sufficiently high pecuniary inducements they will not be so frequently attracted to prostitution, proceeds to point out that that by no means settles the question.  “Like every other industry prostitution is governed by the demand of the need to which it responds.  As long as that need and that demand persist, they will provoke an offer.  It is the need and the demand that we must act on, and perhaps science will furnish us the means to do so."[173] In what way Molinari expects science to diminish the demand for prostitutes, however, is not clearly brought out.

Not only have we to admit that no practicable rise in the rate of wages paid to women in ordinary industries can possibly compete with the wages which fairly attractive women of quite ordinary ability can earn by prostitution,[174] but we have also to realize that a rise in general prosperity—­which alone can render a rise of women’s wages healthy and normal—­involves a rise in the wages of prostitution, and an increase in the number of prostitutes.  So that if good wages is to be regarded as the antagonist of prostitution, we can only say that it more than gives back with one hand what it takes with the other.  To so marked a degree is this the case that Despres in a detailed moral and demographic study of the distribution of prostitution in France comes to the conclusion that we must reverse the ancient doctrine that “poverty engenders prostitution” since prostitution regularly increases with wealth,[175] and as a departement rises in wealth and prosperity, so the number both of its inscribed and its free prostitutes rises also.  There is indeed a fallacy here, for while it is true, as Despres argues, that wealth demands prostitution, it is also true that a wealthy community involves the extreme of poverty as well as of riches and that it is among the poorer elements that prostitution chiefly finds its recruits.  The ancient dictum that “poverty engenders prostitution” still stands, but it is complicated and qualified by the complex conditions of civilization.  Bonger, in his able discussion of the economic side of the question, has realized the wide and deep basis of prostitution when he reaches the conclusion that it is “on the one hand the inevitable complement of the existing legal monogamy, and on the other hand the result of the bad conditions in which many young girls grow up, the result of the physical and psychical wretchedness in which the women of the people live, and the consequence also of the inferior position of women in our actual society."[176] A narrowly economic consideration of prostitution can by no means bring us to the root of the matter.