A NEW CONSCIENCE AND AN ANCIENT EVIL By JANE ADDAMS HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO Author of Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of PeaceThe Spirit of Youth and the City StreetsTwenty Years at Hull-House New YorkTHE MACMILLAN COMPANY1912 To the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, whose superintendent andfield officers have collected much of the material for this book, and whosepresident, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, has so ably and sympathetically collaborated inits writing. CONTENTS CHAPTER I As inferred from An AnalogyCHAPTER II As indicated by Recent Legal EnactmentsCHAPTER III As indicated by the Amelioration of Economic ConditionsCHAPTER IV As indicated by the Moral Education and Legal Protection of ChildrenCHAPTER V As indicated by Philanthropic Rescue and PreventionCHAPTER VI As indicated by Increased Social Control PREFACE The following material, much of which has been published in McClure'sMagazine, was written, not from the point of view of the expert, butbecause of my own need for a counter-knowledge to a bewildering mass ofinformation which came to me through the Juvenile Protective Associationof Chicago. The reports which its twenty field officers daily brought toits main office adjoining Hull House became to me a revelation of thedangers implicit in city conditions and of the allurements which aredesignedly placed around many young girls in order to draw them into anevil life. As head of the Publication Committee, I read the original documents in aseries of special investigations made by the Association on dance halls, theatres, amusement parks, lake excursion boats, petty gambling, thehome surroundings of one hundred Juvenile Court children and the recordsof four thousand parents who clearly contributed to the delinquency oftheir own families. The Association also collected the personalhistories of two hundred department-store girls, of two hundred factorygirls, of two hundred immigrant girls, of two hundred office girls, andof girls employed in one hundred hotels and restaurants. While this experience was most distressing, I was, on the other hand, much impressed and at times fairly startled by the large and diversifiednumber of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffichad become unendurable and who promptly responded to any appeal made onbehalf of its victims. City officials, policemen, judges, attorneys, employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrivedimmigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men, as under aprofound sense of compunction, were unsparing of time and effort whengiven an opportunity to assist an individual girl, to promotelegislation designed for her protection, or to establish institutionsfor her rescue. I therefore venture to hope that in serving my own need I may also servethe need of a rapidly growing public when I set down for rationalconsideration the temptations surrounding multitudes of young people andwhen I assemble, as best I may, the many indications of a newconscience, which in various directions is slowly gathering strength andwhich we may soberly hope will at last successfully array itself againstthis incredible social wrong, ancient though it may be. Hull House, Chicago. CHAPTER I AN ANALOGY In every large city throughout the world thousands of women are so setaside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered animpropriety to speak the very word which designates them. Lecky callsthis type of woman "the most mournful and the most awful figure inhistory": he says that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations riseand fall, the eternal sacrifice of humanity, blasted for the sins of thepeople. " But evils so old that they are imbedded in man's earliesthistory have been known to sway before an enlightened public opinion andin the end to give way to a growing conscience, which regards them firstas a moral affront and at length as an utter impossibility. Thus thegeneration just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the enormous upasof slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race of man, "although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives of man'searliest warfare, even as this existing evil thus originated. Those of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience inregard to this twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itselfand even more persistent, find a possible analogy between certain civic, philanthropic and educational efforts directed against the veryexistence of this social evil and similar organized efforts whichpreceded the overthrow of slavery in America. Thus, long before slaverywas finally declared illegal, there were international regulations ofits traffic, state and federal legislation concerning its extension, andmany extra legal attempts to control its abuses; quite as we have theinternational regulations concerning the white slave traffic, the stateand interstate legislation for its repression, and an extra legal powerin connection with it so universally given to the municipal police thatthe possession of this power has become one of the great sources ofcorruption in every American city. Before society was ready to proceed against the institution of slaveryas such, groups of men and women by means of the underground railroadcherished and educated individual slaves; it is scarcely necessary topoint out the similarity to the rescue homes and preventive associationswhich every great city contains. It is always easy to overwork an analogy, and yet the economist who foryears insisted that slave labor continually and arbitrarily limited thewages of free labor and was therefore a detriment to national wealth wasa forerunner of the economist of to-day who points out the economicbasis of the social evil, the connection between low wages and despair, between over-fatigue and the demand for reckless pleasure. Before the American nation agreed to regard slavery as unjustifiablefrom the standpoint of public morality, an army of reformers, lecturers, and writers set forth its enormity in a never-ceasing flow of invective, of appeal, and of portrayal concerning the human cruelty to which thesystem lent itself. We can discern the scouts and outposts of a similararmy advancing against this existing evil: the physicians andsanitarians who are committed to the task of ridding the race fromcontagious diseases, the teachers and lecturers who are appealing to thehigher morality of thousands of young people; the growing literature, not only biological and didactic, but of a popular type more closelyapproaching "Uncle Tom's Cabin. " Throughout the agitation for the abolition of slavery in America, therewere statesmen who gradually became convinced of the political and moralnecessity of giving to the freedman the protection of the ballot. Inthis current agitation there are at least a few men and women who wouldextend a greater social and political freedom to all women if onlybecause domestic control has proved so ineffectual. We may certainly take courage from the fact that our contemporaries arefired by social compassions and enthusiasms, to which even our immediatepredecessors were indifferent. Such compunctions have ever manifestedthemselves in varying degrees of ardor through different groups in thesame community. Thus among those who are newly aroused to action inregard to the social evil are many who would endeavor to regulate it andbelieve they can minimize its dangers, still larger numbers who wouldeliminate all trafficking of unwilling victims in connection with it, and yet others who believe that as a quasi-legal institution it may beabsolutely abolished. Perhaps the analogy to the abolition of slavery ismost striking in that these groups, in their varying points of view, arelike those earlier associations which differed widely in regard tochattel slavery. Only the so-called extremists, in the first instance, stood for abolition and they were continually told that what theyproposed was clearly impossible. The legal and commercial obstacles, bulked large, were placed before them and it was confidently assertedthat the blame for the historic existence of slavery lay deep withinhuman nature itself. Yet gradually all of these associations reached thepoint of view of the abolitionist and before the war was over even themost lukewarm unionist saw no other solution of the nation's difficulty. Some such gradual conversion to the point of view of abolition is theexperience of every society or group of people who seriously face thedifficulties and complications of the social evil. Certainly all thenational organizations--the National Vigilance Committee, the AmericanPurity Federation, the Alliance for the Suppression and Prevention ofthe White Slave Traffic and many others--stand for the final abolitionof commercialized vice. Local vice commissions, such as the able onerecently appointed in Chicago, although composed of members of varyingbeliefs in regard to the possibility of control and regulation, unitedin the end in recommending a law enforcement looking towards finalabolition. Even the most sceptical of Chicago citizens, after readingthe fearless document, shared the hope of the commission that "the city, when aroused to the truth, would instantly rebel against the social evilin all its phases. " A similar recommendation of ultimate abolition wasrecently made unanimous by the Minneapolis vice commission after theconversion of many of its members. Doubtless all of the nationalsocieties have before them a task only less gigantic than that faced bythose earlier associations in America for the suppression of slavery, although it may be legitimate to remind them that the best-knownanti-slavery society in America was organized by the New Englandabolitionists in 1836, and only thirty-six years later, in 1872, wasformally disbanded because its object had been accomplished. The longstruggle ahead of these newer associations will doubtless claim itsmartyrs and its heroes, has indeed already claimed them during the lastthirty years. Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood;nevertheless, to paraphrase Lincoln's speech, if blood were exacted dropby drop in measure to the tears of anguished mothers and enslaved girls, the nation would still be obliged to go into the struggle. Throughout this volume the phrase "social evil" is used to designate thesexual commerce permitted to exist in every large city, usually in asegregated district, wherein the chastity of women is bought and sold. Modifications of legal codes regarding marriage and divorce, moraljudgments concerning the entire group of questions centring aboutillicit affection between men and women, are quite other questions whichare not considered here. Such problems must always remain distinct fromthose of commercialized vice, as must the treatment of an irreducibleminimum of prostitution, which will doubtless long exist, quite associety still retains an irreducible minimum of murders. This volumedoes not deal with the probable future of prostitution, and gives onlysuch historical background as is necessary to understand the presentsituation. It endeavors to present the contributory causes, as they havebecome registered in my consciousness through a long residence in acrowded city quarter, and to state the indications, as I have seen them, of a new conscience with its many and varied manifestations. Nothing is gained by making the situation better or worse than it is, nor in anywise different from what it is. This ancient evil is indeedsocial in the sense of community responsibility and can only beunderstood and at length remedied when we face the fact and measure theresources which may at length be massed against it. Perhaps the moststriking indication that our generation has become the bearer of a newmoral consciousness in regard to the existence of commercialized vice isthe fact that the mere contemplation of it throws the more sensitive menand women among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt. Itis doubtless an instinctive shrinking from this emotion and anunconscious dread that this modern sensitiveness will be outraged, whichjustifies to themselves so many moral men and women in their persistentignorance of the subject. Yet one of the most obvious resources at ourcommand, which might well be utilized at once, if it is to be utilizedat all, is the overwhelming pity and sense of protection which therecent revelations in the white slave traffic have aroused for thethousands of young girls, many of them still children, who are yearlysacrificed to the "sins of the people. " All of this emotion ought to bemade of value, for quite as a state of emotion is invariably the organicpreparation for action, so it is certainly true that no profoundspiritual transformation can take place without it. After all, human progress is deeply indebted to a study ofimperfections, and the counsels of despair, if not full of seasonedwisdom, are at least fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur toaction. Sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any humanproblem, and the line of least resistance into the jungle of humanwretchedness must always be through that region which is most thoroughlyexplored, not only by the information of the statistician, but bysympathetic understanding. We are daily attaining the latter throughsuch authors as Sudermann and Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled theirreaders to comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilfulportrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realismhas rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossibleCamille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced theweeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women transcribedfrom actual life. The treatment of this subject in American literature is at present inthe pamphleteering stage, although an ever-increasing number of shortstories and novels deal with it. On the other hand, the plays throughwhich Bernard Shaw constantly places the truth before the public inEngland as Brieux is doing for the public in France, produce in thespectators a disquieting sense that society is involved incommercialized vice and must speedily find a way out. Such writing islike the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troopsready for action. Some of the writers who are performing this valiant service are relatedto those great artists who in every age enter into a long struggle withexisting social conditions, until after many years they change theoutlook upon life for at least a handful of their contemporaries. Theirreaders find themselves no longer mere bewildered spectators of a givensocial wrong, but have become conscious of their own hypocrisy in regardto it, and they realize that a veritable horror, simply because it washidden, had come to seem to them inevitable and almost normal. Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness regarding the social evilare found in contemporary literature, for while the business ofliterature is revelation and not reformation, it may yet perform for themen and women now living that purification of the imagination andintellect which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror. Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary processes, we have learned totalk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibilityof racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wideroutlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappledwith chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new consciencegather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall beconstrained to eradicate this ancient evil! CHAPTER II RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that, first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be calledwhite slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procuretheir victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested andprosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently andillegally detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturallythrough the line of legal action that the most striking revelations ofthe white slave traffic have come. For the sake of convenience, we maydivide this legal action into those cases dealing with the internationaltrade, those with the state and interstate traffic, and the regulationswith which the municipality alone is concerned. First in value to the white slave commerce is the girl imported fromabroad who from the nature of the case is most completely in the powerof the trader. She is literally friendless and unable to speak thelanguage and at last discouraged she makes no effort to escape. Manycases of the international traffic were recently tried in Chicago andthe offenders convicted by the federal authorities. One of these cases, which attracted much attention throughout the country, was of Marie, aFrench girl, the daughter of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor thathe was obliged to take her from her convent school at the age of twelveyears. He sent her to Paris, where she became a little household drudgeand nurse-maid, working from six in the morning until eight at night, and for three years sending her wages, which were about a franc a day, directly to her parents in the Breton village. One afternoon, as she wasbuying a bottle of milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conversationby a young man who invited her into a little patisserie where, aftergiving her some sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur Paret, who was gathering together a theatrical troupe to go to America. Paretshowed her pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed andannouncements of their coming tour, and Marie felt much flattered whenit was intimated that she might join this brilliant company. Afterseveral clandestine meetings to perfect the plan, she left the city withParet and a pretty French girl to sail for America with the rest of theso-called actors. Paret escaped detection by the immigration authoritiesin New York, through his ruse of the "Kinsella troupe, " and took thegirls directly to Chicago. Here they were placed in a disreputable housebelonging to a man named Lair, who had advanced the money for theirimportation. The two French girls remained in this house for severalmonths until it was raided by the police, when they were sent toseparate houses. The records which were later brought into court showthat at this time Marie was earning two hundred and fifty dollars aweek, all of which she gave to her employers. In spite of this largemonetary return she was often cruelly beaten, was made to do thehousehold scrubbing, and was, of course, never allowed to leave thehouse. Furthermore, as one of the methods of retaining a reluctant girlis to put her hopelessly in debt and always to charge against her theexpenses incurred in securing her, Marie as an imported girl had begunat once with the huge debt of the ocean journey for Paret and herself. In addition to this large sum she was charged, according to universalcustom, with exorbitant prices for all the clothing she received andwith any money which Paret chose to draw against her account. Later, when Marie contracted typhoid fever, she was sent for treatment to apublic hospital and it was during her illness there, when a generalinvestigation was made of the white slave traffic, that a federalofficer visited her. Marie, who thought she was going to die, freelygave her testimony, which proved to be most valuable. The federal authorities following up her statements at last locatedParet in the city prison at Atlanta, Georgia, where he had beenconvicted on a similar charge. He was brought to Chicago and on histestimony Lair was also convicted and imprisoned. Marie has since married a man who wishes to protect her from theinfluence of her old life, but although not yet twenty years old andmaking an honest effort, what she has undergone has apparently so farwarped and weakened her will that she is only partially successful inkeeping her resolutions, and she sends each month to her parents inFrance ten or twelve dollars, which she confesses to have earnedillicitly. It is as if the shameful experiences to which this littleconvent-bred Breton girl was forcibly subjected, had finally becomeregistered in every fibre of her being until the forced demoralizationhas become genuine. She is as powerless now to save herself from hersubjective temptations as she was helpless five years ago to saveherself from her captors. Such demoralization is, of course, most valuable to the white slavetrader, for when a girl has become thoroughly accustomed to the life andtestifies that she is in it of her own free will, she puts herselfbeyond the protection of the law. She belongs to a legally degradedclass, without redress in courts of justice for personal outrages. Marie, herself, at the end of her third year in America, wrote to thepolice appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to herletter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there ofher own volition and that therefore he could do nothing for her. It iseasy to see why it thus becomes part of the business to break down agirl's moral nature by all those horrible devices which are constantlyused by the owner of a white slave. Because life is so often shortenedfor these wretched girls, their owners degrade them morally as quicklyas possible, lest death release them before their full profit has beensecured. In addition to the quantity of sacrificed virtue, to the bulkof impotent suffering, which these white slaves represent, ourcivilization becomes permanently tainted with the vicious practicesdesigned to accelerate the demoralization of unwilling victims in orderto make them commercially valuable. Moreover, a girl thus rendered moreuseful to her owner, will thereafter fail to touch either the chivalryof men or the tenderness of women because good men and women have becomeconvinced of her innate degeneracy, a word we have learned to use withthe unction formerly placed upon original sin. The very revolt ofsociety against such girls is used by their owners as a protection tothe business. The case against the captors of Marie, as well as twenty-four othercases, was ably and vigorously conducted by Edwin W. Sims, United StatesDistrict Attorney in Chicago. He prosecuted under a clause of theimmigration act of 1908, which was unfortunately declaredunconstitutional early the next year, when for the moment federalauthorities found themselves unable to proceed directly against thisinternational traffic. They could not act under the international whiteslave treaty signed by the contracting powers in Paris in 1904, andproclaimed by the President of the United States in 1908, because it wasfound impossible to carry out its provisions without federal police. Thelong consideration of this treaty by Congress made clear to the nationthat it is in matters of this sort that navies are powerless and that asour international problems become more social, other agencies must beprovided, a point which arbitration committees have long urged. Thediscussion of the international treaty brought the subject before theentire country as a matter for immediate legislation and for executiveaction, and the White Slave Traffic Act was finally passed by Congressin 1910, under which all later prosecutions have since been conducted. When the decision on the immigration clause rendered in 1909 threw theburden of prosecution back upon the states, Mr. Clifford Roe, thenassistant State's Attorney, within one year investigated 348 such cases, domestic and foreign, and successfully prosecuted 91, carrying on thevigorous policy inaugurated by United States Attorney Sims. In 1908Illinois passed the first pandering law in this country, changing theoffence from disorderly conduct to a misdemeanor, and greatly increasingthe penalty. In many states pandering is still so little defined as tomake the crime merely a breach of manners and to put it in the sameclass of offences as selling a street-car transfer. As a result of this vigorous action, Chicago became the first city tolook the situation squarely in the face, and to make a determinedbusiness-like fight against the procuring of girls. An office wasestablished by public-spirited citizens where Mr. Roe was placed incharge and empowered to follow up the clues of the traffic whereverfound and to bring the traffickers to justice; in consequence the whiteslave traders have become so frightened that the foreign importation ofgirls to Chicago has markedly declined. It is estimated by Mr. Roe thatsince 1909 about one thousand white slave traders, of whom thirty orforty were importers of foreign girls, have been driven away from thecity. Throughout the Congressional discussions of the white slave traffic, beginning with