Baumgarten, in Vienna, from a knowledge of over 8000 prostitutes, concluded that only a very minute proportion are either criminal or psychopathic in temperament or organization (Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie, vol. xi, 1902).  It is not clear, however, that Baumgarten carried out any detailed and precise investigations.  Mr. Lane, a London police magistrate, has stated as the result of his own observation, that prostitution is “at once a symptom and outcome of the same deteriorated physique and decadent moral fibre which determine the manufacture of male tramps, petty thieves, and professional beggars, of whom the prostitute is in general the female analogue” (Ethnological Journal, April, 1905, p. 41).  This estimate is doubtless correct as regards a considerable proportion of the women, often enfeebled by drink, who pass through the police courts, but it could scarcely be applied without qualification to prostitutes generally.

Morasso (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1896, fasc.  I) has protested against a purely degenerative view of prostitutes on the strength of his own observations.  There is, he states, a category of prostitutes, unknown to scientific inquirers, which he calls that of the prostitute di alto bordo.  Among these the signs of degeneration, physical or moral, are not to be found in greater number than among women who do not belong to prostitution.  They reveal all sorts of characters, some of them showing great refinement, and are chiefly marked off by the possession of an unusual degree of sexual appetite.  Even among the more degraded group of the bassa prostituzione, he asserts, we find a predominance of sexual, as well as professional, characters, rather than the signs of degeneration.  It is sufficient to quote one more testimony, as set down many years ago by a woman of high intelligence and character, Mrs. Craik, the novelist:  “The women who fall are by no means the worst of their station,” she wrote.  “I have heard it affirmed by more than one lady—­by one in particular whose experience was as large as her benevolence—­that many of them are of the very best, refined, intelligent, truthful, and affectionate.  ‘I don’t know how it is,’ she would say, ’whether their very superiority makes them dissatisfied with their own rank—­such brutes or clowns as laboring men often are!—­so that they fall easier victims to the rank above them; or whether, though this theory will shock many people, other virtues can exist and flourish entirely distinct from, and after the loss of, that which we are accustomed to believe the indispensable prime virtue of our sex—­chastity.  I cannot explain it; I can only say that it is so, that some of my most promising village girls have been the first to come to harm; and some of the best and most faithful servants I ever had, have been girls who have fallen into shame, and who, had I not gone to the rescue and put them in the way to do well, would infallibly