When we come to the question whether prostitution is an evil, we shall find that some of the consequences are evil in themselves, and some are evil because of the way society treats them. There can be no possible doubt that the practice is of the greatest injury to the health of the women engaged in it. Those who persist in it die young, though here the Chicago Commission suggests there has been exaggeration. The injury to the health of the men might be decreased if there were no disgrace attached to the practice, and if medical advice were always invoked and carefully followed; there would still, however, be considerable risk to the health of the men, even if excess were not added, as a cause of disease. The injury to the health of wives is very grave indeed, and those who will take the trouble to consult such books as _Social Diseases and Marriage_, by Prince A. Morrow, M.D., or _Hygiene and Morality_, by Lavinia L. Dock (Secretary of the International Council of Nurses), will find there justification enough for the statement that prostitution is not only _an_ evil, but it is _the_ evil which is felt most disastrously by women of all ages and classes. It affects the children, who are afflicted with many ghastly diseases, as a result of their father’s conduct; it affects the wives, who, besides the moral suffering they may endure, are frequently rendered barren, and themselves diseased; it affects all women wage-earners and, through them, men wage-earners. Concerning the moral evil, a whole book might and I hope will be written, from a modern standpoint. A great deal of purity-preaching fails because it is out of touch with modern minds. If you want men to have a horror of using a woman merely “as a convenience,” if you want women to resent such a use of themselves, you will have to replace semi-savage tabus with science. And this is not to say that religion has nothing to do here. For those who believe in a God who made things must believe He meant us to find out His law. There is a sense in which the sneer of the Pharisee is bare truth, and “this people that knoweth not the law _is_ accursed.”