the Howell-Bennett Act in 1907, it was evident that thesubject was closely allied to immigration, and when the immigrationcommission made a partial report to Congress in December, 1909, upon"the importation and harboring of women for immoral purposes, " theirfinding only emphasized the report of the Commissioner General ofImmigration made earlier in the year. His report had traced theinternational traffic directly to New York, Chicago, Boston, Buffalo, New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, andButte. As the list of cities was comparatively small, it seemed notunreasonable to hope that the international traffic might be rigorouslyprosecuted, with the prospect of finally doing away with it in spite ofits subtle methods, its multiplied ramifications, and its financialresources. Only officials of vigorous conscience can deal with thistraffic; but certainly there can be no nobler service for federal andstate officers to undertake than this protection of immigrant girls. It is obvious that a foreign girl who speaks no English, who has not theremotest idea in what part of the city her fellow-countrymen live, whodoes not know the police station or any agency to which she may apply, is almost as valuable to a white slave trafficker as a girl importeddirectly for the trade. The trafficker makes every effort to interceptsuch a girl before she can communicate with her relations. Althoughgreat care is taken at Ellis Island, the girl's destination carefullyindicated upon her ticket and her friends communicated with, after sheboards the train the governmental protection is withdrawn and manyuntoward experiences may befall a girl between New York and her finaldestination. Only this year a Polish mother of the Hull Houseneighborhood failed to find her daughter on a New York train upon whichshe had been notified to expect her, because the girl had been inducedto leave the New York train at South Chicago, where she was met by twoyoung men, one of them well known to the police, and the other a youngPole, purporting to have been sent by the girl's mother. The immigrant girl also encounters dangers upon the very moment of herarrival. The cab-men and expressmen are often unscrupulous. One of thelatter was recently indicted in Chicago upon the charge of regularlyprocuring immigrant girls for a disreputable hotel. The non-Englishspeaking girl handing her written address to a cabman has no means ofknowing whither he will drive her, but is obliged to place herselfimplicitly in his hands. The Immigrants' Protective League has broughtabout many changes in this respect, but has upon its records somepiteous tales of girls who were thus easily deceived. An immigrant girl is occasionally exploited by her own lover whom shehas come to America to marry. I recall the case of a Russian girl thusdecoyed into a disreputable life by a man deceiving her through a fakemarriage ceremony. Although not found until a year later, the girl hadnever ceased to be distressed and rebellious. Many Slovak and Polishgirls, coming to America without their relatives, board in housesalready filled with their countrymen who have also preceded their ownfamilies to the land of promise, hoping to earn money enough to send forthem later. The immigrant girl is thus exposed to dangers at the verymoment when she is least able to defend herself. Such a girl, alreadybewildered by the change from an old world village to an American city, is unfortunately sometimes convinced that the new country freedom doesaway with the necessity for a marriage ceremony. Many others are toldthat judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America than in theold country. The last month's records of the Municipal Court in Chicago, set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen unfortunategirls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing eight differentnationalities. These discouraged and deserted girls become an easy preyfor the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers. Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain anaffectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free fromchaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughterswork, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town. " Theythemselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly givethe same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is sounlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by theirinability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand theirdaughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on the part oftheir mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the firsttaste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation duringcertain hours, are almost as free from social control as is thetraditional young man who comes up from the country to take care ofhimself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quiteunable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of publicopinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, andwhile she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in afactory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating asa restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied inthe coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enoughto offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreationwhich is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements, deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under suchexcitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent. Thegreat human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries tolimit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes, and it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements. On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many immigrantgirls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist alltemptations. Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsomegirl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which acontinued mood of introspection so often lends to the young. Olga hadbeen in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned toSweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to bethoroughly respectable. But a friendless girl of such striking beautycould not escape the machinations of those who profit by the sale ofgirls. Almost immediately Olga found herself beset by two young men whocontinually forced themselves upon her attention, although she refusedall their invitations to shows and dances. In six months the frightenedgirl had changed her boarding-place four times, hoping that the menwould not be able to follow her. She was also obliged constantly to lookfor a cheaper place, because the dull season in the cloak-making tradecame early that year. In the fifth boarding-house she finally foundherself so hopelessly in arrears that the landlady, tired of waiting forthe "new cloak making to begin, " at length fulfilled a long-promisedthreat, and one summer evening at nine o'clock literally put Olga intothe street, retaining her trunk in payment of the debt. The girl walkedthe street for hours, until she fancied that she saw one of herpersecutors in the distance, when she hastily took refuge in a sheltereddoorway, crouching in terror. Although no one approached her, she satthere late into the night, apparently too apathetic to move. With thecurious inconsequence of moody youth, she was not aroused to action bythe situation in which she found herself. The incident epitomized to herthe everlasting riddle of the universe to which she could see nosolution and she drearily decided to throw herself into the lake. As sheleft the doorway at daybreak for this pitiful purpose, she attracted theattention of a passing policeman. In response to his questions, kindlyat first but becoming exasperated as he was convinced that she waseither "touched in her wits" or "guying" him, he obtained a confusedstory of the persecutions of the two young men, and in sheerbewilderment he finally took her to the station on the very chargeagainst the thought of which she had so long contended. The girl was doubtless sullen in court the next morning; she wasresentful of the policeman's talk, she was oppressed and discouraged andtherefore taciturn. She herself said afterwards that she "often gotstill that way. " She so sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after herlong struggle for respectability, that she gave a false name and becameinvolved in a story to which she could devote but half her attention, being still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative thought whichcontinually broke through the flimsy tale she was fabricating. With the evidence before him, the judge felt obliged to sustain thepoliceman's charge, and as Olga could not pay the fine imposed, hesentenced her to the city prison. The girl, however, had appeared sostrangely that the judge was uncomfortable and gave her in charge of arepresentative of the Juvenile Protective Association in the hope thatshe could discover the whole situation, meantime suspending thesentence. It took hours of patient conversation with the girl and thekindly services of a well-known alienist to break into her dangerousstate of mind and to gain her confidence. Prolonged medical treatmentaverted the threatened melancholia and she was at last rescued from themeaningless despondency so hostile to life itself, which has claimedmany young victims. It is strange that we are so slow to learn that no one can safely livewithout companionship and affection, that the individual who tries thehazardous experiment of going without at least one of them is prone tobe swamped by a black mood from within. It is as if we had to buildlittle islands of affection in the vast sea of impersonal forces lest webe overwhelmed by them. Yet we know that in every large city there arehundreds of men whose business it is to discover girls thus hard pressedby loneliness and despair, to urge upon them the old excuse that "no onecares what you do, " to fill them with cheap cynicism concerning thevalue of virtue, all to the end that a business profit may be secured. Had Olga yielded to the solicitations of bad men and had the immigrationauthorities in the federal building of Chicago discovered her in thedisreputable hotel in which her captors wanted to place her, she wouldhave been deported to Sweden, sent home in disgrace from the countrywhich had failed to protect her. Certainly the immigration laws might dobetter than to send a girl back to her parents, diseased and disgracedbecause America has failed to safeguard her virtue from the machinationsof well-known but unrestrained criminals. The possibility of deportationon the charge of prostitution is sometimes utilized by jealous husbandsor rejected lovers. Only last year a Russian girl came to Chicago tomeet her lover and was deceived by a fake marriage. Although the manbasely deserted her within a few weeks he became very jealous a yearlater when he discovered that she was about to be married to aprosperous fellow-countryman, and made charges against her to thefederal authorities concerning her life in Russia. It was with thegreatest difficulty that the girl was saved from deportation to Russiaunder circumstances which would have compelled her to take out a redticket in Odessa, and to live forevermore the life with which her loverhad wantonly charged her. May we not hope that in time the nation's policy in regard to immigrantswill become less negative and that a measure of protection will beextended to them during the three years when they are so liable toprompt deportation if they become criminals or paupers? While it may be difficult for the federal authorities to accomplish thisprotection and will doubtless require an extension of the powers of theDepartment of Immigration, certainly no one will doubt that it is thebusiness of the city itself to extend much more protection to younggirls who so thoughtlessly walk upon its streets. Yet, in spite of thegrave consequences which lack of proper supervision implies, themunicipal treatment of commercialized vice not only differs in each citybut varies greatly in the same city under changing administrations. The situation is enormously complicated by the pharisaic attitude of thepublic which wishes to have the comfort of declaring the social evil tobe illegal, while at the same time it expects the police department toregulate it and to make it as little obvious as possible. In reality thepolice, as they themselves know, are not expected to serve the public inthis matter but to consult the desires of the politicians; for, next tothe fast and loose police control of gambling, nothing affords betterpolitical material than the regulation of commercialized vice. First inline is the ward politician who keeps a disorderly saloon which servesboth as a meeting-place for the vicious young men engaged in the trafficand as a market for their wares. Back of this the politician higher upreceives his share of the toll which this business pays that it mayremain undisturbed. The very existence of a segregated district underpolice regulation means, of course, that the existing law must benullified or at least rendered totally inoperative. When policeregulation takes the place of law enforcement a species of municipalblackmail inevitably becomes intrenched. The police are forced toregulate an illicit trade, but because the men engaged in an unlawfulbusiness expect to pay money for its protection, the corruption of thepolice department is firmly established and, as the Chicago vicecommission report points out, is merely called "protection to thebusiness. " The practice of grafting thereafter becomes almost official. On the other hand, any man who attempts to show mercy to the victims ofthat business, or to regulate it from the victim's point of view, isconsidered a traitor to the cause. Quite recently a former inspector ofpolice in Chicago established a requirement that every young girl whocame to live in a disreputable house within a prescribed district mustbe reported to him within an hour after her arrival. Each one wasclosely questioned as to her reasons for entering into the life. If shewas very young, she was warned of its inevitable consequences and urgedto abandon her project. Every assistance was offered her to return towork and to live a normal life. Occasionally a girl was desperate and itwas sometimes necessary that she be forcibly detained in the policestation until her friends could be communicated with. More often she wasglad to avail herself of the chance of escape; practically always, unless she had already become romantically entangled with a disreputableyoung man, whom she firmly believed to be her genuine lover andprotector. One day a telephone message came to Hull House from the inspector askingus to take charge of a young girl who had been brought into the stationby an older woman for registration. The girl's youth and the innocenceof her replies to the usual questions convinced the inspector that shewas ignorant of the life she was about to enter and that she probablybelieved she was simply registering her choice of a boarding-house. Herstory which she told at Hull House was as follows: She was a Milwaukeefactory girl, the daughter of a Bohemian carpenter. Ten days before shehad met a Chicago young man at a Milwaukee dance hall and after a briefcourtship had promised to marry him, arranging to meet him in Chicagothe following week. Fearing that her Bohemian mother would not approveof this plan, which she called "the American way of getting married, "the girl had risen one morning even earlier than factory worknecessitated and had taken the first train to Chicago. The young man mether at the station, took her to a saloon where he introduced her to afriend, an older woman, who, he said, would take good care of her. Afterthe young man disappeared, ostensibly for the marriage license, thewoman professed to be much shocked that the little bride had brought noluggage, and persuaded her that she must work a few weeks in order toearn money for her trousseau, and that she, an older woman who knew thecity, would find a boarding-house and a place in a factory for her. Shefurther induced her to write postal cards to six of her girl friends inMilwaukee, telling them of the kind lady in Chicago, of the good chancesfor work, and urging them to come down to the address which she sent. The woman told the unsuspecting girl that, first of all, a newcomer mustregister her place of residence with the police, as that was the law inChicago. It was, of course, when the woman took her to the policestation that the situation was disclosed. It needed but littleinvestigation to make clear that the girl had narrowly escaped awell-organized plot and that the young man to whom she was engaged wasan agent for a disreputable house. Mr. Clifford Roe took up the casewith vigor, and although all efforts failed to find the young man, thewoman who was his accomplice was fined one hundred and fifty dollars andcosts. The one impression which the trial left upon our minds was that all themen concerned in the prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage againstthe method employed to secure the girl, but took for granted that thelife she was about to lead was in the established order of things, ifshe had chosen it voluntarily. In other words, if the efforts of theagent had gone far enough to involve her moral nature, the girl, whoalthough unsophisticated, was twenty-one years old, could have remained, quite unchallenged, in the hideous life. The woman who was prosecutedwas well known to the police and was fined, not for her dailyoccupation, but because she had become involved in interstate whiteslave traffic. One touch of nature redeemed the trial, for the girlsuffered much more from the sense that she had been deserted by herlover than from horror over the fate she had escaped, and she was neverwholly convinced that he had not been genuine. She asserted constantly, in order to account for his absence, that some accident must havebefallen him. She felt that he was her natural protector in this strangeChicago to which she had come at his behest and continually resented anyimputation of his motives. The betrayal of her confidence, the playingupon her natural desire for a home of her own, was a ghastly revelationthat even when this hideous trade is managed upon the most carefullycalculated commercial principles, it must still resort to the use of theoldest of the social instincts as its basis of procedure. This Chicago police inspector, whose desire to protect young girls wasso genuine and so successful, was afterward indicted by the grand juryand sent to the penitentiary on the charge of accepting "graft" fromsaloon-keepers and proprietors of the disreputable houses in hisdistrict. His experience was a dramatic and tragic portrayal of theposition into which every city forces its police. When a girl who hasbeen secured for the life is dissuaded from it, her rescue represents adefinite monetary loss to the agency which has secured her and incursthe enmity of those who expected to profit by her. When this enmity hassufficiently accumulated, the active official is either "called down" byhigher political authority, or brought to trial for those illegalpractices which he shares with his fellow-officials. It is, therefore, easy to make such an inspector as ours suffer for his virtues, which areindividual, by bringing charges against his grafting, which is generaland almost official. So long as the customary prices for protection areadhered to, no one feels aggrieved; but the sentiment which prompts aninspector "to side with the girls" and to destroy thousands of dollars'worth of business is unjustifiable. He has not stuck to the rules of thegame and the pack of enraged gamesters, under full cry of "morality, "can very easily run him to ground, the public meantime being gratifiedthat police corruption has been exposed and the offender punished. Yethundreds of girls, who could have been discovered in no other way, wererescued by this man in his capacity of police inspector. On the otherhand, he did little to bring to justice those responsible for securingthe girls, and while he rescued the victim, he did not interfere withthe source of supply. Had he been brought to trial for thisindifference, it would have been impossible to find a grand jury tosustain the indictment. He was really brought to trial because he hadbroken the implied contract with the politicians; he had devised illicitand damaging methods to express that instinct for protecting youth andinnocence, which every man on the police force doubtless possesses. Werethis instinct freed from all political and extra legal control, it wouldin and of itself be a tremendous force against commercialized vice whichis so dependent upon the exploitation of young girls. Yet the fortunesof the police are so tied up to those who profit by this trade and totheir friends, the politicians, that the most well-meaning man upon theforce is constantly handicapped. Several illustrations of this occur tome. Two years ago, when very untoward conditions were discovered inconnection with a certain five-cent theatre, a young policeman arrestedthe proprietor, who was later brought before the grand jury, indictedand released upon bail for nine thousand dollars. The crime was aheinous one, involving the ruin of fourteen little girls; but so muchpolitical influence had been exerted on behalf of the proprietor, whowas a relative of the republican committeeman of his ward, that althoughthe license of the theatre was immediately revoked, it was reissued tohis wife within a very few days and the man continued to be a menace tothe community. When the young policeman who had made the arrest saw himin the neighborhood of the theatre talking to little girls and reportedhim, the officer was taken severely to task by the highest republicanauthority in the city. He was reprimanded for his activity and orderedtransferred to the stockyards, eleven miles away. The policeman wellunderstood that this was but the first step in the process called"breaking;" that after he had moved his family to the stockyards, in afew weeks he would be transferred elsewhere, and that this change ofbeat would be continued until he should at last be obliged to resignfrom the force. His offence, as he was plainly told, had been hisignorance of the fact that the theatre was under political protection. In short, the young officer had naïvely undertaken to serve the publicwithout waiting for his instructions from the political bosses. A flagrant example of the collusion of the police with vice is instancedby United States District Attorney Sims, who recently called upon theChicago police to make twenty-four arrests on behalf of the UnitedStates government for violations of the white slave law, when all of themen liable to arrest left town two hours after the warrants were issued. To quote Mr. Sims: "We sent the secret service men who had been workingin conjunction with the police back to Washington and brought in a freshsupply. These men did not work with the police, and within two weeksafter the first set of secret service men had left Chicago, the men wewanted were back in town, and without the aid of the city police wearrested all of them. " When the legal control of commercialized vice is thus tied up with citypolitics the functions of the police become legislative, executive andjudicial in regard to street solicitation: in a sense they also havepower of license, for it lies with them to determine the number of womenwho are allowed to ply their trade upon the street. Some of these womenare young earthlings, as it were, hoping to earn money for much-desiredclothing or pleasure. Others are desperate creatures making one lasteffort before they enter a public hospital to face a miserable end; butby far the larger number are sent out under the protection of the menwho profit by their earnings, or they are utilized to secure patronagefor disreputable houses. The police regard the latter "as regular, " andwhile no authoritative order is ever given, the patrolman understandsthat they are protected. On the other hand, "the straggler" is liable tobe arrested by any officer who chooses, and she is subjected to a fineupon his unsupported word. In either case the police regard all suchwomen as literally "abandoned, " deprived of ordinary rights, obliged tolive in specified residences, and liable to have their personalliberties invaded in a way that no other class of citizens wouldtolerate. The recent establishment of the Night Court in New York registers anadvance in regard to the treatment of these wretched women. Not onlydoes the public gradually become cognizant of the treatment accordedthem, but some attempt at discrimination is made between the firstoffenders and those hardened by long practice in that most hideous