These considerations do not, it is true, apply to many kinds of sexual perverts who form an important proportion of the clients of brothels. These can frequently find what they crave inside a brothel much more easily than outside.
Thus Charles Booth, in his great work on Life and Labor in London, final volume (p. 128), recommends that "houses of accommodation," instead of being hunted out, should be tolerated as a step towards the suppression of brothels.
"Towns like Woolwich, Aldershot, Portsmouth, Plymouth," it has been said, "abound with wretched, filthy monsters that bear no resemblance to women; but it is drink, scorn, brutality and disease which have reduced them to this state, not the mere fact of associating with men."
"The contract of prostitution in the opinion of prostitutes themselves," Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo remark (La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 254), "cannot be assimilated to a sale, nor to a contract of work, nor to any other form of barter recognized by the civil law. They consider that in these pacts there always enters an element which makes it much more like a gift in a matter in which no payment could be adequate. 'A woman's body is without price' is an axiom of prostitution. The money placed in the hands of her who procures the satisfaction of sexual desire is not the price of the act, but an offering which the priestess of Venus applies to her maintenance." To the Spaniard, it is true, every transaction which resembles trade is repugnant, but the principle underlying this feeling holds good of prostitution generally.