One circumstance alone should have sufficed to indicate that the inability of many women to secure “a living wage,” is far from being the most fundamental cause of prostitution:  a large proportion of prostitutes come from the ranks of domestic service.  Of all the great groups of female workers, domestic servants are the freest from economic anxieties; they do not pay for food or for lodging; they often live as well as their mistresses, and in a large proportion of cases they have fewer money anxieties than their mistresses.  Moreover, they supply an almost universal demand, so that there is never any need for even very moderately competent servants to be in want of work.  They constitute, it is true, a very large body which could not fail to supply a certain contingent of recruits to prostitution.  But when we see that domestic service is the chief reservoir from which prostitutes are drawn, it should be clear that the craving for food and shelter is by no means the chief cause of prostitution.

It may be added that, although the significance of this predominance of servants among prostitutes is seldom realized by those who fancy that to remove poverty is to abolish prostitution, it has not been ignored by the more thoughtful students of social questions.  Thus Sherwell, while pointing out truly that, to a large extent, “morals fluctuate with trade,” adds that, against the importance of the economic factor, it is a suggestive and in every way impressive fact that the majority of the girls who frequent the West End of London (88 per cent., according to the Salvation Army’s Registers) are drawn from domestic service where the economic struggle is not severely felt (Arthur Sherwell, Life in West London, Ch.  V, “Prostitution").

It is at the same time worthy of note that by the conditions of their lives servants, more than any other class, resemble prostitutes (Bernaldo de Quiros and Llanas Aguilaniedo have pointed this out in La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 240).  Like prostitutes, they are a class of women apart; they are not entitled to the considerations and the little courtesies usually paid to other women; in some countries they are even registered, like prostitutes; it is scarcely surprising that when they suffer from so many of the disadvantages of the prostitute, they should sometimes desire to possess also some of her advantages.  Lily Braun (Frauenfrage, pp. 389 et seq.) has set forth in detail these unfavorable conditions of domestic labor as they bear on the tendency of servant-girls to become prostitutes.  R. de Ryckere, in his important work, La Servante Criminelle (1907, pp. 460 et seq.; cf., the same author’s article, “La Criminalite Ancillaire,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, July and December, 1906), has studied the psychology of the servant-girl.  He finds that she is specially marked by lack of foresight, vanity, lack of invention, tendency to imitation,