ofoccupations. Furthermore, an adult probation system is gradually beingsubstituted for the system of fines which at present are levied in suchwise as to virtually constitute a license and a partnership with thepolice department. While American cities cannot be said to have adopted a policy either ofsuppression or one of regulation, because the police consider the formerimpracticable and the latter intolerable to public opinion, we mayperhaps claim for America a little more humanity in its dealing withthis class of women, a little less ruthlessness than that exhibited bythe continental cities where regimentation is relentlessly assumed. The suggestive presence of such women on the streets is perhaps one ofthe most demoralizing influences to be found in a large city, and suchvigorous efforts as were recently made by a former chief of police inChicago when he successfully cleared the streets of their presence, demonstrates that legal suppression is possible. At least this obvioustemptation to young men and boys who are idly walking the streets mightbe avoided, for in an old formula one such woman "has cast down manywounded; yea, many strong men have been slain by her. " Were the streetskept clear, many young girls would be spared familiar knowledge thatsuch a method of earning money is open to them. I have personally knownseveral instances in which young girls have begun street solicitationthrough sheer imitation. A young Polish woman found herself in direstraits after the death of her mother. Her only friends in America hadmoved to New York, she was in debt for her mother's funeral, and as itwas the slack season of the miserable sweat-shop sewing she had beendoing, she was unable to find work. One evening when she was quitedesperate with hunger, she stopped several men upon the street, as shehad seen other girls do, and in her broken English asked them forsomething to eat. Only after a young man had given her a good meal at arestaurant did she realize the price she was expected to pay and thehorrible things which the other girls were doing. Even in her shockedrevolt she could not understand, of course, that she herself epitomizedthat hideous choice between starvation and vice which is perhaps thecrowning disgrace of civilization. The legal suppression of street solicitation would not only protectgirls but would enormously minimize the risk and temptation to boys. Theentire system of recruiting for commercialized vice is largely dependentupon boys who are scarcely less the victims of the system than are thegirls themselves. Certainly this aspect of the situation must beseriously considered. In 1908, when Mr. Clifford Roe conducted successful prosecutions againstone hundred and fifty of these disreputable young men in Chicago, nearlyall of them were local boys who had used their personal acquaintance tosecure their victims. The accident of a long acquaintance with one ofthese boys, born in the Hull-House neighborhood, filled me withquestionings as to how far society may be responsible for these wretchedlads, many of them beginning a vicious career when they are but fifteenor sixteen years of age. Because the trade constantly demands very younggirls, the procurers require the assistance of immature boys, for inthis game above all others "youth calls to youth. " Such a boy is oftenincited by the professional procurer to ruin a young girl, because thelatter's position is much safer if the character of the girl isblackened before he sells her, and if he himself cannot be implicated inher downfall. He thus keeps himself within the letter of the law, andwhen he is even more cautious, he induces the boy to go through theceremony of a legal marriage by promising him a percentage of his wife'sfirst earnings. Only yesterday I received a letter from a young man whom I had knownfrom his early boyhood, written in the state penitentiary, where he isserving a life sentence. His father was a drunkard, but his mother was afine woman, devoted to her children, and she had patiently supported herson Jim far beyond his school age. At the time of his trial, she pawnedall her personal possessions and mortgaged her furniture in order to getthree hundred dollars for his lawyer. Although Jim usually led the lifeof a loafer and had never supported his mother, he was affectionatelydevoted to her and always kindly and good-natured. Perhaps it wasbecause he had been so long dependent upon a self-sacrificing woman thatit became easy for him to be dependent upon his wife, a girl whom he metwhen he was temporarily acting as porter in a disreputable hotel. Through his long familiarity with vice, and the fact that many of hiscompanions habitually lived upon the earnings of "their girls, " heeasily consented that his wife should continue her life, and heconstantly accepted the money which she willingly gave him. After hismarriage he still lived in his mother's house and refused to take moremoney from her, but she had no idea of the source of his income. One dayhe called at the hotel, as usual, to ask for his wife's earnings, and ina quarrel over the amount with the landlady of the house, he drew arevolver and killed her. Although the plea of self-defense was urged inthe trial, his abominable manner of life so outraged both judge and jurythat he received the maximum sentence. His mother still insists that hesincerely loved the girl, whom he so impulsively married and that heconstantly tried to dissuade her from her evil life. Certain it is thatJim's wife and mother are both filled with genuine sorrow for his fateand that in some wise the educational and social resources in the cityof his birth failed to protect him from his own lower impulses and fromthe evil companionship whose influence he could not withstand. He is butone of thousands of weak boys, who are constantly utilized to supply thewhite slave trafficker with young girls, for it has been estimated thatat any given moment the majority of the girls utilized by the trade areunder twenty years of age and that most of them were procured whenyounger. We cannot assume that the youths who are hired to entice andentrap these girls are all young fiends, degenerate from birth; themajority of them are merely out-of-work boys, idle upon the streets, whoreadily lend themselves to these base demands because nothing else ispresented to them. All the recent investigations have certainly made clear that the bulk ofthe entire traffic is conducted with the youth of the community, andthat the social evil, ancient though it may be, must be renewed in ourgeneration through its younger members. The knowledge of the youth ofits victims doubtless in a measure accounts for the new sense ofcompunction which fills the community. CHAPTER III AMELIORATION OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS It may be possible to extract some small degree of comfort from therecent revelations of the white slave traffic when we reflect that atthe present moment, in the midst of a freedom such as has never beenaccorded to young women in the history of the world, under an economicpressure grinding down upon the working girl at the very age when shemost wistfully desires to be taken care of, it is necessary to organizea widespread commercial enterprise in order to procure a sufficientnumber of girls for the white slave market. Certainly the larger freedom accorded to woman by our changing socialcustoms and the phenomenal number of young girls who are utilized bymodern industry, taken in connection with this lack of supply, wouldseem to show that the chastity of women is holding its own in thatslow-growing civilization which ever demands more self-control andconscious direction on the part of the individuals sharing it. Successive reports of the United States census indicate thatself-supporting girls are increasing steadily in number each decade, until 59 per cent. Of all the young women in the nation between the agesof sixteen and twenty, are engaged in some gainful occupation. Yearafter year, as these figures increase, the public views them withcomplacency, almost with pride, and confidently depends upon the innerrestraint and training of this girlish multitude to protect it fromdisaster. Nevertheless, the public is totally unable to determine atwhat moment these safeguards, evolved under former industrialconditions, may reach a breaking point, not because of economic freedom, but because of untoward economic conditions. For the first time in history multitudes of women are laboring withoutthe direct stimulus of family interest or affection, and they are alsounable to proportion their hours of work and intervals of rest accordingto their strength; in addition to this for thousands of them the effortto obtain a livelihood fairly eclipses the very meaning of life itself. At the present moment no student of modern industrial conditions canpossibly assert how far the superior chastity of woman, so rigidlymaintained during the centuries, has been the result of her domesticsurroundings, and certainly no one knows under what degree of economicpressure the old restraints may give way. In addition to the monotony of work and the long hours, the small wagesthese girls receive have no relation to the standard of living whichthey are endeavoring to maintain. Discouraged and over-fatigued, theyare often brought into sharp juxtaposition with the women who areobtaining much larger returns from their illicit trade. Society alsoventures to capitalize a virtuous girl at much less than one who hasyielded to temptation, and it may well hold itself responsible for theprecarious position into which, year after year, a multitude of frailgirls is placed. The very valuable report recently issued by the vice commission ofChicago leaves no room for doubt upon this point. The report estimatesthe yearly profit of this nefarious business as conducted in Chicago tobe between fifteen and sixteen millions of dollars. Although theseenormous profits largely accrue to the men who conduct the business sideof prostitution, the report emphasizes the fact that the average girlearns very much more in such a life than she can hope to earn by anyhonest work. It points out that the capitalized value of the averageworking girl is six thousand dollars, as she ordinarily earns sixdollars a week, which is three hundred dollars a year, or five per cent. On that sum. A girl who sells drinks in a disreputable saloon, earningin commissions for herself twenty-one dollars a week, is capitalized ata value of twenty-two thousand dollars. The report further estimatesthat the average girl who enters an illicit life under a protector ormanager is able to earn twenty-five dollars a week, representing acapital of twenty-six thousand dollars. In other words, a girl in such alife "earns more than four times as much as she is worth as a factor inthe social and industrial economy, where brains, intelligence, virtueand womanly charm should bring a premium. " The argument is specious inthat it does not record the economic value of the many later years inwhich the honest girl will live as wife and mother, in contrast to thepremature death of the woman in the illicit trade, but the girl herselfsees only the difference in the immediate earning possibilities in thetwo situations. Nevertheless the supply of girls for the white slave traffic so farfalls below the demand that large business enterprises have beendeveloped throughout the world in order to secure a sufficient number ofvictims for this modern market. Over and over again in the criminalproceedings against the men engaged in this traffic, when questioned asto their motives, they have given the simple reply "that more girls areneeded", and that they were "promised big money for them". Althougheconomic pressure as a reason for entering an illicit life has thus beenbrought out in court by the evidence in a surprising number of cases, there is no doubt that it is often exaggerated; a girl always prefers tothink that economic pressure is the reason for her downfall, even whenthe immediate causes have been her love of pleasure, her desire forfinery, or the influence of evil companions. It is easy for her, as forall of us, to be deceived as to real motives. In addition to this thewretched girl who has entered upon an illicit life finds the experienceso terrible that, day by day, she endeavors to justify herself with theexcuse that the money she earns is needed for the support of some onedependent upon her, thus following habits established by generations ofvirtuous women who cared for feeble folk. I know one such girl living ina disreputable house in Chicago who has adopted a delicate childafflicted with curvature of the spine, whom she boards with respectablepeople and keeps for many weeks out of each year in an expensivesanitarium that it may receive medical treatment. The mother of thechild, an inmate of the house in which the ardent foster-mother herselflives, is quite indifferent to the child's welfare and also ratheramused at such solicitude. The girl has persevered in her course forfive years, never however allowing the little invalid to come to thehouse in which she and the mother live. The same sort of devotion andself-sacrifice is often poured out upon the miserable man who in thebeginning was responsible for the girl's entrance into the life and whoconstantly receives her earnings. She supports him in the luxurious lifehe may be living in another part of the town, takes an almost maternalpride in his good clothes and general prosperity, and regards him as theone person in all the world who understands her plight. Most of the cases of economic responsibility, however, are not due tochivalric devotion, but arise from a desire to fulfill familyobligations such as would be accepted by any conscientious girl. Thiswas clearly revealed in conversations which were recently held withthirty-four girls, who were living at the same time in a rescue home, when twenty-two of them gave economic pressure as the reason forchoosing the life which they had so recently abandoned. One piteouslittle widow of seventeen had been supporting her child and had beenable to leave the life she had been leading only because her marriedsister offered to take care of the baby without the money formerly paidher. Another had been supporting her mother and only since her recentdeath was the girl sure that she could live honestly because she hadonly herself to care for. The following story, fairly typical of the twenty-two involving economicreasons, is of a girl who had come to Chicago at the age of fifteen, from a small town in Indiana. Her father was too old to work and hermother was a dependent invalid. The brother who cared for the parents, with the help of the girl's own slender wages earned in the countrystore of the little town, became ill with rheumatism. In her desire toearn more money the country girl came to the nearest large city, Chicago, to work in a department store. The highest wage she could earn, even though she wore long dresses and called herself "experienced, " wasfive dollars a week. This sum was of course inadequate even for her ownneeds and she was constantly filled with a corroding worry for "thefolks at home. " In a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise"showed her that it was possible to add to her wages by makingappointments for money in the noon hour at down-town hotels. Havingearned money in this way for a few months, the young girl made anarrangement with an older woman to be on call in the evenings whenevershe was summoned by telephone, thus joining that large clandestine groupof apparently respectable girls, most of whom yield to temptation onlywhen hard pressed by debt incurred during illness or non-employment, orwhen they are facing some immediate necessity. This practice has becomeso general in the larger American cities as to be systematicallyconducted. It is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the economicpressure, unless one cites its corollary--the condition of thousands ofyoung men whose low salaries so cruelly and unjustifiably postpone theirmarriages. For a long time the young saleswoman kept her position in thedepartment store, retaining her honest wages for herself, but sendingeverything else to her family. At length however, she changed from herclandestine life to an openly professional one when she needed enoughmoney to send her brother to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she maintainedhim for a year. She explained that because he was now restored to healthand able to support the family once more, she had left the life "foreverand ever", expecting to return to her home in Indiana. She suspectedthat her brother knew of her experience, although she was sure that herparents did not, and she hoped that as she was not yet seventeen, shemight be able to make a fresh start. Fortunately the poor child did notknow how difficult that would be. It is perhaps in the department store more than anywhere else that everypossible weakness in a girl is detected and traded upon. For while it istrue that "wherever many girls are gathered together more or lessunprotected and embroiled in the struggle for a livelihood, near by willbe hovering the procurers and evil-minded", no other place of employmentis so easy of access as the department store. No visitor is received ina factory or office unless he has definite business there, whereas everypurchaser is welcome at a department store, even a notorious woman wellknown to represent the demi-monde trade is treated with marked courtesyif she spends large sums of money. The primary danger lies in the factthat the comely saleswomen are thus easy of access. The disreputableyoung man constantly passes in and out, making small purchases fromevery pretty girl, opening an acquaintance with complimentary remarks;or the procuress, a fashionably-dressed woman, buys clothing in largeamounts, sometimes for a young girl by her side, ostensibly herdaughter. She condoles with the saleswoman upon her hard lot and lack ofpleasure, and in the rôle of a kindly, prosperous matron invites her tocome to her own home for a good time. The girl is sometimes subjected totemptation through the men and women in her own department, who tell herhow invitations to dinners and theatres may be procured. It is notsurprising that so many of these young, inexperienced girls are eitherdeceived or yield to temptation in spite of the efforts made to protectthem by the management and by the older women in the establishment. The department store has brought together, as has never been done beforein history, a bewildering mass of delicate and beautiful fabrics, jewelry and household decorations such as women covet, gatheredskilfully from all parts of the world, and in the midst of this bulk ofdesirable possessions is placed an untrained girl with carefulinstructions as to her conduct for making sales, but with no guidance inregard to herself. Such a girl may be bitterly lonely, but she isexpected to smile affably all day long upon a throng of changingcustomers. She may be without adequate clothing, although she stands inan emporium where it is piled about her, literally as high as her head. She may be faint for want of food but she may not sit down lest sheassume "an attitude of inertia and indifference, " which is against therules. She may have a great desire for pretty things, but she must sellto other people at least twenty-five times the amount of her own salary, or she will not be retained. Because she is of the first generation ofgirls which has stood alone in the midst of trade, she is clinging andtimid, and yet the only person, man or woman, in this commercialatmosphere who speaks to her of the care and protection which shecraves, is seeking to betray her. Because she is young and feminine, hermind secretly dwells upon a future lover, upon a home, adorned with themost enticing of the household goods about her, upon a child dressed inthe filmy fabrics she tenderly touches, and yet the only man whoapproaches her there acting upon the knowledge of this inner life ofhers, does it with the direct intention of playing upon it in order todespoil her. Is it surprising that the average human nature of theseyoung girls cannot, in many instances, endure this strain? Of fifteenthousand women employed in the down-town department stores of Chicago, the majority are Americans. We all know that the American girl has grownup in the belief that the world is hers from which to choose, that thereis ordinarily no limit to her ambition or to her definition of success. She realizes that she is well mannered and well dressed and does notappear unlike most of her customers. She sees only one aspect of hercountrywomen who come shopping, and she may well believe that the chiefconcern of life is fashionable clothing. Her interest and ambitionalmost inevitably become thoroughly worldly, and from the very fact thatshe is employed down town, she obtains an exaggerated idea of the luxuryof the illicit life all about her, which is barely concealed. The fifth volume of the report of "Women and Child Wage Earners" in theUnited States gives the result of a careful inquiry into "the relationof wages to the moral condition of department store women. " Inconnection with this, the investigators secured "the personal historiesof one hundred immoral women, " of whom ten were or had been employed ina department store. They found that while only one of the ten had beendirectly induced to leave the store for a disreputable life, six of themsaid that they had found "it was easier to earn money that way. " Thereport states that the average employee in a department store earnsabout seven dollars a week, and that the average income of the onehundred immoral women covered by the personal histories, ranged fromfifty dollars a week to one hundred dollars a week in exceptional cases. It is of these exceptional cases that the department store girl hears, and the knowledge becomes part of the unreality and glittering life thatis all about her. Another class of young women which is especially exposed to thisalluring knowledge is the waitress in down-town cafés and restaurants. Arecent investigation of girls in the segregated district of aneighboring city places waiting in restaurants and hotels as highest onthe list of "previous occupations. " Many waitresses are paid so littlethat they gratefully accept any fee which men may offer them. It is alsothe universal habit for customers to enter into easy conversation whilebeing served. Some of them are lonely young men who have fewopportunities to speak to women. The girl often quite innocently acceptsan invitation for an evening, spent either in a theatre or dance hall, with no evil results, but this very lack of social convention exposesher to danger. Even when the proprietor means to protect the girls, acertain amount of familiarity must be borne, lest their resentmentshould diminish the patronage of the café. In certain restaurants, moreover, the waitresses doubtless suffer because the patrons comparethem with the girls who ply their trade in disreputable saloons underthe guise of serving drinks. The following story would show that mere friendly propinquity mayconstitute a danger. Last summer an honest, straightforward girl from asmall lake town in northern Michigan was working in a Chicago café, sending every week more than half of her wages of seven dollars to hermother and little sister, ill with tuberculosis, at home. The motherowned the little house in which she lived, but except for the vegetablesshe raised in her own garden and an occasional payment for plain sewing, she and her younger daughter were dependent upon the hard-working girlin Chicago. The girl's heart grew heavier week by week as the mother'sletters reported that the sister was daily growing weaker. One hot dayin August she received a letter from her mother telling her to come atonce if she "would see sister before she died. " At noon that day whensickened by the hot air of the café, and when the clatter of dishes, thebuzz of conversation, the orders shouted through the slide seemed but ahideous accompaniment to her tormented thoughts, she was suddenlystartled by hearing the name of her native town, and realized that oneof her regular patrons was saying to her that he meant to take a nightboat to M. At 8 o'clock and get out of this "infernal heat. " Almostinvoluntarily she asked him if he would take her with him. Although thevery next moment she became conscious what his consent implied, she didnot reveal her fright, but merely stipulated that if she went with himhe must agree to buy her a return ticket. She reached home twelve hoursbefore her sister died, but when she returned to Chicago a week laterburdened with the debt of an undertaker's bill, she realized that shehad discovered a means of payment. All girls who work down town are at a disadvantage as compared tofactory girls, who are much less open to direct inducement and to thetemptations which come through sheer imitation. Factory girls also havethe protection of working among plain people who frankly designate anirregular life, in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If a factory girl catchessight of the vicious life at all, she sees its miserable victims in allthe wretchedness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer parts ofthe city. As she passes the opening doors of a disreputable saloon shemay see for an instant three or four listless girls urging liquor uponmen tired out with the long day's work and already sodden with drink. Asshe hurries along the street on a rainy night she may hear a sharp cryof pain from a sick-looking girl whose arm is being brutally wrenched bya rough man, and if she stops for a moment she catches his mutteredthreats in response to the girl's pleading "that it is too bad a nightfor street work. " She sees a passing policeman shrug his shoulders as hecrosses the street, and she vaguely knows that the sick girl has putherself beyond the protection of the law, and that the rough man has anunderstanding with the officer on the beat. She has been told thatcertain streets are "not respectable, " but a furtive look down thelength of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, fromwhich all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; aslovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up thelurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its "denizens, "although she may have known a neighbor's daughter who came home to dieof a mysterious disease said to be the result of a "fast life, " andwhose disgraced mother "never again held up her head. " Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge, the increasing nervousenergy to which industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, andthe speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at any momentso register their results upon the nervous system of a factory girl asto overcome her powers of resistance. Many a working girl at the end ofa day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance isplainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls go directly to bed as soonas they have eaten their suppers. They are too tired to go from home forrecreation, too tired to read and often too tired to sleep. A humaneforewoman recently said to me as she glanced down the long room in whichhundreds of young women, many of them with their shoes beside them, werestanding: "I hate to think of all the aching feet on this floor; thesegirls all have trouble with their feet, some of them spend the entireevening bathing them in hot water. " But aching feet are no more usualthan aching backs and aching heads. The study of industrial diseases hasonly this year been begun by the federal authorities, and doubtless asmore is known of the nervous and mental effect of over-fatigue, manymoral breakdowns will be traced to this source. It is already easy tomake the connection in definite cases: "I was too tired to care, " "I wastoo tired to know what I was doing, " "I was dead tired and sick of itall, " "I was dog tired and just went with him, " are phrases taken fromthe lips of reckless girls, who are endeavoring to explain the situationin which they find themselves. Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the hours of working women, yet the able brief presented to the United States supreme court on theconstitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law for women, based its pleaupon the results of overwork as affecting women's health, the gravemedical statement constantly broken into by a portrayal of thedisastrous effects of over-fatigue upon character. It is as yetdifficult to distinguish between the results of long hours and theresults of overstrain. Certainly the constant sense of haste is one ofthe most nerve-racking and exhausting tests to which the human systemcan be subjected. Those girls in the sewing industry whose mothersthread needles for them far into the night that they may sew without amoment's interruption during the next day; those girls who inserteyelets into shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case, each casecontaining twenty-four pairs of shoes, are striking victims of theover-speeding which is so characteristic of our entire factory system. Girls working in factories and laundries are also open to thepossibilities of accidents. The loss of only two fingers upon the righthand, or a broken wrist, may disqualify an operator from continuing inthe only work in which she is skilled and make her struggle forrespectability even more difficult. Varicose veins and broken arches inthe feet are found in every occupation in which women are obliged tostand for hours, but at any moment either one may develop beyond purelypainful symptoms into crippling incapacity. One such girl recentlyreturning home after a long day's work deliberately sat down upon thefloor of a crowded street car, explaining defiantly to the conductor andthe bewildered passengers that "her feet would not hold out anotherminute. " A young woman who only last summer broke her hand in a manglewas found in a rescue home in January, explaining her recent experienceby the phrase that she was "up against it when leaving the hospital inOctober. " In spite of many such heart-breaking instances the movement forsafeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidentsproceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of aminiature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate ofindustrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, itshideousness might well have been increased had it been able todemonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and thecomplete moral disaster which overtook their victims. Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtimeoften find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after alltheir efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl saidthat she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterlydiscouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to saveenough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars aweek for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a weekfor carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weeklywage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoestwice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and shepossessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle;to use her own contemptuous phrase, she "sold out for a pair of shoes. " Usually the phrases are less graphic, but after all they contain thesame dreary meaning: "Couldn't make both ends meet, " "I had always beenused to having nice things, " "Couldn't make enough money to live on, " "Igot sick and ran behind, " "Needed more money, " "Impossible to feed andclothe myself, " "Out of work, hadn't been able to save. " Of course agirl in such a strait does not go out deliberately to find illicitmethods of earning money, she simply yields in a moment of utterweariness and discouragement to the temptations she has been able towithstand up to that moment. The long hours, the lack of comforts, thelow pay, the absence of recreation, the sense of "good times" all abouther which she cannot share, the conviction that she is rapidly losinghealth and charm, rouse the molten forces within her. A swelling tide ofself-pity suddenly storms the banks which have hitherto held her andfinally overcomes her instincts for decency and righteousness, as wellas the habit of clean living, established by generations of herforebears. The aphorism that "morals fluctuate with trade" was long consideredcynical, but it has been demonstrated in Berlin, in London, in Japan, aswell as in several American cities, that there is a distinct increase inthe number of registered prostitutes during periods of financialdepression and even during the dull season of leading local industries. Out of my own experience I am ready to assert that very often all thatis necessary to effectively help the girl who is on the edge ofwrong-doing is to lend her money for her board until she finds work, provide the necessary clothing for which she is in such desperate need, persuade her relatives that she should have more money for her ownexpenditures, or find her another place at higher wages. Upon suchsimple economic needs does the tried virtue of a good girl sometimesdepend. Here again the immigrant girl is at a disadvantage. The average wage oftwo hundred newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Galatians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Roumanians, Germans, and Swedes, who were interviewed bythe Immigrants' Protective League, was four dollars and a half a weekfor the first position which they had been able to secure in Chicago. Itoften takes a girl several weeks to find her first place. During thisperiod of looking for work the immigrant girl is subjected to greatdangers. It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit symptoms ofthat type of disordered mind which alienists pronounce "due to conflictthrough poor adaptation. " I have known several immigrant young men aswell as girls who became deranged during the first year of life inAmerica. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtainingthe freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three monthsof bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sentto the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of hisyoung countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises ofwork, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbrokenassociation. I also recall a Polish girl who became utterly distraughtafter weeks of sleeplessness and anxiety because she could not repayfifty dollars which she had borrowed from a countryman in Chicago forthe purpose of bringing her sister to America. Her case was declaredhopeless, but when the creditor made reassuring visits to the patientshe began to mend and now, five years later, is not only free from debt, but has brought over the rest of the family, whose united earnings areslowly paying for a house and lot. Psychiatry is demonstrating theafter-effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yetbeen done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economicinsecurity in the midst of new surroundings, has superinduced insanityamong newly arrived immigrants. Such a state of nervous bewilderment andfright, added to that sense of expectation which youth always carriesinto new surroundings, often makes it easy to exploit the virtue of animmigrant girl. It goes without saying that she is almost alwaysexploited industrially. A Russian girl recently took a place in aChicago clothing factory at twenty cents a day, without in the leastknowing that she was undercutting the wages of even that ill-paidindustry. This girl rented a room for a dollar a week and all that shehad to eat was given her by a friend in the same lodging house, whoshared her own scanty fare with the newcomer. In the clothing industry trade unionism has already established aminimum wage limit for thousands of women who are receiving theprotection and discipline of trade organization and responding to thetonic of self-help. Low wages will doubtless in time be modified byMinimum Wage Boards representing the government's stake in industry, such as have been in successful operation for many years in certainBritish colonies and are now being instituted in England itself. As yetMassachusetts is the only state which has appointed a special commissionto consider this establishment for America, although the IndustrialCommission of Wisconsin is empowered to investigate wages and theireffect upon the standard of living. Anyone who has lived among working people has been surprised at thedocility with which grown-up children give all of their earnings totheir parents. This is, of course, especially true of the daughters. Thefifth volume of the governmental report upon "Women and Child WageEarners in the United States, " quoted earlier, gives eighty-four percent. As the proportion of working girls who turn in all of their wagesto the family fund. In most cases this is done voluntarily andcheerfully, but in many instances it is as if the tradition of woman'sdependence upon her family for support held long after the actual facthad changed, or as if the tyranny established through generations whendaughters could be starved into submission to a father's will, continuedeven after the rôles had changed, and the wages of the girl childsupported a broken and dissolute father. An over-restrained girl, from whom so much is exacted, will sometimesbegin to deceive her family by failing to tell them when she has had araise in her wages. She will habitually keep the extra amount forherself, as she will any overtime pay which she may receive. All suchmoney is invariably spent upon her own clothing, which she, of course, cannot wear at home, but which gives her great satisfaction upon thestreets. The girl of the crowded tenements has no room in which to receive herfriends or to read the books through which she shares the lives ofassorted heroines, or, better still, dreams of them as of herself. Evenif the living-room is not full of boarders or children or washing, it iscomfortable neither for receiving friends nor for reading, and she findsupon the street her entire social field; the shop windows with theirdesirable garments hastily clothe her heroines as they travel the oldroads of romance, the street cars rumbling noisily by suggest adelectable somewhere far away, and the young men who pass offerpossibilities of the most delightful acquaintance. It is not astonishingthat she insists upon clothing which conforms to the ideals of thisall-absorbing street and that she will unhesitatingly deceive anuncomprehending family which does not recognize its importance. One such girl had for two years earned money for clothing by fillingregular appointments in a disreputable saloon between the hours of sixand half-past seven in the evening. With this money earned almost dailyshe bought the clothes of her heart's desire, keeping them with thesaloon-keeper's wife. She demurely returned to her family for supper inher shabby working clothes and presented her mother with her unopenedpay envelope every Saturday night. She began this life at the age offourteen after her Polish mother had beaten her because she had"elbowed" the sleeves and "cut out" the neck of her ungainly calico gownin a vain attempt to make it look "American. " Her mother, who had soconscientiously punished a daughter who was "too crazy for clothes, "could never of course comprehend how dangerous a combination is the girlwith an unsatisfied love for finery and the opportunities for illicitearning afforded on the street. Yet many sad cases may be traced to suchlack of comprehension. Charles Booth states that in England a largeproportion of parents belonging to the working and even lower middleclasses, are unacquainted with the nature of the lives led by their owndaughters, a result doubtless of the early freedom of the streetaccorded city children. Too often the mothers themselves are totallyignorant of covert dangers. A few days ago I held in my hand a patheticlittle pile of letters written by a desperate young girl of fifteenbefore she attempted to commit suicide. These letters were addressed toher lover, her girl friends, and to the head of the rescue home, butnone to her mother towards whom she felt a bitter resentment "becauseshe did not warn me. " The poor mother after the death of her husband hadgone to live with a married daughter, but as the son-in-law would not"take in two" she had told the youngest daughter, who had already workedfor a year as an apprentice in a dressmaking establishment, that shemust find a place to live with one of her girl friends. The poor childhad found this impossible, and three days after the breaking up of herhome she had fallen a victim to a white slave trafficker, who hadtreated her most cruelly and subjected her to unspeakable indignities. It was only when her "protector" left the city, frightened by theunwonted activity of the police, due to a wave of reform, that she foundher way to the rescue home, and in less than five months after the deathof her father she had purchased carbolic acid and deliberately "courteddeath for the nameless child" and herself. Another experience during which a girl faces a peculiar danger is whenshe has lost one "job" and is looking for another. Naturally she losesher place in the slack season and pursues her search at the very momentwhen positions are hardest to find, and her un-employment is thereforemost prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our social order is so unorganizedand inchoate as our method, or rather lack of method, of placing youngpeople in industry. This is obvious from the point of view of theirfirst positions when they leave school at the unstable age of fourteen, or from the innumerable places they hold later, often as high as ten ayear, when they are dismissed or change voluntarily through sheerrestlessness. Here again a girl's difficulty is often increased by thelack of sympathy and understanding on the part of her parents. A girl isoften afraid to say that she has lost her place and pretends to go towork each morning while she is looking for a new one; she postponestelling them at home day by day, growing more frantic as the usualpay-day approaches. Some girls borrow from loan sharks in order to takethe customary wages to their parents, others fall victims tounscrupulous employment agencies in their eagerness to take the firstthing offered. The majority of these girls answer the advertisements in the dailypapers as affording the cheapest and safest way to secure a position. These out-of-work girls are found, sometimes as many as forty or fiftyat a time, in the rest rooms of the department stores, waiting for thenew edition of the newspapers after they have been the rounds of themorning advertisements and have found nothing. Of course such a possible field as these rest rooms is not overlooked bythe procurer, who finds it very easy to establish friendly relationsthrough the offer of the latest edition of the newspaper. Even penniesare precious to a girl out of work and she is also easily grateful toanyone who expresses an interest in her plight and tells her of aposition. Two representatives of the Juvenile Protective Association ofChicago, during a period of three weeks, arrested and convictedseventeen men and three women who were plying their trades in the restrooms of nine department stores. The managers were greatly concernedover this exposure and immediately arranged both for more intelligentmatrons and greater vigilance. One of the less scrupulous storesvoluntarily gave up a method of advertising carried on in the rest roomitself where a demonstrator from "the beauty counter" made up the facesof the patrons of the rest room with the powder and paint procurable inher department below. The out-of-work girls especially availedthemselves of this privilege and hoped that their search would be easierwhen their pale, woe-begone faces were "made beautiful. " The poor girlscould not know that a face thus made up enormously increased theirrisks. A number of girls also came early in the morning as soon as the restrooms were open. They washed their faces and arranged their hair andthen settled to sleep in the largest and easiest chairs the roomafforded. Some of these were out-of-work girls also determined to takehome their wages at the end of the week, each pretending to her motherthat she had spent the night with a girl friend and was working all dayas usual. How much of this deception is due to parental tyranny and howmuch to a sense of responsibility for younger children or invalids, itis impossible to estimate until the number of such recorded cases ismuch larger. Certain it is that the long habit of obedience, as well asthe feeling of family obligation established from childhood, is oftenutilized by the white slave trafficker. Difficult as is the position of the girl out of work when her family isexigent and uncomprehending, she has incomparably more protection thanthe girl who is living in the city without home ties. Such girls formsixteen per cent. Of the working women of Chicago. With absolutely everypenny of their meagre wages consumed in their inadequate living, theyare totally unable to save money. That loneliness and detachment whichthe city tends to breed in its inhabitants is easily intensified in sucha girl into isolation and a desolating feeling of belonging nowhere. Allyouth resents the sense of the enormity of the universe in relation tothe insignificance of the individual life, and youth, with that intenseself-consciousness which makes each young person the very centre of allemotional experience, broods over this as no older person can possiblydo. At such moments a black oppression, the instinctive fear ofsolitude, will send a lonely girl restlessly to walk the streets evenwhen she is "too tired to stand, " and when her desire for companionshipin itself constitutes a grave danger. Such a girl living in a rentedroom is usually without any place in which to properly receive callers. An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-housesin which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. Were found witha parlor in which guests might be received. Many girls quite innocentlypermit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifullydisguised as "sitting-rooms, " but the danger is obvious, and thestandards of the girl gradually become lowered. Certainly during the trying times when a girl is out of work she shouldhave much more intelligent help than is at present extended to her; sheshould be able to avail herself of the state employment agencies muchmore than is now possible, and the work of the newly establishedvocational bureaus should be enormously extended. When once we are in earnest about the abolition of the social evil, society will find that it must study industry from the point of view ofthe producer in a sense which has never been done before. Such a studywith reference to industrial legislation will ally itself on one handwith the trades-union movement, which insists upon a living wage andshorter hours for the workers, and also upon an opportunity forself-direction, and on the other hand with the efficiency movement, which would refrain from over-fatiguing an operator as it would fromover-speeding a machine. In addition to legislative enactment and thehistoric trade-union effort, the feebler and newer movement on the partof the employers is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who isnot only devising recreational and educational plans, but is placingbefore the employer much disturbing information upon the cost of livingin relation to the pitiful wages of working girls. Certainly employersare growing ashamed to use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence ofemploying only the girl "protected by home influences" as a device forreducing wages. Help may also come from the consumers, for an increasingnumber of them, with compunctions in regard to tempted young employees, are not only unwilling to purchase from the employer who underpays hisgirls and thus to share his guilt, but are striving in divers ways tomodify existing conditions. As working women enter fresh fields of labor which ever open up anew asthe old fields are submerged behind them, society must endeavor tospeedily protect them by an amelioration of the economic conditionswhich are now so unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health and morals. The world-wide movement for establishing governmental control ofindustrial conditions is especially concerned for working women. Fourteen of the European countries prohibit all night work for women andalmost every civilized country in the world is considering the number ofhours and the character of work in which women may be permitted tosafely engage. Although amelioration comes about so slowly that many young girls aresacrificed each year under conditions which could so easily andreasonably be changed, nevertheless it is apparently better to overcomethe dangers in this new and freer life, which modern industry has openedto women, than it is to attempt to retreat into the domestic industry ofthe past; for all statistics of prostitution give the largest number ofrecruits for this life as coming from domestic service and the secondlargest number from girls who live at home with no definite occupationwhatever. Therefore, although in the economic aspect of the social evilmore than in any other, do we find ground for despair, at the same timewe discern, as nowhere else, the young girl's stubborn power ofresistance. Nevertheless, the most superficial survey of hersurroundings shows the necessity for ameliorating, as rapidly aspossible, the harsh economic