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 which is, of coarse, the most moral thing in the world. The subject was investigated in England and it was shown that not one of the stories told in this cause there had any foundation in fact. So far as I know, no authentic verification of the story in any of its forms has ever been made. And yet it was the stock in trade of the professional moralists and was employed by them in two continents to generate that hysteria without which they cannot carry on their reforms. It was repeated and accepted—that is all, and to doubt it was to make oneself particeps criminis, a sort of accessory after the fact.

XLIX

It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere a significance in the phrase "white slave," when acted upon by minds that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any contact with the virtuous and respectable; she no longer occupied even the sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and Lecky in our own time figured her; she was not even that daughter of joy whose dalliance is the secret