Now all this is true, but is not all the truth. Remove the economic pressure and no woman will be driven, or be likely to be trapped, into entering the oldest profession in the world; but this does not say that she _will not enter it_. The establishment of a minimum wage will assuredly lighten the evil, but it will not end prostitution. The economic factor is by no means the only factor. It is quite true that poverty drives many women into the profession--that this should be so is one of the social crimes that must, and will, be remedied. The real problem lies deeper than this. Want is not the incentive to the traffic of sex in the case of the dancer or chorus girl in regular employment, of the forewoman in a factory or shop who earns steady wages, or among numerous women belonging to much higher social positions. These women choose prostitution, they are not driven into it. It is necessary to insist upon this. The belief in the efficacy of economic reform amounts almost to a disease--a kind of unquestioning fanatical faith. Again and again I have been met by the assurance, made by men who should know better, as well as by women, that no woman would sell herself if economic causes were removed. Such opinion proves a very plain ignorance of the history and facts of prostitution. It is only a little more scientific than the view of the woman moral crusader, who believes that the "social evil" can easily be remedied by self-control on the part of men. One of the worst vices common to women at present is spiritual pride. One wonders if these short-cut reformers have ever been acquainted with a single member of this class they hope to repress by legal enactments or other measures, such as early marriage, better wages for women, moral education, the censorship of amusements, and so forth. It is not so simple. You see, what is needed is an understanding of the conditions, not from the reformer's standard of thought, but from that of the prostitute, which is a very different matter. How can any one hope to reform a class whose real lives, thoughts, and desires are unknown to them? My effort to reach bed-rock facts had led me to seek first-hand information from these women, many of whom I have come to know intimately, and to like. I have learnt a great deal, much more than from all my close study of the problem as it is presented in books. Problems are never so simple in the working out as they appear in theories. Moral doctrines fall to pieces; even statistics and the estimates of expert investigators are apt to become curiously unreal in the light of a very little practical knowledge. I have learnt that there is no one type of prostitute, no one cause of the evil, no one remedy that will cure it.