"The man who does not work," Bays President Roosevelt, "cannot be happy." "The woman who does not labor," remarks Acton, I think, in his History of Prostitution, "rich and honored though she be, bears upon her head the inevitable curse of heaven." It would be a safe wager that Helen Gould reaps more genuine and rational happiness from her works of benevolence than Queen Alexandra from all the trappings of her rank. We need not go back to the concubines and thrushes of Lucullus; to the boy-harems of the Caliphs, where a special tutor at an enormous salary was employed by the Court to teach the royal scions the "fine arts" of sexual indulgence; to the "strange woman," dropping honey from her lips in the streets of Babylon, or Nineveh;* nor point to the gigantic wrecks of empire scattered along the shores of time, to show the inevitable connection between the growth of luxury, perversion of the sexual instinct, and national ruin.

And shall we judge the future by the past? Are the same causes operative in society to-day as, under the splendid reigns of Henry III and Louis XIV, sanctioned the abduction of little boys from the streets of Paris to satisfy the abominable exigences of the king's royal baths?3 Are not the vast accumulations of wealth, in our own "simple democracy," with their inseparable concomitants of luxury and highly stimulated erotism, directly responsible for the secret vices and prostitution which avowedly characterize the times?

J The lipe of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. (Prov. 5, 3.) • Victor Hugo.