The great majority of prostitutes are recruited from the class of young maid-servants. Maid-servants pass their childhood in country villages. Even to-day, in some countries, most of them can neither read nor write. They are not only unintelligent, but thoroughly simple; naturally they are easily seduced. In the country circles from which the great majority of them come, premarital sexual intercourse is hardly regarded as immoral, and is an almost universal custom. The girls bring these ideas with them to the town, with results that are necessarily disastrous. In most cases they are completely cut off from their parental homes, and lack the firm support given by a well-ordered family life, are sent from the country into a strange and incomprehensible world, and live under one roof with persons belonging to a social class by whose members they are regarded as being of inferior birth. They pass their new lives in a circle in which the demands are far higher than they have been accustomed to; imitatively, they soon come to share these demands, but can satisfy them only by the supplementary earnings of shame. By the men of the household, most often by their employer or his sons, they are seduced, and then left to fend for themselves. They seldom stay long in one situation; and when out of employment, especially if they have formed bad associations, they are exposed to the gravest moral dangers. Their hours of work are unlimited, and for this reason they wish to live as intensely as possible during the few and scanty hours of liberty. Their legal position is a very unfavourable one, and it is practically impossible for them to organise themselves in a trade union. They form a servile class. Their personal desires are continually repressed, and even this is but a preparation for their subsequent profession, in which servility and repression will be their fate. _Prostitution and Child-Protection_.--Prostitution explains and favours the development of numerous factors which make the work of child-protection an ever-existing need. These factors are: (_a_) criminal offences against persons under age; (_b_) venereal diseases; (_c_) a fall in women’s wages, and a consequent fall in men’s wages also; (_d_) corruption of the sexual morals of juveniles; (_e_) the fact that prostitutes, though somewhat exceptionally, bear children.