conditions which now environ her. That steadily increasing function of the state by which it seeks toprotect its workers from their own weakness and degradation, and insiststhat the livelihood of the manual laborer shall not be beaten down belowthe level of efficient citizenship, assumes new forms almost daily. Fromthe human as well as the economic standpoint there is an obligationresting upon the state to discover how many victims of the white slavetraffic are the result of social neglect, remedial incapacity, and thelack of industrial safeguards, and how far discontinuous employment andnon-employment are factors in the breeding of discouragement anddespair. Is it because our modern industrialism is so new that we have been slowto connect it with the poverty and vice all about us? The socialiststalk constantly of the relation of economic law to destitution and pointout the connection between industrial maladjustment and individualwrongdoing, but certainly the study of social conditions, the obligationto eradicate vice, cannot belong to one political party or to oneeconomic school. It must be recognized as a solemn obligation ofexisting governments, and society must realize that economic conditionscan only be made more righteous and more human by the unceasing devotionof generations of men. CHAPTER IV MORAL EDUCATION AND LEGAL PROTECTION OF CHILDREN No great wrong has ever arisen more clearly to the social consciousnessof a generation than has that of commercialized vice in theconsciousness of ours, and that we are so slow to act is simply anotherevidence that human nature has a curious power of callous indifferencetowards evils which have been so entrenched that they seem part of thatwhich has always been. Educators of course share this attitude; atmoments they seem to intensify it, although at last an educationalmovement in the direction of sex hygiene is beginning in the schools andcolleges. Primary schools strive to satisfy the child's firstquestionings regarding the beginnings of human life and approach thesubject through simple biological instruction which at least places thisknowledge on a par with other natural facts. Such teaching is anenormous advance for the children whose curiosity would otherwise havebeen satisfied from poisonous sources and who would have learned ofsimple physiological matters from such secret undercurrents of corruptknowledge as to have forever perverted their minds. Yet this firstdirect step towards an adequate educational approach to this subject hasbeen surprisingly difficult owing to the self-consciousness of grown-uppeople; for while the children receive the teaching quite simply, theirparents often take alarm. Doubtless co-operation with parents will benecessary before the subject can fall into its proper place in theschools. In Chicago, the largest women's club in the city hasestablished normal courses in sex hygiene attended both by teachers andmothers, the National and State Federations of Women's Clubs aregradually preparing thousands of women throughout America for fullerco-operation with the schools in this difficult matter. In this, as inso many other educational movements, Germany has led the way. Twopublications are issued monthly in Berlin, which promote not only moreeffective legislation but more adequate instruction in the schools onthis basic subject. These journals are supported by men and womenanxious for light for the sake of their children. Some of them werefirst stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama "The Awakening ofSpring, " which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights thelesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of giftedschool-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents. A year ago the Bishop of London gathered together a number ofinfluential people and laid before them his convictions that the root ofthe social evil lay in so-called "parental modesty, " and that in thequickening of the parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting upof England's moral tone which has for so long been the despair ofEngland's foremost men. " In America the eighth year-book of the National Society for theScientific Study of Education treats of this important subject withgreat ability, massing the agencies and methods in impressive array. Many other educational journals and organized societies could be citedas expressing a new conscience in regard to this world-old evil. Theexpert educational opinion which they represent is practically agreedthat for older children the instruction should not be confined tobiology and hygiene, but may come quite naturally in history andliterature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexualinstinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed andspiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotionsand sacrifices. The youth thus taught sees this primal instinct not onlyas an essential to the continuance of the race, but also, when it istransmuted to the highest ends, as a fundamental factor in socialprogress. The entire subject is broadened out in his mind as he learnsthat his own struggle is a common experience. He is able to make his owninterpretations and to combat the crude inferences of his patronizingcompanions. After all, no young person will be able to control hisimpulses and to save himself from the grosser temptations, unless he hasbeen put under the sway of nobler influences. Perhaps we have yet tolearn that the inhibitions of character as well as its reinforcementscome most readily through idealistic motives. Certainly all the great religions of the world have recognized youth'sneed of spiritual help during the trying years of adolescence. Theceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this instinct almost tothe exclusion of others, and all later religions attempt to provide theyouth with shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies ahead of him, forthe wise men in every age have known that only the power of the spiritcan overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this educationaladvance, courses of study in many public and private schools are stillprepared exactly as if educators had never known that at fifteen orsixteen years of age, the will power being still weak, the bodilydesires are keen and insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyttleton, who has given much thought to this gap in the education of youth says, "The certain result of leaving an enormous majority of boys unguided anduninstructed in a matter where their strongest passions are concerned, is that they grow up to judge of all questions connected with it, from apurely selfish point of view. " He contends that this selfishness is dueto the fact that any single suggestion or hint which boys receive on thesubject comes from other boys or young men who are under the same potentinfluences of ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No wholesomecounter-balance of knowledge is given, no attempt is made to invest thesubject with dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare of othersand to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton contends that this alone can explainthe peculiarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women which is asustained cruelty to be discerned in no other relation of English life. To quote him again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty are not birdsor beasts but our own countrywomen, doomed by the hundred thousand to alife of unutterable shame and hopeless misery, then and then only thegeneral average tone of young men becomes hard and brutally callous orfrivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not exhibited in relation toany other form of human suffering. " At the present moment thousands ofyoung people in our great cities possess no other knowledge of thisgrave social evil which may at any moment become a dangerous personalmenace, save what is imparted to them in this brutal flippant spirit. Ithas been said that the child growing up in the midst of civilizationreceives from its parents and teachers something of the accumulatedexperience of the world on all other subjects save upon that of sex. Onthis one subject alone each generation learns little from itspredecessors. An educator has lately pointed out that it is an old lure of vice topretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complainsthat it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes oflife contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that youngpeople are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions withpolite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observethe life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to bepart of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing tothis attitude, many young people living in our cities at the presentmoment have failed to apprehend the admonitions of religion and havenever responded to its inner control. It is as if the impact of theworld had stunned their spiritual natures, and as if this had occurredat the very time that a most dangerous experiment is being tried. Thepublic gaieties formerly allowed in Catholic countries where youngpeople were restrained by the confessional, are now permitted in citieswhere this restraint is altogether unknown to thousands of young people, and only faintly and traditionally operative upon thousands of others. The puritanical history of American cities assumes that these gaietiesare forbidden, and that the streets are sober and decorous forconscientious young men and women who need no external protection. Thisungrounded assumption, united to the fact that no adult has theconfidence of these young people, who are constantly subjected to amultitude of imaginative impressions, is almost certain to resultdisastrously. The social relationships in a modern city are so hastily made and oftenso superficial, that the old human restraints of public opinion, longsustained in smaller communities, have also broken down. Thousands ofyoung men and women in every great city have received none of thelessons in self-control which even savage tribes imparted to theirchildren when they taught them to master their appetites as well astheir emotions. These young people are perhaps further from allcommunity restraint and genuine social control than the youth of thecommunity have ever been in the long history of civilization. Certainlyonly the modern city has offered at one and the same time every possiblestimulation for the lower nature and every opportunity for secret vice. Educators apparently forget that this unrestrained stimulation of youngpeople, so characteristic of our cities, although developing veryrapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not yet seen the outcome. The present education of the average young man has given him only themost unreal protection against the temptations of the city. Schoolboysare subjected to many lures from without just at the moment when theyare filled with an inner tumult which utterly bewilders them andconcerning which no one has instructed them save in terms of emptyprecept and unintelligible warning. We are authoritatively told that the physical difficulties areenormously increased by uncontrolled or perverted imaginations, and allsound advice to young men in regard to this subject emphasizes a cleanmind, exhorts an imagination kept free from sensuality and insists upondays filled with wholesome athletic interests. We allow this régime tobe exactly reversed for thousands of young people living in the mostcrowded and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not only does the stagein its advertisements exhibit all the allurements of sex to such anextent that a play without a "love interest" is considered foredoomed tofailure, but the novels which form the sole reading of thousands ofyoung men and girls deal only with the course of true or simulated love, resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in variegated misfortunes. Often the only recreation possible for young men and young womentogether is dancing, in which it is always easy to transgress theproprieties. In many public dance halls, however, improprieties aredeliberately fostered. The waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, thecouples leaning heavily on each other barely move across the floor, allthe jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, asis all the careful decorum of the formal dance. The efforts to obtainpleasure or to feed the imagination are thus converged upon the senseswhich it is already difficult for young people to understand and tocontrol. It is therefore not remarkable that in certain parts of thecity groups of idle young men are found whose evil imaginations haveactually inhibited their power for normal living. On the streets or inthe pool-rooms where they congregate their conversation, their tales ofadventure, their remarks upon women who pass by, all reveal that theyhave been caught in the toils of an instinct so powerful and primal thatwhen left without direction it can easily overwhelm its possessor andswamp his faculties. These young men, who do no regular work, who expectto be supported by their mothers and sisters and to get money for theshows and theatres by any sort of disreputable undertaking, are inexcellent training for the life of the procurer, and it is from suchgroups that they are recruited. There is almost a system ofapprenticeship, for boys when very small act as "look-outs" and arelater utilized to make acquaintances with girls in order to introducethem to professionals. From this they gradually learn the method ofprocuring girls and at last do an independent business. If one boy issuccessful in such a life, throughout his acquaintance runs the rumorthat a girl is an asset that will bring a larger return than canpossibly be earned in hard-working ways. Could the imaginations of theseyoung men have been controlled and cultivated, could the desire foradventure have been directed into wholesome channels, could these idleboys have been taught that, so far from being manly they were losing allvirility, could higher interests have been aroused and standards giventhem in relation to this one aspect of life, the entire situation ofcommercialized vice would be a different thing. The girls with a desire for adventure seem confined to this one dubiousoutlet even more than the boys, although there are only one-eighth asmany delinquent girls as boys brought into the juvenile court inChicago, the charge against the girls in almost every instance involvesa loss of chastity. One of them who was vainly endeavoring to formulatethe causes of her downfall, concentrated them all in the singlestatement that she wanted the other girls to know that she too was a"good Indian. " Such a girl, while she is not an actual member of a gangof boys, is often attached to one by so many loyalties and friendshipsthat she will seldom testify against a member, even when she has beeninjured by him. She also depends upon the gang when she requires bail inthe police court or the protection that comes from political influence, and she is often very proud of her quasi-membership. The little girlsbrought into the juvenile court are usually daughters of those poorestimmigrant families living in the worst type of city tenements, who arefrequently forced to take boarders in order to pay the rent. Asurprising number of little girls have first become involved inwrong-doing through the men of their own households. A recent inquiryamong 130 girls living in a sordid red light district disclosed the factthat a majority of them had thus been victimized and the wrong had cometo them so early that they had been despoiled at an average age of eightyears. Looking upon the forlorn little creatures, who are often broughtinto the Chicago juvenile court to testify against their own relatives, one is seized with that curious compunction Goethe expressed in the nowhackneyed line from "Mignon:" "Was hat Man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?" One is also inclined to reproach educators for neglecting to givechildren instruction in play when one sees the unregulated amusementparks which are apparently so dangerous to little girls twelve orfourteen years old. Because they are childishly eager for amusement andtotally unable to pay for a ride on the scenic railway or for a ticketto an entertainment, these disappointed children easily accept manyfavors from the young men who are standing near the entrances for theexpress purpose of ruining them. The hideous reward which is demandedfrom them later in the evening, after they have enjoyed the many"treats" which the amusement park offers, apparently seems of littlemoment. Their childish minds are filled with the memory of the luridpleasures to the oblivion of the later experience, and they eagerly telltheir companions of this possibility "of getting in to all the shows. "These poor little girls pass unnoticed amidst a crowd of honest peopleseeking recreation after a long day's work, groups of older girlswalking and talking gaily with young men of their acquaintance, andhappy children holding their parents' hands. This cruel exploitation ofthe childish eagerness for pleasure is, of course, possible only among acertain type of forlorn city children who are totally without standardsand into whose colorless lives a visit to the amusement park brings theacme of delirious excitement. It is possible that these children are theinevitable product of city life; in Paris, little girls at local fêteswishing to ride on the hobby horse frequently buy the privilege at afearful price from the man directing the machinery, and a physicianconnected with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty toChildren writes: "It is horribly pathetic to learn how far a nickel or aquarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children. " The home environment of such children has been similar to that of manyothers who come to grief through the five-cent theatres. These eagerlittle people, to whom life has offered few pleasures, crowd around thedoor hoping to be taken in by some kind soul and, when they have beendisappointed over and over again and the last performance is about tobegin, a little girl may be induced unthinkingly to barter her chastityfor an entrance fee. Many children are also found who have been decoyed into their firstwrong-doing through the temptation of the saloon, in spite of the factthat one of the earliest regulations in American cities for theprotection of children was the prohibition of the sale of liquor tominors. That children may be easily demoralized by the influence of adisorderly saloon was demonstrated recently in Chicago; one of thesesaloons was so situated that the pupils of a public school were obligedto pass it and from the windows of the schoolhouse itself could see muchof what was passing within the place. An effort was made by the JuvenileProtective Association to have it closed by the chief of police, butalthough he did so, it was opened again the following day. TheAssociation then took up the matter with the mayor, who refused tointerfere, insisting that the objectionable features had beeneliminated. Through months of effort, during which time the practices ofthe place remained quite unchanged, one group after another ofpublic-spirited citizens endeavored to suppress what had become a publicscandal, only to find that the place was protected by brewery interestswhich were more powerful, both financially and politically, thanthemselves. At last, after a peculiarly flagrant case involving a littlegirl, the mothers of the neighborhood arranged a mass meeting in theschoolhouse itself, inviting local officials to be present. The mothersthen produced a mass of testimony which demonstrated that dozens andhundreds of children had been directly or indirectly affected by theplace whose removal they demanded. A meeting so full of genuine anxietyand righteous indignation could not well be disregarded, and thecompulsory education department was at last able to obtain a revocationof the license. The many people who had so long tried to do away withthis avowedly disreputable saloon received a fresh impression of themenace to children who became sophisticated by daily familiarity withvice. Yet many mothers, hard pressed by poverty, are obliged to renthouses next to vicious neighborhoods and their children very earlybecome familiar with all the outer aspects of vice. Among them are thechildren of widows who make friends with their dubious neighbors duringthe long days while their mothers are at work. I recall two sisters inone family whose mother had moved her household to the borders of aChicago segregated district, apparently without knowing the character ofthe neighborhood. The little sisters, twelve and eight years old, accepted many invitations from a kind neighbor to come into her house tosee her pretty things. The older girl was delighted to be "made up" withpowder and paint and to try on long dresses, while the little one whosang very prettily was taught some new songs, happily withoutunderstanding their import. The tired mother knew nothing of what thechildren did during her absence, until an honest neighbor who had seenthe little girls going in and out of the district, interfered on theirbehalf. The frightened mother moved back to her old neighborhood whichshe had left in search of cheaper rent, her pious soul stirred to itsdepths that the children for whom she patiently worked day by day had sonarrowly escaped destruction. Who cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, overworkedand harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing andcooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding andmisgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed areslowly slipping away from her control and affection? Such a spectacleforces one into an agreement with Wells, that it is a "monstrousabsurdity" that women who are "discharging their supreme socialfunction, that of rearing children, should do it in their spare time, asit were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing somehalf-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product. "Nevertheless, such a woman whose wages are fixed on the basis ofindividual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, isstill held by a legal obligation to support her children with thedesperate penalty of forfeiture if she fail. I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children tothe Hull House day nursery with this result at the end of ten years ofdevotion: the little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglectfollowing a case of measles, because her mother could not stop work inorder to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars;the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys, in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been suchhabitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aidfrom education. Of the five children three are now in semi-penalinstitutions, supported by the state. It would not therefore have beenso un-economical to have boarded them with their own mother, requiring astandard of nutrition and school attendance at least up to that nationalstandard of nurture which the more advanced European governments areestablishing. The recent Illinois law, providing that the children of widows may besupported by public funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenilecourt, will eventually restore a mother's care to these poor children;but in the meantime, even the poor mother who is receiving such aid, inher forced search for cheap rent may be continually led nearer to thenotoriously evil districts. Many appeals made to landlords ofdisreputable houses in Chicago on behalf of the children living adjacentto such property have never secured a favorable response. It isapparently difficult for the average property owner to resist the highrents which houses in certain districts of the city can command ifrented for purposes of vice. I recall two small frame houses identicalin type and value standing side by side. One which belonged to a citizenwithout scruples was rented for $30. 00 a month, the other belonging to aconscientious man was rented for $9. 