[1] The nature of prostitution and of the White Slave Traffic and their relation to each other may clearly be studied in such valuable first-hand investigations of the subject as The Social Evil: With Special Reference to Conditions Existing in the City of New York, 2nd edition, edited by E.R.A. Seligman, Putnam's, 1912; Commercialised Prostitution in New York City, by G.J. Kneeland, New York Century Co., 1913; Prostitution in Europe, by Abraham Flexner, New York Century Co., 1914; The Social Evil in Chicago, by the Vice-Commission of Chicago, 1911. As regards prostitution in England and its causes I should like to call attention to an admirable little book, Downward Paths, published by Bell & Sons, 1916. The literature of the subject is, however, extensive, and a useful bibliography will be found in the first-named volume.
[2] This is especially true of many regions in America, both North and South, where a hideous mixture of disparate nationalities furnishes conditions peculiarly favourable to the "White Slave Traffic," when prosperity increases. See, for instance, the well-informed and temperately written book by Miss Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, 1912.
[3] See Havelock Ellis: Sex in Relation to Society (Studies in the Psychology of Sex), Vol. VI., Ch. VII.
[4] "The White Slave Traffic," English Review, June, 1913. It is just just the same in America. Mr. Brand-Whitlock, when Mayor of Toledo, thoroughly investigated a sensational story of this kind brought to him in great detail by a social worker and found that it possessed not the slightest basis of truth. "It was," he remarks in an able paper on "The White Slave" (Forum, Feb., 1914), "simply another variant of the story that had gone the rounds of the continents, a story which had been somehow psychologically timed to meet the hysteria which the pulpit, the Press, and the legislature had displayed."
[5] G.F. Collas, Geschichte des Flagellantismus, 1913, Vol. I., p. 16.
[6] I have brought together some of the evidence on this point in the chapter on "Immorality and the Law" in my book, The Task of Social Hygiene.
[7] The idea is cherished by many, especially among socialists, that prostitution is mainly an economic question, and that to raise wages is to dry up the stream of prostitution. That is certainly a fallacy, unsupported by careful investigators, though all are agreed that the economic condition of the wage-earner is one factor in the problem. Thus Commissioner Adelaide Cox, at the head of the Women's Social Wing of the Salvation Army, speaking from a very long and extensive acquaintance with prostitutes, while not denying that women are often "wickedly underpaid," finds that the cause of prostitution is "essentially a moral one, and cannot be successfully fought by other than moral weapons."—(Westminster Gazette, Dec. 2nd, 1912). In a yet wider sense, it may be said that the question of the causes of prostitution is essentially social.
[8] This is a very important clue indeed in dealing with the problem of prostitution. "It is the weak-minded, unintelligent girl," Goddard states in his valuable work on Feeblemindedness, "who makes the White Slave Traffic possible." Dr. Hickson found that over 85 per cent. of the women brought before the Morals Court in Chicago were distinctly feeble-minded, and Dr. Olga Bridgeman states that among the girls committed for sexual delinquency to the Training School of Geneva, Illinois, 97 per cent. were feeble-minded by the Binet tests, and to be regarded as "helpless victims." (Walter Clarke, Social Hygiene, June, 1915, and Journal of Mental Science, Jan., 1916, p. 222.) There are fallacies in these figures, but it would appear that about half of the prostitutes in institutions are to be regarded as mentally defective.