It all seems to me to start in the home. Woman’s work there is not properly valued, and this false standard of values goes right through life. In addition, there is the double standard of morals which prevails, and which allows a man to commit adultery without any penalty, but punishes a woman guilty of the same offence with relentless severity. This question needs thinking out on straight clear lines. If, as some people say, men are so constructed that prostitution of women is a necessity of modern life (which I do not for one moment accept), it logically follows that the society which accepts this must accept all the consequences of such an admission, and we must all cheerfully allow our daughters to minister to the common need of men by becoming members of the great army of fallen women. If it is a necessity for the man, it is a duty for the woman. If it is a duty for the working-class woman, it is a duty for the daughters and wives and sisters of the comfortable classes. I am not now thinking of the isolated sexual lapses of which any man or woman may, under stress of temptation, be guilty, but of the wretched victims of our social order, who like dumb driven cattle earn their bread on the streets of the great cities, and who, some doctors tell us, are necessary in order to safeguard the honour and virtue of our wives and daughters. Honour bought and virtue maintained at such a cost are not worth preserving. We must all unite in protest against such a doctrine, must insist on conditions of life for men and women which will make the exercise of virtue, if not easy, at any rate practicable and possible; and a condition precedent of all reform is for each of us to accept the principle that each other man’s daughter, wife, and sister are as valuable as our own, and that the dishonouring of either our own body or another’s is an outrage against God and humanity. We must also set our faces against all theories of inferiority where women are concerned: we must declare with unceasing insistence that motherhood and home-making are great services; above all, that woman’s life and work together with man’s shall be recognised as of value to the State, and organised in co-operation on lines of equality and service for the good of the whole community. CHAPTER III BUSINESS