00 a month. The supposedlyrespectable landlords defend themselves behind the old sophistry: "If Idid not rent my house for such a purpose, someone else would, " and themore hardened ones say that "It is all in the line of business. " Both ofthem are enormously helped by the secrecy surrounding the ownership ofsuch houses, although it is hoped that the laws requiring the name ofthe owner and the agent of every multiple house to be posted in thepublic hallway will at length break through this protection, and thediscovered landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to which thelaw specifically states they have made themselves liable. In themeantime, women forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one morehandicap in addition to the many others poverty places upon them. Suchexperiences may explain the fact that English figures show a very largeproportion of widows and deserted women among the prostitutes in thoselarge towns which maintain segregated districts. The deprivation of a mother's care is most frequently experienced by thechildren of the poorest colored families who are often forced to live indisreputable neighborhoods because they literally cannot rent housesanywhere else. Both because rents are always high for colored people andbecause the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seventimes as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of thewhite mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in themidst of temptation is abnormally large. So closely is child lifefounded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows allevil is almost sure in the end to share it. Colored children seldom roamfar from their own neighborhoods: in the public playgrounds, which aretheoretically open to them, they are made so uncomfortable by theslights of other children that they learn to stay away, and, shut outfrom legitimate recreation, are all the more tempted by the careless, luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addition to the coloredgirls who have thus from childhood grown familiar with the outer aspectsof vice, are others who are sent into the district in the capacity ofdomestic servants by unscrupulous employment agencies who would notventure to thus treat a white girl. The community forces the very peoplewho have confessedly the shortest history of social restraint, into adangerous proximity with the vice districts of the city. This results, as might easily be predicted, in a very large number of colored girlsentering a disreputable life. The negroes themselves believe that thebasic cause for the high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recentenslavement of their race with its attendant unstable marriage andparental status, and point to thousands of slave sales that but twogenerations ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at family life. Knowingthis as we do, it seems all the more unjustifiable that the nation whichis responsible for the broken foundations of this family life shouldcarelessly permit the negroes, making their first struggle towards ahigher standard of domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagranttemptations which our civilization tolerates. The imaginations of even very young children may easily be forced intosensual channels. A little girl, twelve years old, was one day broughtto the psychopathic clinic connected with the Chicago juvenile court. She had been detained under police surveillance for more than a week, while baffled detectives had in vain tried to verify the statements shehad made to her Sunday-school teacher in great detail of certainhorrible experiences which had befallen her. For at least a week no oneconcerned had the remotest idea that the child was fabricating. Thepolice thought that she had merely grown confused as to the places towhich she had been "carried unconscious. " The mother gave the first cluewhen she insisted that the child had never been away from her longenough to have had these experiences, but came directly home from schoolevery afternoon for her tea, of which she habitually drank ten or twelvecups. The skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly establishingthe fact of a disordered mind, disclosed an astonishing knowledge of thehabits of the underworld. Even children who live in respectable neighborhoods and are guarded bycareful parents so that their imaginations are not perverted, but onlystarved, constantly conduct a search for the magical and impossiblewhich leads them into moral dangers. An astonishing number of themconsult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune tellers. These dealers infuturity, who sell only love and riches, the latter often dependent uponthe first, are sometimes in collusion with disreputable houses, and atthe best make the path of normal living more difficult for their eageryoung patrons. There is something very pathetic in the sheepish, yetradiant, faces of the boy and girl, often together, who come out on thestreet from a dingy doorway which bears the palmist's sign of thespread-out hand. This remnant of primitive magic is all they can findwith which to feed their eager imaginations, although the city offerslibraries and galleries, crowned with man's later imaginativeachievements. One hard-working girl of my acquaintance, told by apalmist that "diamonds were coming to her soon, " afterwards acceptedwithout a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond ring from a man whoseimproper attentions she had hitherto withstood. In addition to these heedless young people, pulled into a sordid andvicious life through their very search for romance, are many littlechildren ensnared by means of the most innocent playthings and pleasuresof childhood. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the social evil asit exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring of little girlswho are too young to have received adequate instruction of any sort andwhose natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has been broken down bythe overcrowding of tenement house life. Any educator who has made acareful study of the children from the crowded districts is impressedwith the numbers of them whose moral natures are apparently unawakened. While there are comparatively few of these non-moral children in any oneneighborhood, in the entire city their number is far from negligible. Such children are used by disreputable people to invite their morenormal playmates to house parties, which they attend again and again, lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually learn to trust thevicious hostess. The head of one such house, recently sent to thepenitentiary upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile ProtectiveAssociation, founded her large and successful business upon theactivities of three or four little girls who, although they hadgradually come to understand her purpose, were apparently so chained toher by the goodies and favors which they received, that they were quiteindifferent to the fate of their little friends. Such children, whenbrought to the psychopathic clinic attached to the Chicago juvenilecourt, are sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or other physicaldisabilities from which their conduct may be at least partiallyaccounted for. Sometimes they come from respectable families, but moreoften from families where they have been mistreated and where dissoluteparents have given them neither affection nor protection. Many of thesechildren whose relatives have obviously contributed to their delinquencyare helped by the enforcement of the adult delinquency law. One looks upon these hardened little people with a sense of apology thateducational forces have not been able to break into their firstignorance of life before it becomes toughened into insensibility, andone knows that, whatever may be done for them later, because of thisearly neglect, they will probably always remain impervious to thegentler aspects of life, as if vice seared their tender minds withred-hot irons. Our public-school education is so nearly universal, thatif the entire body of the teachers seriously undertook to instruct allAmerican youth in regard to this most important aspect of life, whyshould they not in time train their pupils to continence andself-direction, as they already discipline their minds with knowledge inregard to many other matters? Certainly the extreme youth of the victimsof the white slave traffic, both boys and girls, places a greatresponsibility upon the educational forces of the community. The state which supports the public school is also coming to the rescueof children through protective legislation. This is another illustrationthat the beginnings of social advance have often resulted from theefforts to defend the weakest and least-sheltered members of thecommunity. The widespread movement which would protect children frompremature labor, also prohibits them from engaging in occupations inwhich they are subjected to moral dangers. Several American cities haveof late become much concerned over the temptations to which messengerboys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly subjected when theirbusiness takes them into vicious districts. The Chicago vice commissionmakes a plea for these "children of the night" that they shall beprotected by law from those temptations which they are too young and toountrained to withstand. New York and Wisconsin are the only states whichhave raised the legal age of messenger boys employed late at night totwenty-one years. Under the inadequate sixteen-year limit, whichregulates night work for children in Illinois, boys constantly come togrief through their familiarity with the social evil. One of these, adelicate boy of seventeen, had been put into the messenger service byhis parents when their family doctor had recommended out-of-door work. Because he was well-bred and good-looking, he became especially popularwith the inmates of disreputable houses. They gave him tips of a dollarand more when he returned from the errands which he had executed forthem, such as buying candy, cocaine or morphine. He was inevitablyflattered by their attentions and pleased with his own popularity. Although his mother knew that his duties as a messenger boy occasionallytook him to disreputable houses, she fervently hoped his early trainingmight keep him straight, but in the end realized the foolhardiness ofsubjecting an immature youth to these temptations. The vice commissionreport gives various detailed instances of similar experiences on thepart of other lads, one of them being a high-school boy who was merelyearning extra money as a messenger boy during the rush of Christmasweek. The regulations in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louisfor the safeguarding of these children may be but a forecast of the carewhich the city will at last learn to devise for youth under specialtemptations. Because the various efforts made in Chicago to obtainadequate legislation for the protection of street-trading children havenot succeeded, incidents like the following have not only occurred once, but are constantly repeated: a pretty little girl, the only child of awidowed mother, sold newspapers after school hours from the time she wasseven years old. Because her home was near a vicious neighborhood andbecause the people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked for changewhen they bought a paper and good-naturedly gave her many littlepresents, her mother permitted her to gain a clientele within thedistrict on the ground that she was too young to understand what shemight see. This continued familiarity, in spite of her mother'sadmonitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably resulted in sovitiating the standard of the growing girl, that at the age of fourteenshe became an inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance concernsthree little girls who habitually sold gum in one of the segregateddistricts. Because they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-heartedpolicemen who felt that they ought not to be in such a neighborhood, each one of these children had obtained a special permit from the mayorof the city in order to protect herself from "police interference. "While the mayor had no actual authority to issue such permits, naturallythe piece of paper bearing his name, when displayed by a child, checkedthe activity of the police officer. The incident was but one moreexample of the old conflict between mistaken kindness to the individualchild in need of money, and the enforcement of those regulations whichmay seem to work a temporary hardship upon one child, but save a hundredothers from entering occupations which can only lead into blind alleys. Because such occupations inevitably result in increasing the number ofunemployables, the educational system itself must be challenged. A royal commission has recently recommended to the English Parliamentthat "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys beshortened, that they be required to spend the hours so set free, inphysical and technological training, that the manufacturing of theunemployable may cease. " Certainly we are justified in demanding fromour educational system, that the interest and capacity of each childleaving school to enter industry, shall have been studied with referenceto the type of work he is about to undertake. When vocational bureausare properly connected with all the public schools, a girl will have anintelligent point of departure into her working life, and a place towhich she may turn in time of need, for help and advice through thoselong and dangerous periods of unemployment which are now so inimical toher character. This same British commission divided all of the unemployed, theunder-employed, and the unemployable as the results of three types oftrades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein women and childrenare paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard ofhealth and industrial efficiency, so that their wages must besupplemented by relatives or charity; second, labor deterioratingtrades, which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, ofworkers; third, bare subsistence trades, where the worker is forced tosuch a low level in his standard of life that he continually falls belowself-support. We have many trades of these three types in America, allof them demanding the work of young and untrained girls. Yet, in spiteof the obvious dangers surrounding every girl who enters one of them, little is done to guide the multitude of children who leave schoolprematurely each year into reasonable occupations. Unquestionably the average American child has received a more expensiveeducation than has yet been accorded to the child of any other nation. The girls working in department stores have been in the public schoolson an average of eight years, while even the factory girls, who so oftenleave school from the lower grades, have yet averaged six and two-tenthsyears of education at the public expense, before they enter industriallife. Certainly the community that has accomplished so much could affordthem help and oversight for six and a half years longer, which is theaverage length of time that a working girl is employed. The state mightwell undertake this, if only to secure its former investment and to savethat investment from utter loss. Our generation, said to have developed a new enthusiasm for thepossibilities of child life, and to have put fresh meaning into thephrase "children's rights, " may at last have the courage to insist upona child's right to be well born and to start in life with its tiny bodyfree from disease. Certainly allied to this new understanding of childlife and a part of the same movement is the new science of eugenics withits recently appointed university professors. Its organized societiespublish an ever-increasing mass of information as to that whichconstitutes the inheritance of well-born children. When this new sciencemakes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcomeof the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration, effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against thepreventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible, and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflictedchildren infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage toanother generation. Public societies for the prevention of blindness arecontinually distributing information on the care of new-born childrenand may at length answer that old, confusing question "Did this man sinor his parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowledge is becoming morewidespread every day and the rising interest in infant welfare must intime react upon the very existence of the social-evil itself. This new public concern for the welfare of little children in certainAmerican cities has resulted in a municipal milk supply; in many Germancities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York, Chicago, Boston andother large towns, employ hundreds of nurses each summer to instructtenement-house mothers upon the care of little children. Doubtless allof this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arousepublic opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of diseasewhich thousands of them annually inherit, and which is directlytraceable to the vicious living of their parents or grandparents. Thisslaughter of the innocents, this infliction of suffering upon thenew-born, is so gratuitous and so unfair, that it is only a question oftime until an outraged sense of justice shall be aroused on behalf ofthese children. But even before help comes through chivalric sentiments, governmental and municipal agencies will decline to spend thetax-payers' money for the relief of suffering infants, when by theexertion of the same authority they could easily provide against thepossibility of the birth of a child so afflicted. It is obvious that theaverage tax-payer would be moved to demand the extermination of thatform of vice which has been declared illegal, although it stillflourishes by official connivance, did he once clearly apprehend that itis responsible for the existence of these diseases which cost him sodear. It is only his ignorance which makes him remain inert until eachvictim of the white slave traffic shall be avenged unto the third andfourth generation of them that bought her. It is quite possible that thetax-payer will himself contend that, as the state does not legalize amarriage without a license officially recorded, that the status ofchildren may be clearly defined, so the state would need to go but onestep further in the same direction, to insist upon health certificatesfrom the applicant for a marriage license, that the health of futurechildren might in a certain measure, be guaranteed. Whether or not thisstep may be predicted, the mere discussion of this matter in itself, isan indication of the changing public opinion, as is the fact that suchlegislation has already been enacted in two states, which are only nowputting into action the recommendation made centuries ago by such socialphilosophers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense of justice outragedby the wanton destruction of new-born children, may in time unite withthat ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture of the young, until the old barriers of silence and inaction, behind which the socialevil has so long intrenched itself, shall at last give way. Certainly it will soon be found that the sentiment of pity, so recentlyaroused throughout the country on behalf of the victims of the whiteslave traffic, will be totally unable to afford them protection unlessit becomes incorporated in government. It is possible that we are on theeve of a series of legislative enactments similar to those whichresulted from the attempts to regulate child labor. Through the entirecourse of the last century, in that anticipation of coming changes whichdoes so much to bring changes about, the friends of the children weresteadily engaged in making a new state, from the first child labor lawpassed in the English parliament in 1803 to the final passage of theso-called children's charter in 1909. During the long century oftransforming pity into political action there was created that socialsympathy which has become one of the greatest forces in modernlegislation, and to which we may confidently appeal in this new crusadeagainst the social evil. Another point of similarity to the child labor movement is obvious, forthe friends of the children early found that they needed muchstatistical information and that the great problem of the would-bereformer is not so much overcoming actual opposition--the passing oftime gradually does that for him--as obtaining and formulating accurateknowledge and fitting that knowledge into the trend of his time. Fromthis point of view and upon the basis of what has already beenaccomplished for "the protection of minors, " the many recentinvestigations which have revealed the extreme youth of the victims ofthe white slave traffic, should make legislation on their behalf all themore feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever more legitimately makean emotional appeal to the higher sensibility of the public. In the rescue homes recently opened in Chicago by the White SlaveTraffic Committee of the League of Cook County Clubs, the tender ages ofthe little girls who were brought there horrified the good clubwomenmore than any other aspect of the situation. A number of the littleinmates in the home wanted to play with dolls and several of thembrought dolls of their own, which they had kept with them through alltheir vicissitudes. There is something literally heart-breaking in thethought of these little children who are ensnared and debauched whenthey are still young enough to have every right to protection and care. Quite recently I visited a home for semi-delinquent girls against eachone of whom stood a grave charge involving the loss of her chastity. Upon each of the little white beds or on one of the stiff chairsstanding by its side was a doll belonging to a delinquent owner stillyoung enough to love and cherish this supreme toy of childhood. I hadcome to the home prepared to "lecture to the inmates. " I remained todress dolls with a handful of little girls who eagerly asked questionsabout the dolls I had once possessed in a childhood which seemed to themso remote. Looking at the little victims who supply the white slavetrade, one is reminded of the burning words of Dr. Howard Kelly utteredin response to the demand that the social evil be legalized and itsvictims licensed. He says: "Where shall we look to recruit theever-failing ranks of these poor creatures as they die yearly by thetens of thousands? Which of the little girls of our land shall wedesignate for this traffic? Mark their sweet innocence to-day as theyrun about in our streets and parks prattling and playing, ever busyabout nothing; which of them shall we snatch as they approach maturity, to supply this foul mart?" It is incomprehensible that a nation whose chief boast is its freepublic education, that a people always ready to respond to any moral orfinancial appeal made in the name of children, should permit this infamyagainst childhood to continue! Only the protection of all children fromthe menacing temptations which their youth is unable to withstand, willprevent some of them from falling victims to the white slave traffic;only when moral education is made effective and universal will there behope for the actual abolition of commercialized vice. These areillustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity of which society is sorapidly becoming conscious. CHAPTER V PHILANTHROPIC RESCUE AND PREVENTION There is no doubt that philanthropy often reflects and dramatizes themodern sensitiveness of the community in relation to a social wrong, because those engaged in the rescue of the victims are able toapprehend, through their daily experiences, many aspects of a recognizedevil concerning which the public are ignorant and therefore indifferent. However ancient a wrong may be, in each generation it must become newlyembodied in living people and the social custom into which it hashardened through the years, must be continued in individual lives. Unless the contemporaries of such unhappy individuals are touched totenderness or stirred to indignation by the actual embodiments of theold wrong in their own generation, effective action cannot be secured. The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effortthan any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely becausethere is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personalacquaintance with its victims; a distaste and distress that sometimesleads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished Englishman hasrecently written "that sober-minded people who, from motives of pity, have looked the hideous evil full in the face, have often asserted thatnothing in their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with aloss of reason. " Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philanthropic effort is the moreremarkable because the average age of the recruits to prostitution isbetween sixteen and eighteen years, the age at which girls are stillminors under the law in respect to all matters of property. We allow aminor to determine for herself whether or not she will live this mostabominable life, although if she resolve to be a thief she