have become “lost women"’” (A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 1858, p. 291).  Various writers have insisted on the good moral qualities of prostitutes.  Thus in France, Despine first enumerates their vices as (1) greediness and love of drink, (2) lying, (3) anger, (4) want of order and untidiness, (5) mobility of character, (6) need of movement, (7) tendency to homosexuality; and then proceeds to detail their good qualities:  their maternal and filial affection, their charity to each other; and their refusal to denounce each other; while they are frequently religious, sometimes modest, and generally very honest (Despine, Psychologie Naturelle, vol. iii, pp. 207 et seq.; as regards Sicilian prostitutes, cf.  Callari, Archivio di Psichiatria, fasc.  IV, 1903).  The charity towards each other, often manifested in distress, is largely neutralized by a tendency to professional suspicion and jealousy of each other.

Lombroso believes that the basis of prostitution must be found in moral idiocy.  If by moral idiocy we are to understand a condition at all closely allied with insanity, this assertion is dubious.  There seems no clear relationship between prostitution and insanity, and Tammeo has shown (La Prostituzione, p. 76) that the frequency of prostitutes in the various Italian provinces is in inverse ratio to the frequency of insane persons; as insanity increases, prostitution decreases.  But if we mean a minor degree of moral imbecility—­that is to say, a bluntness of perception for the ordinary moral considerations of civilization which, while it is largely due to the hardening influence of an unfavorable early environment, may also rest on a congenital predisposition—­there can be no doubt that moral imbecility of slight degree is very frequently found among prostitutes.  It would be plausible, doubtless, to say that every woman who gives her virginity in exchange for an inadequate return is an imbecile.  If she gives herself for love, she has, at the worst, made a foolish mistake, such as the young and inexperienced may at any time make.  But if she deliberately proposes to sell herself, and does so for nothing or next to nothing, the case is altered.  The experiences of Commenge in Paris are instructive on this point.  “For many young girls,” he writes, “modesty has no existence, they experience no emotion in showing themselves completely undressed, they abandon themselves to any chance individual whom they will never see again.  They attach no importance to their virginity; they are deflowered under the strangest conditions, without the least thought or care about the act they are accomplishing.  No sentiment, no calculation, pushes them into a man’s arms.  They let themselves go without reflexion and without motive, in an almost animal manner, from indifference and without pleasure.”  He was acquainted with forty-five girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen who were deflowered by chance strangers whom they never met again;