Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/70

 by its efficiency in promoting Dame Nature’s aims.

Prostitution has no such selective effect on the males as it has on the females. It may have a slight effect in delaying, or in exceptional cases obviating, marriage. But whereas prostitutes never constitute more than a small percentage of the female population, their patrons constitute an important percentage of the male population: estimates (admittedly unreliable) running as high as ninety per cent in America, and higher in Europe. Nor can it be said there is any less ultimate fecundicity among the more frequent male fornicators than among the less frequent, or among the minority who take monogamy seriously. Other vices, however, homosexuality in particular, do lessen reproduction by males of weak strains, although having no probably effect on female reproduction.

The presumptive effect of prostitution on the average emotional constitution of woman can as reasonably be assumed to be a loss as again. If we could free ourselves from the still prevalent view of woman as property; if marriage could