The comfortable and short-sighted people who, from the security of their smug homes, point a finger of censure at prostitution, therefore, have not as a rule the imaginations or the knowledge to realize that in so doing they are bringing an indictment against the whole order of society, including their own pathetic fastnesses of bourgeois luxury and morality. If prostitution exists on a large scale in modern Europe, and prostitution is wrong, then the civilizations of modern Europe are wrong, and it is fatuous to point to the most obvious sore, when the whole pig is diseased. Nobody nowadays denies, perhaps, that the whole pig is diseased? Then it is absurd to moan over this one sore. But why is so much fuss made precisely about prostitution on its sexual side? There is the prostitution of healthy rosy-fingered youth in hundreds of other walks of life, and nobody, or scarcely anybody, stirs to point it out. The young girls who to-day are sent by their parents at the age of sixteen to twenty to bow their heads for forty-three hours a week before a typewriter, or a ledger, or a stamping, cutting or folding machine, get ill just as quickly, lose their beauty just as surely, and grow depressed and spiritless just as rapidly, as the sexual prostitute, and they get only a sixteenth or less of the prostitute’s entertainment out of life into the bargain. Watch the career of the girl who sells herself to the modern taskmaster of commerce or industry! Could anything be more tragic? Could any satyr bring about grosser degradation of health and spirits? What sympathy or horror or righteous indignation can you rouse in the moral toads, who inveigh against prostitution, by pointing to the rounded shoulders, the loveless life, the listless eyes, the bloodless cheeks and hands of the typewriter or other machine drudge? None! They reply that the typist’s worn-out looks, her lost beauty, her faded youth, her hopeless expression and outlook, are _not_ the result of a life of immorality, _therefore_ she is honourable, therefore she need not be rescued, therefore everything is all right, therefore nothing need be done. But enough! The wide-awake will see at once that there is cant in the very frown that is vouchsafed to sexual prostitution—_cant_, the inevitable ingredient of every movement and every counter-movement in these islands.[120] The evils of prostitution are no greater and no more tragic than those of any other form of exploitation of the individual. That which unnecessarily aggravates the horrors of the public courtesan’s life in England is not necessarily the natural consequences of the life itself, but the whole attitude of the community and of the legislature to the question of prostitution in general.[121]