This shelving of the real facts, of course, is unconscious on the part of women. The lust of men as the true cause of evil is the one popular and accepted view of the situation, and from this it follows that the prostitute is the man's victim, and as such must be protected. This is highly pleasing; a view depending, as it does, on the moral superiority of women, which stands them as Amazons of purity on the glorious mountain heights of virtue, from where they must send down climbing ropes and ladders, in the form of moral warnings and carefully edited sexual instruction, possibly made pleasing by cinemas and theater illustrations, to pull men up out of the deep valleys of vice. Yet this view is singularly untrue; for if we inquire into this question of men's lust, it is obvious that not they, but women, are the more responsible. How often it is woman who awakens this male lust, fans it to flame, feeds it to keep it at fever heat. Woman indeed must so act, since nature urges behind; but the prostitute uses this power without rest, she lives, not indeed sacrificed by men's lust, but kept alive by it. Always there is the invitation--"Come and find me." To be provocative is the one fixed simple rule of her life. Men's lust is a necessity to her very existence. Starving nations do not so eagerly await the coming of the food-laden ships which will keep them alive as the prostitute watches for the rising of the male desire. The dismay when it is reluctant to quicken is as sincere as it is disquieting to acknowledge. In the final result the woman may be the victim, but at the start she is the controller of the assault. She directs a continuous attack; her relation to men is comparable to that of a magnet to a heap of iron filings. Most men, it is true, are not only tolerant of women's wiles; they like them. But most men succumb, I believe, against their will, and often against their inclination to this tyranny of lust. Men's chivalry as well as their pride has woven a cloak of silence around this question; this silence has protected women--even the worst. There is such a thing as too much temptation for a man; temptation that a woman has no right to give unless she knows a man loves her and is ready to marry her. It is damnably hard on men. The truth in these matters is not often spoken. In spite of the emancipation upon which they pride themselves, in spite even of much precocious experience, almost all women lead a shielded life; vast tracts of experience are usually outside their knowledge or their power of comprehension. This explains, I think, their belief in the old fiction that the seduction of men by women does not take place, but all men know it goes on unceasingly. Women have been shielded by men to an extent which few of them acknowledge. This is one reason why the best of them find it so difficult now to face the woman's responsibility in these problems of sex frankly and simply.