For this reason, if for no other, the existence of prostitution has to be faced by women. Apathy and ignorance will no longer be accepted as excuse, in the light of the sins against the race slowly piled up through the centuries by vice and disease. But what will be the result of women's action in this matter? What will they do? What changes in the law will they demand? The importance of these questions forces itself upon all those who realise at all the difficulties of the problem. What we see and hear does not, I think, give great hopes. Every woman who dares to speak on this great burked subject seems to have "a remedy" ready to her hand. What one hears most frequently are unconsidered denunciations of "the men who are responsible." For example, I heard one woman of education state publicly that _there was no problem of prostitution!_ I mention this because it seems to me a very grave danger, an instance of the feminine over-haste in reform, which, while casting out one devil, but prepares the way for seven other devils worse than the first. Women seem to expect to solve problems that have vexed civilisation since the beginnings of society. This attitude is a little irritating. Every attempt hitherto to grapple with prostitution has been a failure. Women have to remember that it has existed as an institution in nearly all historic times and among nearly all races of men. It is as old as monogamic marriage, and maybe the result of that form of the sexual relationship, and not, as some have held, a survival of primitive sexual licence. The action of women in this question must be based on an educated opinion, which is cognisant with the past history of prostitution, recognises the facts of its action to-day in all civilised countries, and understands the complexity of the problem from the man's side as well as the woman's. Nothing less than this is necessary if any fruitful change is to be effected, when women shall come to have a voice to direct the action the State should assume towards this matter. The one measure which has recently been brought forward and passed, largely aided by women, especially the militant Suffragists--I refer to the White Slave Traffic Bill--is just the most useless, ill-devised and really preposterous law with which this tremendous problem could be mocked. As Bernard Shaw has recently said-- "The act is the final triumph of the vice it pretends to repress. There is one remedy and one alone, for the White Slave Traffic. Make it impossible, by the enactment of a Minimum Wage law and by the proper provision of the unemployed, for any woman to be forced to choose between prostitution and penury, and the White Slaver will have no more power over the daughters of labourers, artisans and clerks than he (or under the New Act she) will have over the wives of Bishops."