"And believe me, O egregious colleague of the country beyond the Alps, when life shall be no longer threatened and the organism shall have new blood, then we will close this wound, too, together with many other ones which are still bleeding. We will close the house of voluptuousness when every man will have his nest and love will not be considered a crime any longer." There are some savage races among which prostitution is unknown, while no civilized nation is without prostitutes; on the contrary, every country, even the most moral, has the high prostitutes and the very high, the low and the very low. Not in all countries are prostitutes cynically named according to the price they ask for their favors, as in Persia, where they are termed "the fifty _tomani_," "the twenty _tomani_," etc.; but everywhere a tariff is the index of the hierarchy of vice and a scale of lechery. Alexander Severus did not want the money collected through taxes on houses of prostitution to be paid into the treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, used it for the maintenance of the theaters and the public health. With Juvenalian sagacity, the government of Brazil devotes to the regulation of vice the money received from the sale of decorations and titles of nobility. We find everywhere women who sell themselves, but we also find, to our honor, that society is everywhere ashamed of this stain, conceals and does not mention it, and a mysterious mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love. A thousand muddy streamlets carry their tributes to prostitution; but at the first source the cause is one and powerful: in man an imperious appetite for voluptuousness, in woman an imperious want of bread or licentiousness, or licentiousness and bread at the same time. Unfortunately woman can always sell five minutes of voluptuousness without love, without desire; she can sell herself with disgust in her heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, fashion, according to the infamous art with which she knows how to feign pleasure and counterfeit love. Procurers and procuresses hasten to the market of lechery to test the flesh of the precious victims, to fatten the lean and buy the plump for the higher bidder; and panders and bawds, keeping within the shadow of the law, conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of prostitution that quivering herd of youth and shame. And prisoners in the same gloomy atmosphere are martyrs of love and nymphomaniacs; victims of hunger and of ignorance; fallen angels and foul demons; all the lowest strata of feminine society, all the bloody carrions of the great social battles.