruption? ‘Who can find a virtuous woman?’ asks Solomon (Prov. xxxi. 10), and goes on to say that her price is far above rubies: doubtless for the same reason that rubies are so highly valued--because they are so scarce. The trade of courtesan has always been numerous and powerful, and has been constantly recruited from every class. Vanity, of course, is the great inducement; love of dress and power, and greed of notoriety, are other compelling forces; and a joy in outraging all decency and propriety, of defying conventions of respectability and religion, is answerable for the rest. This kind of woman makes all mankind her prey, and has no generous instincts whatever. Everything ministers to her vanity and lavish waste. It is a matter of notoriety that men of light and leading are drawn after her all-conquering chariot, and that in three out of every four plays she is the heroine. She is cruel as the grave, heartless as a stone, and extravagant beyond measure. Her kind have utterly wasted the patrimony of thousands of dupes, and having reduced them to beggary the most abject and forlorn, have sought fresh victims of their insatiable greed.