will, ifpossible, be apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a vagrant shewill be restrained; even if she become a professional beggar, she willbe interfered with; but the decision to lead this evil life, disastrousalike to herself and the community, although well known to the police, is openly permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment of weakness in agirl and obtained her consent, although she may thereafter be in direneed of help she is put outside all protection of the law. The courtsassume that such a girl has deliberately decided for herself and thatbecause she is not "of previous chaste life and character, " she is lostto all decency. Yet every human being knows deep down in his heart thathis own moral energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be judged fairlyby his hours of defeat, and that after revealing moments of weakness, although shocked and frightened, he is the same human being, strugglingas he did before. Nevertheless in some states, a little girl as young asten years of age may make this irrevocable decision for herself. Modern philanthropy, continually discovering new aspects of prostitutionthrough the aid of economics, sanitary science, statistical research, and many other agencies, finds that this increase of knowledgeinevitably leads it from the attempt to rescue the victims of whiteslavery to a consideration of the abolition of the monstrous wrongitself. At the present moment philanthropy is gradually impelled to aconsideration of prostitution in relation to the welfare and the orderlyexistence of society itself. If the moral fire seems at times to bedying out of certain good old words, such as charity, it is filling withnew warmth such words as social justice, which belong distinctively toour own time. It is also true that those for whom these words containmost of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the oldtasks and obligations, as if the great basic emotion of human compassionhad more than held its own. Certainly the youth of many of the victimsof the white slave traffic, and the helplessness of the older girls whofind themselves caught in the grip of an enormous force which theycannot comprehend, make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy moreoverdiscovers many young girls, who if they had not been rescued byprotective agencies would have become permanent outcasts, although theywould have entered a disreputable life through no fault of their own. The illustrations in this chapter are all taken from the JuvenileProtective Association of Chicago in connection with its efforts to savegirls from overwhelming temptation. Doubtless many other associationscould offer equally convincing testimony, for in recent years the numberof people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic hasbecome unendurable and who are determinedly working against it, hasenormously increased. A surprising number of country girls have been either brought to Chicagounder false pretences, or have been decoyed into an evil life very soonafter their arrival in the city. Mr. Clifford Roe estimates that morethan half of the girls who have been recruited into a disreputable lifein Chicago have come from the farms and smaller towns in Illinois andfrom neighboring states. This estimate is borne out by the records ofParis and other metropolitan cities in which it is universally estimatedthat a little less than one-third of the prostitutes found in them, atany given moment, are city born. The experience of a pretty girl who came to the office of the JuvenileProtective Association, a year ago, is fairly typical of the argumentmany of these country girls offer in their own defense. This girl hadbeen a hotel chambermaid in an Iowa town where many of the travelingpatrons of the hotel had made love to her, one of them occasionallyoffering her protection if she would leave with him. At first sheindignantly refused, but was at length convinced that the acceptance ofsuch offers must be a very general practice and that, whatever might bethe custom in the country, no one in a city made personal inquiries. Shefinally consented to accompany a young man to Seattle, both because shewanted to travel and because she was discouraged in her attempts to "begood. " A few weeks later, when in Chicago, she had left the young man, acting from what she considered a point of honor, as his invitation hadbeen limited to the journey which was now completed. Feeling toodisgraced to go home and under the glamour of the life of idleness shehad been leading, she had gone voluntarily into a disreputable house, inwhich the police had found her and sent her to the Association. Shecould not be persuaded to give up her plan, but consented to wait for afew days to "think it over. " As she was leaving the office in companywith a representative of the Association, they met the young man, whohad been distractedly searching for her and had just discovered herwhereabouts. She was married the very same day and of course theAssociation never saw her again. From the point of view of the traffickers in white slaves, it is muchcheaper and safer to procure country girls after they have reached thecity. Such girls are in constant danger because they are much moreeasily secreted than girls procured from the city. A country girlentering a vicious life quickly feels the disgrace and soon becomes toobroken-spirited and discouraged to make any effort to escape into theunknown city which she believes to be full of horrors similar to thoseshe has already encountered. She desires above all things to deceive herfamily at home, often sending money to them regularly and writingletters describing a fictitious life of hard work. Perhaps the mostflagrant case with which the Association ever dealt, was that of twoyoung girls who had come to Chicago from a village in West Virginia, hoping to earn large wages in order to help their families. They arrivedin the city penniless, having been robbed en route of their one slenderpurse. As they stood in the railway station, utterly bewildered, theywere accosted by a young man who presented the advertising card of aboarding-house and offered to take them there. They quite innocentlyaccepted his invitation, but an hour later, finding themselves in alocked room, they became frightened and realized they had been duped. Fortunately the two agile country girls had no difficulty in jumpingfrom a second-story window, but upon the street they were of course muchtoo frightened to speak to anyone again and wandered about for hours. The house from which they had escaped bore the sign "rooms to rent, " andthey therefore carefully avoided all houses whose placards offeredshelter. Finally, when they were desperate with hunger, they went into asaloon for a "free lunch, " not in the least realizing that they wereexpected to take a drink in order to receive it. A policeman, seeing twoyoung girls in a saloon "without escort, " arrested them and took them tothe nearest station where they spent the night in a wretched cell. At the hearing the next morning, where, much frightened, they gave avery incoherent account of their adventures, the judge fined them eachfifteen dollars and costs, and as they were unable to pay the fine, theywere ordered sent to the city prison. When they were escorted from thecourt room, another man approached them and offered to pay their finesif they would go with him. Frightened by their former experience, theystoutly declined his help, but were over-persuaded by his graphicportrayal of prison horrors and the disgrace that their imprisonmentwould bring upon "the folks at home. " He also made clear that when theycame out of prison, thirty days later, they would be no better off thanthey were now, save that they would have the added stigma of beingjail-birds. The girls at last reluctantly consented to go with him, whena representative of the Juvenile Protective Association, who hadfollowed them from the court room and had listened to the conversation, insisted upon the prompt arrest of the white slave trader. When theentire story, finally secured from the girls, was related to the judge, he reversed his decision, fined the man $100. 00, which he was abundantlyable to pay, and insisted that the girls be sent back to their mothersin Virginia. They were farmers' daughters, strong and capable of takingcare of themselves in an environment that they understood, but inconstant danger because of their ignorance of city life. The methods employed to secure city girls must be much more subtle andcomplicated than those employed with the less sophisticated countrygirl. Although the city girl, once procured, is later allowed morefreedom than is accorded either to a country girl or to an immigrantgirl, every effort is made to demoralize her completely before sheenters the life. Because she may, at any moment, escape into the citywhich she knows so well, it is necessary to obtain her inner consent. Those whose profession it is to procure girls for the white slave tradeapparently find it possible to decoy and demoralize most easily thatcity girl whose need for recreation has led her to the disreputablepublic dance hall or other questionable places of amusement. Gradually those philanthropic agencies that are endeavoring to be ofservice to the girls learn to know the dangers in these places. Manyparents are utterly indifferent or ignorant of the pleasures that theirchildren find for themselves. From the time these children were fiveyears old, such parents were accustomed to see them take care ofthemselves on the street and at school, and it seems but natural thatwhen the children are old enough to earn money, they should be able tofind their own amusements. The girls are attracted to the unregulated dance halls not only by alove of pleasure but by a sense of adventure, and it is in these placesthat they are most easily recruited for a vicious life. Unfortunatelythere are three hundred and twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago, one hundred and ninety of them connect directly with saloons, whileliquor is openly sold in most of the others. This consumption of liquorenormously increases the danger to young people. A girl after a longday's work is easily induced to believe that a drink will dispel herlassitude. There is plenty of time between the dances to persuade her, as the intermissions are long, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dancesshort, occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the halls are hotand dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water. Oftenthe entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arrangedintermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has broughttogether. After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer, who is often in league with the "spieler" who frequents the dance hall, is comparatively easy. He assumes one of two rôles, that of thesympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover. In the characterof the former, he tells "the down-trodden working girl" that her wagesare a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her withhigher wages if she will trust him. He often makes allusions to theshabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it "a shame thatsuch a pretty girl cannot dress better. " In the second rôle heapparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents, complaining that they want him to marry, "a society swell, " but that hereally prefers a working girl like herself. In either case heestablishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind, through theexcitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimateunderstanding and protection. Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with him for a restaurantbecause, as he truthfully says, she is exhausted and in need of food. Atthe supper, however, she drinks much more, and it is not surprising thatshe is at last persuaded that it is too late to go home and in the endconsents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby lodging house. Sixyoung girls, each accompanied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, wererecently followed to a chop suey restaurant and then to a lodging-house, which the police were instigated to raid and where the six girls, moreor less intoxicated, were found. If no one rescues the girl after suchan experience, she sometimes does not return home at all, or if shedoes, feels herself initiated into a new world where it is possible toobtain money at will, to easily secure the pleasures it brings, and shecomes at length to consider herself superior to her less sophisticatedcompanions. Of course this latter state of mind is untenable for anylength of time and the girl is soon found openly leading a disreputablelife. The girls attending the cheap theatres and the vaudeville shows are mostcommonly approached through their vanity. They readily listen to thetriumphs of a stage career, sure to be attained by such a "good looker, "and a large number of them follow a young man to the woman with whom heis in partnership, under the promise of being introduced to a theatricalmanager. There are also theatrical agencies in league with disreputableplaces, who advertise for pretty girls, promising large salaries. Suchan agency operating with a well-known "near theatre" in the statecapital was recently prosecuted in Chicago and its license revoked. Inthis connection the experience of two young English girls is notunusual. They were sisters possessed of an extraordinary skill injuggling, who were brought to this country by a relative acting as theirmanager. Although he exploited them for his own benefit for three years, paying them the most meager salaries and supplying them with thesimplest living in the towns which they "toured, " he had protected themfrom all immorality, and they had preserved the clean living of thefamily of acrobats to which they belonged. Last October, when appearingin San Francisco, the girls, then sixteen and seventeen years of age, demanded more pay than the dollar and twenty cents a week each had beenreceiving, representing the five shillings with which they had startedfrom home. The manager, who had become discouraged with his Americanexperience, refused to accede to their demands, gave them each a ticketfor Chicago, and heartlessly turned them adrift. Arriving in the city, they quite naturally at once applied to a theatrical agency, throughwhich they were sent to a disreputable house where a vaudeville programwas given each night. Delighted that they had found work so quickly, they took the position in good faith. During the very first performance, however, they became frightened by the conduct of the girls who precededthem on the program and by the hilarity of the audience. They managed toescape from the dressing-room, where they were waiting their turn, andon the street appealed to the first policeman, who brought them to theJuvenile Protective Association. They were detained for several days aswitnesses against the theatrical agency, entering into the legalprosecution with that characteristic British spirit which is ever readyto protest against an imposition, before they left the city with atravelling company, each on a weekly salary of twenty dollars. The methods pursued on excursion boats are similar to those of the dancehalls, in that decent girls are induced to drink quantities of liquor towhich they are unaccustomed. On the high seas, liquor is sold usually inoriginal packages, which enormously increases the amount consumed. It isnot unusual to see a boy and girl drinking between them an entire bottleof whiskey. Some of these excursion boats carry five thousand people andin the easy breakdown of propriety which holiday-making often implies, and the absence of police, to which city young people are unaccustomed, the utmost freedom and license is often indulged in. Thus the lakeexcursions, one of the most delightful possibilities for recreation inChicago, through lack of proper policing and through the sale of liquor, are made a menace to thousands of young people to whom they should be agreat resource. When a philanthropic association, with a knowledge of the commercialexploitation of youth's natural response to gay surroundings, attemptsto substitute innocent recreation, it finds the undertaking mostdifficult. In Chicago the Juvenile Protective Association, after athorough investigation of public dance halls, amusement parks, five-centtheatres, and excursion boats, is insisting upon more vigorousenforcement of the existing legislation, and is also urging furtherlegal regulation; Kansas City has instituted a Department of PublicWelfare with power to regulate places of amusement; a New York committeehas established model dance halls; Milwaukee is urging the appointmentof commissions on public recreation, while New York and Columbus havealready created them. Perhaps nothing in actual operation is more valuable than the smallparks of Chicago in which the large halls are used every evening fordancing and where outdoor sports, swimming pools and gymnasiums dailyattract thousands of young people. Unless cities make some suchprovision for their youth, those who sell the facilities for amusementin order to make a profit will continue to exploit the normal desire ofall young people for recreation and pleasure. The city of Chicagocontains at present eight hundred and fourteen thousand minors, alleager for pleasure. It is not surprising that commercial enterpriseundertakes to supply this demand and that penny arcades, slot machines, candy stores, ice-cream parlors, moving-picture shows, skating rinks, cheap theatres and dance halls are trying to attract young people withevery device known to modern advertising. Their promoters are, ofcourse, careless of the moral effect upon their young customers if theycan but secure their money. Until municipal provisions adequately meetthis need, philanthropic and social organizations must be committed tothe establishment of more adequate recreational facilities. Although many dangers are encountered by the pleasure-loving girl whodemands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation, alarge number of girls meet with difficulties and temptations whilesoberly at work. Many of these tempted girls are newly-arrived immigrantgirls between the ages of sixteen and twenty, who find their first workin hotels. Polish girls especially are utilized in hotel kitchens andlaundries, and for the interminable scrubbing of halls and lobbies wherea knowledge of the English language is not necessary, but where theirpeasant strength is in demand. The work is very heavy and fatiguing anduntil the Illinois law limited the work of women to ten hours a day, itoften lasted late into the night. Even now the girls report themselvesso tired that at the end of the day, they crowd into the dormitories andfall upon their beds undressed. When food and shelter is given them, their wages are from $14. 00 to $18. 00 a month, most of which is usuallysent back to the old country, that the remaining members of the familymay be brought to America. Such positions are surrounded by temptationsof every sort. Even the hotel housekeepers, who are honestly trying toprotect the girls, admit that it is impossible to do it adequately. Oneof these housekeepers recently said "that it takes a girl who knows theworld to work in any hotel, " and regretted that the sophisticatedEnglish-speaking girl who might protect herself, was unable to endurethe hard work. She added that as soon as a girl learned English shepromoted her from the laundry to the halls and from there to theposition of chambermaid, but that the latter position was the mostdangerous of all, as the girls were constantly exposed to insults fromthe guests. In the less respectable hotels these newly-arrived immigrantgirls, inevitably seeing a great deal of the life of the underworld andthe apparent ease with which money may be earned in illicit ways, findtheir first impression of the moral standards of life in America mostbewildering. One young Polish girl had worked for two years in adown-town hotel, and had steadfastly resisted all improper advances evensometimes by the aid of her own powerful fist. She yielded at last tothe suggestions of the life about her when she received a telegram fromEllis Island stating that her mother had arrived in New York, but wastoo ill to be sent on to Chicago. All of her money had gone for thesteamer ticket and as the thought of her old country mother, ill andalone among strangers, was too much for her long fortitude, she made thebest bargain possible with the head waiter whose importunities she hadhitherto resisted, accepted the little purse the other Polish girls inthe hotel collected for her and arrived in New York only to find thather mother had died the night before. The simple obedience to parents on the part of these immigrant girls, working in hotels and restaurants, often miscarries pathetically. Theirunspoiled human nature, not yet immune to the poisons of city life, whenthrust into the midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies at thefoundation of all complex luxury, often results in the most fatalreactions. A young German woman, the proprietor of what is considered asuccessful "house" in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces hercareer directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of"bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers andsisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by achild must be paid into the family income until "legal age" wasattained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartilydetested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her firstplace in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting wasbeyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, andevery Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days "off, "were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularlyscolded, "sometimes slapped, " by her parents, jeered at by her morevigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers. She tried to shorten herhours by doing "rush-work" as a waitress at noon, but she found thisstill beyond her strength, and worst of all, the pay of two dollars anda half insufficient to satisfy her mother. Confiding her troubles to theother waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her how she could makemoney through appointments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so takehome an increased amount of money easily called "a raise in wages. " Sostrong was the habit of obedience, that the girl continued to take moneyhome every Saturday night until her eighteenth birthday, in spite of thefact that she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks after herfirst experience. Although all of this happened ten years ago and theGerman mother is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended the storywith the infamous hope that "the old lady was now suffering the tormentsof the lost, for making me what I am. " Such a girl was subjected totemptations to which society has no right to expose her. A dangerous cynicism regarding the value of virtue, a cynicism never sounlovely as in the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because of longhours and overwork, has been unable to preserve either her health orspirits and has lost all measure of joy in life. That this prematurecynicism may be traced to an unhappy and narrow childhood is suggestedby the fact that a large number of these girls come from families inwhich there has been little affection and the poor substitute ofparental tyranny. A young Italian girl who earned four dollars a week in a tailor shoppulling out hastings, when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown on oneof the hottest days of last summer, replied that she was obliged to earnmoney for her clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after hours; thatshe had found no such work lately and that her father would not allowher anything from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because he wasbuying a house. This parental control sometimes exercised in order to secure all of adaughter's wages, is often established with the best intentions in theworld. I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally supported her twodaughters until they were of working age, when she quite naturallyexpected them to conform to the careful habits of living necessaryduring her narrow years. In order to save carfare, she required herdaughters to walk a long distance to the department store in which onewas a bundle wrapper and the other a clerk at the ribbon counter. Theydressed in black as being the most economical color and a penny spent inpleasure was never permitted. One day a young man who was buying ribbonfrom the older girl gave her a yard with the remark that she was muchtoo young and pretty to be so