_The Causes of Prostitution._--As in every commercial transaction, so also in the women-market, two factors are decisive--supply and demand. The demand arises from the fact that to men of the upper classes marriage has become difficult or impossible. Whereas in the case of the lower classes of the population, concubinage offers a substitute for marriage, so that for the men of the lower classes prostitution may be regarded as superfluous, in the case of men of the upper classes prostitution is practically the only available substitute for marriage, so that these men are led to purchase casual and temporary wives from among the women of the lower classes. The supply depends upon poverty, which is the principal cause of prostitution. By this it is not meant to imply that actual destitution is usually the direct and immediate cause of the adoption of a life of prostitution. It is rather that a number of factors, the outcome or the accompaniments of poverty, combine to place girls in a position very favourable to their becoming prostitutes. The environment in which proletarian children live is an unfavourable one in the matter of sexual relationships. It is one which prepares girls for prostitution, and makes them very liable to adopt this mode of life. They are forced to live in a single room with the other members of a large family, with strangers, and even casual night-lodgers--a room in which they all cook, eat, sleep, and practise sexual intercourse. The girls even have to share a common bed. Thus there is no place in their experience for the sentiment of shame. In addition, proletarian children often form evil associations at a very early age, and become acquainted in very early childhood and in the dirtiest possible manner with all the circumstances of the sexual life--with the most offensive and unclean, the most abnormal and morbid excrescences of the disordered sexual life. Many women would never have sunk into the slough of prostitution had their upbringing been a different one. Often enough the pressure of poverty even leads parents to make money out of the procurement of their own children.