is sometimes regarded with pity, but less often with contempt.  She may associate openly with men, ultimately be married, even to men of good social class, and rank as a respectable woman.  “In riding from Tokio to Yokohama, the past winter,” Coltman observes (op. cit., p. 113), “I saw a party of four young men and three quite pretty and gaily-painted prostitutes, in the same car, who were having a glorious time.  They had two or three bottles of various liquors, oranges, and fancy cakes, and they ate, drank and sang, besides playing jokes on each other and frolicking like so many kittens.  You may travel the whole length of the Chinese Empire and never witness such a scene.”  Yet the history of Japanese prostitutes (which has been written in an interesting and well-informed book, The Nightless City, by an English student of sociology who remains anonymous) shows that prostitution in Japan has not only been severely regulated, but very widely looked down upon, and that Japanese prostitutes have often had to suffer greatly; they were at one time practically slaves and often treated with much hardship.  They are free now, and any condition approaching slavery is strictly prohibited and guarded against.  It would seem, however, that the palmiest days of Japanese prostitution lay some centuries back.  Up to the middle of the eighteenth century Japanese prostitutes were highly accomplished in singing, dancing, music, etc.  Towards this period, however, they seem to have declined in social consideration and to have ceased to be well educated.  Yet even to-day, says Matignon ("La Prostitution au Japon,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, October, 1906), less infamy attaches to prostitution in Japan than in Europe, while at the same time there is less immorality in Japan than in Europe.  Though prostitution is organized like the postal or telegraph service, there is also much clandestine prostitution.  The prostitution quarters are clean, beautiful and well-kept, but the Japanese prostitutes have lost much of their native good taste in costume by trying to imitate European fashions.  It was when prostitution began to decline two centuries ago, that the geishas first appeared and were organized in such a way that they should not, if possible, compete as prostitutes with the recognized and licensed inhabitants of the Yoshiwara, as the quarter is called to which prostitutes are confined.  The geishas, of course, are not prostitutes, though their virtue may not always be impregnable, and in social position they correspond to actresses in Europe.

In Korea, at all events before Korea fell into the hands of the Japanese, it would seem that there was no distinction between the class of dancing girls and prostitutes.  “Among the courtesans,” Angus Hamilton states, “the mental abilities are trained and developed with a view to making them brilliant and entertaining companions.  These ‘leaves of sunlight’ are called gisaing, and correspond to the