"The light!" echoed Victoria bitterly. "You have no idea, I see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light to women like me. There are various religious organizations who wish to rescue us and house us comfortably under the patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a day for these privileges, but that is by the way. There are also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury, service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to men. How tempting it is!" ... The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt shaken by Victoria's bitterness.... "The vote does not mean everything," she said reluctantly. "It will merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit." "Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that. But now, tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?" "It would be raised...." "No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and if you 'raise' us we lose our means of livelihood. How are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?" The suffragist's face contracted. "Everything takes time," she faltered. "Just as I couldn't promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up the next day, I can't say that ... of course your case is more difficult than any other, because ... because...." "Because," said Victoria coldly, "I represent a social necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisure class who draw luxury from the labor of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John's Wood to Pekin." The Selling of Love (_From "Love's Coming of Age"_) BY EDWARD CARPENTER (See page 186) The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing--even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?