Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/61

 tax is levied on every act of lust? Look about you in your social ranks and you will find that the circle of prostitution encloses thousands of families who make the sign of the cross at the mention of the word brothel. When a girl marries from necessity, or is made to marry from speculation, is not that as much prostitution as when she sells herself from necessity or is sold from speculation? To be sure, by marriage she sells herself only to a single person, but that does not change the immorality of her relationship. Those women who can still say a year after their marriage that their husbands are really the men of their hearts are indeed rare, at least among certain classes; and this confession is nothing more than a confession of prostitution. Most marriages are the product of money or class considerations, or exigencies to avoid in the eleventh hour the entire failure of the sexual design. But where marriage as a rule is a mere charitable institution, it at once becomes by law also an institution of compulsion, which perpetuates prostitution and makes regret useless.

No further exposition is necessary to show that the sources of prostitution, into which the greater part of the feminine sex has fallen, are political disqualification and economic dependence, i.e., the twin tyranny which throws the greatest part of humanity under the feet of the ruling, revelling minority. The abolition of prostitution is