Monogamic morality as a protection for family life means much more in America than in Europe. It is true that there is an astounding amount of prostitution in America, but we should be grateful that our ideals of the monogamic family have not been seriously influenced and seem to be slowly but surely improving among our best people. As illustrations of our adherence to monogamic law, let me give some facts for comparison of America and continental Europe. In America, illegitimate births are not accurately reported but are probably less than five per cent of the total number for the whole country. Locally the proportion is often very much higher. Thus in Washington, D.C., where (1914) over ten thousand, chiefly negroes, live in alleys between the streets and under extremely unhygienic and immoral conditions, fifty per cent of the children are illegitimate, while but twenty per cent of the colored children born of mothers living outside the alleys, and less than eleven per cent of the total born of all races in the city are illegitimate. In various small American regions with a white population the proportion of illegitimacy is astoundingly high, but the average for the entire country is hopefully low. In many German towns statistics show above twenty-five per cent, and in the whole empire, more than half the legitimate first-born children are conceived before marriage. All writers, the German ones included, seem to agree that the majority of Teutonic men and women enter into free unions before marriage and public opinion does not severely condemn. In many rural districts of England, France, and Sweden, and even in London and Paris, a large percentage of the marriages are simply legalization of free unions. In short, in all these countries the monogamic ideal is not followed by a large percentage of people. It must be remembered that the great majority of people involved in the above figures are of the peasant and laboring classes; conditions are quite different among women of the educated classes. These must ultimately set the moral standards for the masses. Our American conditions are quite different, especially outside of the large cosmopolitan cities. It is impossible not to believe in the moral integrity of the great majority of unmarried women in America. Certainly even in our worst communities we have no such general immorality of women as above European figures suggest. Perhaps wholesale prostitution in which one public woman may be the mistress of ten, twenty, or even fifty men, may tend to protect any equal number of American women; whereas in Europe a peasant woman would probably be for a time the paramour of one man, thus tending to make equal numbers of immoral men and women.