It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prostitutes, and question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic" to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course, that the daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide them with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a woman poet sets it forth: "The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play." Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business, and she insisted that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed, nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted, and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!" As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so largely economic that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society. If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public hospital. Economic forces drive women to prostitution, first, by direct starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige, the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich, and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college professors, priests of God and preachers of Jesus, who attribute the social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."