Relying on their wealth to insinuate themselves into the good graces of young women by supplying them with such things as will gratify vanity, the offspring of rich parentage find fascination in pursuit of their object. When she is at last won, and her virtuous scruples overcome, she is thrown aside like the wilted flower which has yielded all its perfume. The brothel is open to receive all such, particularly if she be handsome of face or form. ONLY BURNED ORPHAN ASYLUM. New York, Chicago, St. Louis, any great city will furnish examples by the thousands. Where one girl enters this life from choice (through sensuality inherited from the lust of her father, no doubt), ninety-nine are sucked into its whirlpool by force of circumstances. The young woman who is a clerk is paid an amount which will barely cover the cost of living. She is expected to dress well, and if she protests that she can not, is told to rely on some "gentleman friend" for other expenses. Likewise in factories and shops. Only she who is protected by home associations, and whose labor is done to add to the general home comfort, can hope to escape, and then not always. The grim, irrefutable facts in connection with the thrusting of the working girl into prostitution by the wealthy owners of department stores, was never better expressed than in a recent story by O. Henry, in McClure's Magazine. Henry dreamed that he had been dead a long while, and that he had finally arrived at the Judgment Day. An Angel policeman was haling him before the Great Court of Last Resort. As he was forced into the waiting room the Angel policeman asked him kindly if he belonged with a certain crowd which he saw near him. The members of this coterie were dressed in frock coats, gray trousers, spats, patent leather shoes, and all of them boasted of high silk hats. "Who are they?" asked the trembling Henry. "Oh, they are the men who ran big department stores and paid their poor girls five dollars a week in order that they themselves might belong to clubs, go to Europe and own fine residences and automobiles," replied the angel. "Not on your life," replied Henry. "I'm only the feller that murdered a blind man for his pennies and burned down the orphan asylum. I don't belong with that bunch." With the present system of government, each year tends to annihilate the middle class, in which lies a nation's strength. "Ill fares the Hand, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." While extreme poverty exists on the one hand, and extreme wealth on the other, it would be as plausible to dam up Niagara Falls as to stop prostitution by legislating against it. The current, checked in one course, is bound to break out in another, and with all its pent-up force. Human life, like the river, is bound to flow in the channel of the least resistance.