In September, 1894, a scandalous affair was revealed in Budapest, where it became known that about 400 girls not more than fifteen years of age had become the victims of rich libertines. The sons of our “propertied and cultured classes” not infrequently consider it their right to seduce the daughters of the poor and then to forsake them. These confiding, inexperienced daughters of the poor, whose lives are often devoid of all joy and who sometimes have no friend or relative to protect them, easily fall victims to the art of the seducer, who approaches them with all the temptations of pleasure and affection. Bitter disappointments and despair and eventually crime are the results. Among 2,060,973 children born in Germany in 1907 179,178 were illegitimate. One can imagine the amount of care and heart-ache that the births of these illegitimate children mean to their mothers, even if some of them are legally married later on by the fathers of their children. ~Infanticide and the suicide of women are in a great many cases caused by the misery and need of forsaken women.~ The trials for infanticide present a sombre but instructive picture. In the fall of 1894 a young woman was on trial in Krems, Austria. Eight days after her confinement she had been discharged from the lying-in hospital in Vienna, with her infant and penniless, and being desperate she had killed her child. ~She was condemned to death.~ In the spring of 1899 the following was reported from the province of Posen: “On Monday last the 22-year-old working girl, Katherine Gorbacki, from Alexanderruh, near Neustadt was on trial for murder. During the years 1897 and 1898 the defendant had been employed by the Provost Merkel in Neustadt. As a result of intimate relations with her employer, she gave birth to a daughter in June last. The child was placed with her relatives. The provost paid $2 for the child’s board during each of the first two months, but then refused to meet any further expenses. As the girl could not meet the expenses for the child’s maintenance, she decided to do away with it. On a Sunday during September last she smothered the child with a pillow. The jury convicted her of murder in the second degree and admitted extenuating circumstances. The public prosecutor moved to inflict the maximum penalty, five years imprisonment. The judge sentenced her to three years in prison.”