"Already, on all sides, in France as well as in all countries subject to a regular government, Prostitution sees the number of her agents diminishing, progressively with the number of her victims; she recoils, as in an access of modesty, before the development of moral reason; she does not abdicate, but she knows that she is dethroned; and so, she wraps herself in her courtezan's robes, dreaming no more of reconquering her shameless kingdom. The moment is not far distant when she will blush for herself, when she will go forth forever from the sanctuary of good manners, and when she will fall by degrees into obscurity and forgetfulness. There are certain maladies of the human heart which, like certain physical diseases, end by exhausting themselves and by losing their epidemic or contagious character, under the influence of a proper mode of life. The leper is no longer known to us except by name, and if one meets, here and there, with certain rare traces of this terrible plague of the Middle Ages, one realizes, happily, that it no longer possesses the power to spread and propagate itself; and so it is, we have today no more than certain alarming symptoms of the influenza, which once devastated whole populations and which, today, only rarely attacks certain isolated individuals."

-- Paul Lacroix, History of Prostitution Among All the Peoples of the World, from the Most Remote Antiquity to the Present Day, 1851.