considerations which leads girls to become prostitutes.  In Germany, before a girl is put on the police register, due care is always taken to give her a chance of entering a Home and getting work; in Berlin, in the course of ten years, only two girls—­out of thousands—­were willing to take advantage of this opportunity.  The difficulty experienced by English Rescue Homes in finding girls who are willing to be “rescued” is notorious.  The same difficulty is found in other cities, even where entirely different conditions prevail; thus it is found in Madrid, according to Bernaldo de Quiros and Llanas Aguilaniedo, that the prostitutes who enter the Homes, notwithstanding all the devotion of the nuns, on leaving at once return to their old life.  While the economic factor in prostitution undoubtedly exists, the undue frequency and emphasis with which it is put forward and accepted is clearly due, in part to ignorance of the real facts, in part to the fact that such an assumption appeals to those whose weakness it is to explain all social phenomena by economic causes, and in part to its obvious plausibility.[169]

Prostitutes are mainly recruited from the ranks of factory girls, domestic servants, shop girls, and waitresses.  In some of these occupations it is difficult to obtain employment all the year round.  In this way many milliners, dressmakers and tailoresses become prostitutes when business is slack, and return to business when the season begins.  Sometimes the regular work of the day is supplemented concurrently by prostitution in the street in the evening.  It is said, possibly with some truth, that amateur prostitution of this kind is extremely prevalent in England, as it is not checked by the precautions which, in countries where prostitution is regulated, the clandestine prostitute must adopt in order to avoid registration.  Certain public lavatories and dressing-rooms in central London are said to be used by the girls for putting on, and finally washing off before going home, the customary paint.[170] It is certain that in England a large proportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middle class ranks are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their own daughters.  It must be added, also, that occasionally this conduct of the daughter is winked at or encouraged by the parents; thus a correspondent writes that he “knows some towns in England where prostitution is not regarded as anything disgraceful, and can remember many cases where the mother’s house has been used by the daughter with the mother’s knowledge.”

Acton, in a well-informed book on London prostitution, written in the middle of the last century, said that prostitution is “a transitory stage, through which an untold number of British women are ever on their passage."[171] This statement was strenuously denied at the time by many earnest moralists who refused to admit that it was possible for a woman who had sunk into so deep a pit of degradation ever to climb