tucked up and try to catch the eel, and so forth. The police is well aware of these doings, but carefully refrains from interfering with the amusements of fashionable society. The following circular, sent by the management of a Berlin dancing establishment to fashionable men, is another shameless form of pandering. It reads: “The undersigned management of the hunting establishment to whom you, dear sir, have been recommended as a passionate hunter, beg to call your attention to a newly-opened hunting ground with a splendid stock of deer and to invite you to the first chase on August 26th. Special circumstances make our new hunting grounds particularly convenient and pleasant: they are located in the heart of the city and the game-laws are not enforced.” Our bourgeois society is like a great masquerade in which all seek to deceive one another. Every one wears his official gown with dignity, while inofficially he indulges his passions without restraint. Yet, outwardly, all feign decency, religiousness and morality. In no age was hypocrisy as widespread as in ours. The supply of women for immoral purposes increases faster than the demand. Unfavorable social conditions, poverty, seduction, and the fact that many women are attracted by the outward glitter of an apparently free life, help to furnish victims from all strata of society. In a novel by Hans Wachenhusen[102] we find a characteristic description of the conditions that prevail in the German capital. The author thus describes the purpose of his novel: “My book especially tells of the victims of the female sex and their increasing depreciation as a result of our unnatural social conditions, partly through their own fault, partly through a neglected education and the love of luxury. It tells of the surplus of this sex that makes the lives of those, who are born and grow up, more hopeless each day. I wrote as a public prosecutor might write, who had gathered data from the life of a criminal to determine his guilt. If a novel is supposed to be drawn from imagination, then the following is not a novel, but a faithful portrayal of life.” In Berlin conditions are neither better nor worse than in other large cities. Whether orthodox St. Petersburg or Catholic Rome, Christian Berlin, or heathenish Paris, Puritan London or frivolous Vienna is more nearly like ancient Babylonia, it is hard to determine. Similar social conditions bring forth similar results. “Prostitution has its written and unwritten laws, its resources, its various resorts from the lowliest, to the glittering palace, its countless degrees from the lowest to the most cultured and refined. It has its special amusements and its special places of meeting, its police, its hospitals, its prisons and its literature.”[103] “We no longer celebrate the festivals of Osiris, the Bacchanalia and the Indian orgies in the spring month, but in Paris and other large cities in the darkness of night behind