somberly dressed. She wore the ribbon atwork, never of course at home, but it opened a vista of delightfulpossibilities and she eagerly accepted a pair of gloves the followingweek from the same young man, who afterwards asked her to dine with him. This was the beginning of a winter of surreptitious pleasures on thepart of the two sisters. They were shrewd enough never to be out laterthan ten o'clock and always brought home so-called overtime pay to theirmother. In the spring the older girl, finding herself worn out by herdissipation and having resolved to cut loose from her home, came to theoffice of the Juvenile Protective Association to ask help for heryounger sister. It was discovered that the mother was totally ignorantof the semi-professional life her daughters had been leading. Shereiterated over and over again that she had always guarded themcarefully and had given them no money to spend. It took months ofconstant visiting on the part of a representative of the Associationbefore she was finally persuaded to treat the younger girl moregenerously. While this family is fairly typical of those in which over-restraint isdue to the lack of understanding, it is true that in most cases thefamily tyranny is exercised by an old-country father in an honestattempt to guard his daughter against the dangers of a new world. Theworst instances, however, are those in which the father has fallen intothe evil ways of drink, and not only demands all of his daughter'swages, but treats her with great brutality when those wages fall belowhis expectations. Many such daughters have come to grief because theyhave been afraid to go home at night when their wage envelopes containedless than usual, either because a new system of piece work had reducedthe amount or because, in a moment of weakness, they had taken out fivecents with which to attend a show, or ten cents for the much-desiredpleasure of riding back and forth the full length of an elevatedrailroad, or because they had in a thirsty moment taken out a nickel fora drink of soda water, or worst of all, had fallen a victim to theinstallment plan of buying a new hat or a pair of shoes. These girls, intheir fear of beatings and scoldings, although they are sure of shelterand food and often have a mother who is trying to protect them fromdomestic storms, have almost no money for clothing, and are inevitablysubject to moments of sheer revolt, their rebellion intensified by thefact that after a girl earns her own money and is accustomed to come andgo upon the streets as an independent wage earner, she findsunsympathetic control much harder to bear than do schoolgirls of thesame age who have never broken the habits of their childhood and arestill economically dependent upon their parents. In spite of the fact that domestic service is always suggested by theaverage woman as an alternative for the working girl whose life is besetwith danger, the federal report on "Women and Child Wage Earners in theUnited States" gives the occupation of the majority of girls who gowrong as that of domestic service, and in this it confirms theexperience of every matron in a rescue home and the statistics in thematernity wards of the public hospitals. The report suggests that thedanger comes from the general conditions of work: "These generalconditions are the loneliness of the life, the lack of opportunities formaking friends and securing recreation and amusement in safesurroundings, the monotonous and uninteresting nature of the work doneas these untrained girls do it, the lack of external stimulus to prideand self-respect, and the absolutely unguarded state of the girl, exceptwhen directly under the eye of her mistress. " In addition to these reasons, the girls realize that the opportunitiesfor marriage are less in domestic service than in other occupations, andafter all, the great business of youth is securing a mate, as the younginstinctively understand. Unlike the working girl who lives at home andconstantly meets young men of her own neighborhood and factory life, thegirl in domestic service is brought into contact with very few possiblelovers. Even the men of her former acquaintance, however slightlyAmericanized, do not like to call on a girl in someone else's kitchen, and find the entire situation embarrassing. The girl's mistress knowsthat for her own daughters mutual interests and recreation are thenatural foundations for friendship with young men, which may or may notlead to marriage, but which is the prerogative of every young girl. Themistress does not, however, apply this worldly wisdom to the maid in herservice, only eighteen or nineteen years old, utterly dependent upon herfor social life save during one afternoon and evening a week. The majority of domestics are employed in families where there is onlyone, and the tired and dispirited girl, often without a taste forreading, spends many lonely hours. That most fundamental and powerful ofall instincts has therefore no chance for diffusion or social expressionand like all confined forces, tends to degenerate. The girl is equippedwith no weapon with which to contend with those poisonous images whicharise from the senses, and these images, bred of fatigue and loneliness, make a girl an easy victim. This is especially true of the colored girl, who because of her traditions, is often treated with so little respectby white men, that she is constantly subjected to insult. Even thecolored servants in the New York apartment houses, who live at home andthus avoid this loneliness, because their hours extend until nine in theevening, are obliged to seek their pleasures late into the night. American cities offer occupation to more colored women than colored menand this surplus of women, in some cities as large as one hundred andthirty or forty women to one hundred men, affords an opportunity to theprocurer which he quickly seizes. He is often in league with certainemployment bureaus, who make a business of advancing the railroad orboat fare to colored girls coming from the South to enter into domesticservice. The girl, in debt and unused to the city, is often put into aquestionable house and kept there until her debt is paid many timesover. In some respects her position is not unlike that of the importedwhite slave, for although she has the inestimable advantage of speakingthe language, she finds it even more difficult to have her storycredited. This contemptuous attitude places her at a disadvantage, forso universally are colored girls in domestic service suspected ofblackmail that the average court is slow to credit their testimony whenit is given against white men. The field of employment for colored girlsis extremely limited. They are seldom found in factories and workshops. They are not wanted in department stores nor even as waitresses inhotels. The majority of them therefore are engaged in domestic serviceand often find the position of maid in a house of prostitution or ofchambermaid in a disreputable hotel, the best-paying position open tothem. When a girl who has been in domestic service loses her health, or forany other reason is unable to carry on her occupation, she is oftencuriously detached and isolated, because she has had so littleopportunity for normal social relationships and friendships. One of thesaddest cases ever brought to my personal knowledge was that of anorphan Norwegian girl who, coming to America at the age of seventeen, had been for three years in one position as general housemaid, duringwhich time she had drawn only such part of her wages as was necessaryfor her simple clothing. At the end of three years, when she was sent toa public hospital with nervous prostration, her employer refused to payher accumulated wages, on the ground that owing to her ill health shehad been of little use during the last year. When she left the hospital, practically penniless, advised by the physician to find some outdoorwork, she sold a patented egg-beater for six months, scarcely earningenough for her barest necessities and in constant dread lest she couldnot "keep respectable. " When she was found wandering upon the street shenot only had no capital with which to renew her stock, but had beenwithout food for two days and had resolved to drown herself. Everyeffort was made to restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunatelyhospital restraint was not considered necessary, and a month later, inspite of the vigilance of her new employer, her body was taken from thelake. One more of those gentle spirits who had found the problem of lifeinsoluble, had sought refuge in death. A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been indomestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed bytheir lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude ofthe mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered, and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influencedthese girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of adisreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number haveelected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl, assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remainfor another hour in a good home. In full command of the situation, sheusually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparablyruined. Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnantof that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her ownperson to protect her home and to secure the status of her children. Theindignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint whichshould have been exercised by the community and which would havenaturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it, in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress's family. Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeksafter her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, theostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, thepoverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and thegreat temptation which comes after that, to give away her child. Thebaby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells herthat upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care ofthe child for a year and that "maybe it won't live any longer thanthat, " and unless the hospital is equipped with a social servicedepartment, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girlleaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes ofher. It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convincedthat all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputablehouse. Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not bedespised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support ofher child. Often she has received the address of such a house from oneof her companions in the maternity ward where, among the fifty per cent, of the unmarried mothers, at least two or three sophisticated girls arealways to be found, eager to "put wise" the girls who are merelyunfortunate. Occasionally a girl who follows such baneful advice stillinsists upon keeping her child. I recall a pathetic case in the juvenilecourt of Chicago when such a mother of a five-year-old child waspronounced by the judge to be an "improper guardian. " The agonized womanwas told that she might retain her child if she would completely changeher way of life; but she insisted that such a requirement wasimpossible, that she had no other means of earning her living, and thatshe had become too idle and broken for regular work. The child clungpiteously to the mother, and, having gathered from the evidence that shewas considered "bad, " assured the judge over and over again that she was"the bestest mother in the world. " The poor mother, who had begun herwretched mode of life for her child's sake, found herself so demoralizedby her hideous experiences that she could not leave the life, even forthe sake of the same child, still her most precious possession. Only sixyears before, this mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working inthe household of a good woman, whose sense of duty had expressed itselfin dismissing "the outcast. " These discouraged girls, who so often come from domestic service tosupply the vice demands of the city, are really the last representativesof those thousands of betrayed girls who for many years met the entiredemand of the trade; for, while a procurer of some sort has performedhis office for centuries, only in the last fifty years has the whiteslave market required the services of extended business enterprises inorder to keep up the supply. Previously the demand had been largely metby the girls who had voluntarily entered a disreputable life becausethey had been betrayed. While the white slave traffic was organizedprimarily for profit it could of course never have flourished unlessthere had been a dearth of these discouraged girls. Is it not alsosignificant that the surviving representatives of the girls who formerlysupplied the demand are drawn most largely from the one occupation whichis farthest from the modern ideal of social freedom and self-direction?Domestic service represents, in the modern world, more nearly than anyother of the gainful occupations open to women, the ancient laborconditions under which woman's standard of chastity was developed andfor so long maintained. It would seem obvious that both the girlover-restrained at home, as well as the girl in domestic service, hadbeen too much withdrawn from the healthy influence of public opinion, and it is at least significant that domestic control has so broken downthat the girls most completely under its rule are shown to be those inthe greatest danger. Such a statement undoubtedly needs the modificationthat the girls in domestic service are frequently those who areunadapted to skilled labor and are least capable of taking care ofthemselves, yet the fact remains that they are belated morally as wellas industrially. As they have missed the industrial discipline thatcomes from regular hours of systematized work, so they have missed themoral training of group solidarity, the ideals and restraints which thefriendships and companionships of other working girls would have broughtthem. When the judgment of her peers becomes not less firm but more kindly, the self-supporting girl will have a safeguard and restraint many timesmore effective than the individual control which has become soinadequate, or the family discipline that, with the best intentions inthe world, cannot cope with existing social conditions. The most perplexing case that comes before the philanthropicorganizations trying to aid and rescue the victims of the white slavetraffic, is of the type which involves a girl who has been secured bythe trafficker when so lonely, detached and discouraged that shegreedily seized whatever friendship was offered her. Such a girl hasbeen so eager for affection that she clings to even the wretchedsimulacrum of it, afforded by the man who calls himself her "protector, "and she can only be permanently detached from the life to which he holdsher, when she is put under the influence of more genuine affections andinterests. That is doubtless one reason it is always more possible tohelp the girl who has become the mother of a child. Although sheunjustly faces a public opinion much more severe than that encounteredby the childless woman who also endeavors to "reform, " the mother'ssheer affection and maternal absorption enables her to overcome thegreater difficulties more easily than the other woman, without the newwarmth of motive, overcomes the lesser ones. The Salvation Army in theirrescue homes have long recognized this need for an absorbing interest, which should involve the Magdalen's deepest affections and emotions, andtherefore often utilize the rescued girl to save others. Certainly no philanthropic association, however rationalistic andsuspicious of emotional appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmedby desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull her back into thestream of kindly human fellowship and into a life involving normal humanrelations. Such an association must needs remember those wise words ofCount Tolstoy: "We constantly think that there are circumstances inwhich a human being can be treated without affection, and there are nosuch circumstances. " CHAPTER VI INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL When certain groups in a community, to whom a social wrong has becomeintolerable, prepare for definite action against it, they almostinvariably discover unexpected help from contemporaneous socialmovements with which they later find themselves allied. The mostimmediate help in this new campaign against the social evil willprobably come thus indirectly from those streams of humanitarian effortwhich are ever widening and which will in time slowly engulf into theirrising tide of enthusiasm for human betterment, even the victims of thewhite slave traffic. Foremost among them is the world-wide movement to preserve and prolongthe term of human life, coupled with the determination on the part ofthe medical profession to eliminate all forms of germ diseases. The samephysicians and sanitarians who have practically rid the modern city ofsmall-pox and cholera and are eliminating tuberculosis, well know thatthe social evil is directly responsible for germ diseases more prevalentthan any of the others, and also communicable. Over and over again inthe history of large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medicalprofession has been urged to control the diseases resulting from thecommercialized vice which the municipal authorities themselvespermitted. But the experiments in segregation, in licensed systems, andcertification have not been considered successful. The medicalprofession, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasibility of suchundertakings, is virtually united in the conclusion that so long ascommercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city againstthe spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatalalike to the individual and to his offspring. The medical professionagrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become thepurveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type, safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercializedvice. They point out the indirect ways in which this contagion canspread exactly as any other can, but insist that its control isenormously complicated by the fact that the victims of these diseasesare most unwilling to be designated and quarantined. The medicalprofession is at last taking the position that the community wishing toprotect itself against this contagion will in the end be driven to theextermination of the very source itself. A well-known authority statesthe one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is thesocial institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred andcultivated there, they then spread through the community, attackingalike both the innocent and the guilty. We can imagine, after a dozen years of vigorous and able propaganda ofthis opinion on the part of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians, that a city might well appeal to the medical profession to exterminateprostitution on the very ground that it is a source of constant dangerto the health and future of the community. Such a city might readilygive to the board of health ordered to undertake this extermination moreabsolute authority than is now accorded to it in a small-pox epidemic. Of course, no city could reach such a view unless the education of thepublic proceeded much more rapidly than at present, although thenewly-established custom of careful medical examination ofschool-children and of employees in factories and commercialestablishments must result in the discovery of many such cases, and inthe end adequate provision must be made for their isolation. A child wasrecently discovered in a Chicago school with an open sore upon her lip, which made her a most dangerous source of infection. She was justfourteen years of age, too old to be admitted into that most patheticand most unlovely of all children's wards, where children must sufferfor "the sins of their fathers, " and too young and innocent to be putinto the women's ward in which the public takes care of those wrecks ofdissolute living who are no longer valuable to the commerce which oncesecured them, and have become merely worthless stock which pays nodividend. The disease of the little girl was in too virulent a stage toadmit her to that convalescent home lately established in Chicago forthose infected children who are dismissed from the county hospital, butwhom it is impossible to return to their old surroundings. Aphilanthropic association was finally obliged to pay her board for weeksto a woman who carefully followed instructions as to her treatment. Thisis but one example of a child who was discovered and provided for, butit is evident that the public cannot long remain indifferent to the careof such cases when it has already established the means for detectingthem. In twenty-seven months over six hundred children passed throughthis most piteous children's ward in Chicago's public hospital. All buttwenty-nine of these children were under ten years of age, and doubtlessa number of them had been victims of that wretched tradition that a manafflicted with this incurable disease might cure himself at the expenseof innocence. Crusades against other infectious diseases, such as small-pox andcholera, imply well-considered sanitary precautions, dependent uponwidespread education and an aroused public opinion. To establish sucheducation and to arouse the public in regard to this present menaceapparently presents insuperable difficulties. Many newspapers, so readyto deal with all other forms of vice and misery, never allow these evilsto be mentioned in their columns except in the advertisements of quackremedies; the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian religion andthe early apostles, seldom preach against the sin of which thesecontagions are an inevitable consequence: the physicians, bound by arigorous medical etiquette, tell nothing of the prevalence of thesemaladies, use a confusing nomenclature in the hospitals, and write onlycontributory causes upon the very death certificates of the victims. Yet it is easy to predict that a society committed to the abolition ofinfectious germs, to a higher degree of public health, and to a betterstandard of sanitation will not forever permit these highly communicablediseases to spread unchecked in its midst, and that a public, convincedthat sanitary science, properly supported, might rid our cities of thistype of disease, will at length insist upon its accomplishment. When weconsider the many things undertaken in the name of health and sanitationit becomes easy to make the prediction, for public health is a magicword which ever grows more potent, as society realizes that the veryexistence of the modern city would be an impossibility had it not beendiscovered that the health of the individual is largely controlled bythe hygienic condition of his surroundings. Since the first commissionto inquire into the conditions of great cities was appointed inManchester in 1844, sanitary science, both in knowledge and municipalauthority, has progressed until advocates of the most advanced measuresin city hygiene and preventive sanitary science boldly state thatneglected childhood and neglected disease are the most potent causes ofsocial insufficiency. Certainly a plea could be made for the women and children who are oftenthe innocent victims of these diseases. Quite recently in Chicago therewas brought to my attention the incredibly pathetic plight of a widowwith four children who was in such constant fear of spreading theinfection for which her husband had been responsible, that shetouchingly offered to leave her children forevermore, if there was noother way to save them from the horrible suffering she herself wasenduring. In spite of thousands of such cases Utah is the pioneer andonly state with a law which requires that this infection shall bereported and controlled, as are other contagious maladies, and whichalso authorizes boards of health to take adequate measures in order tosecure protection. Another humanitarian movement from which assistance will doubtless cometo the crusade against the social evil, is the great movement againstalcoholism with its recent revival in every civilized country of theworld. A careful scientist has called alcohol the indispensable vehicleof the business transacted by the white slave traders, and has assertedthat without its use this trade could not long continue. Whoever hastried to help a girl making an effort to leave the irregular life shehas been leading, must have been discouraged by the victim's attempts toovercome the habit of using alcohol and drugs. Such a girl has commonlybeen drawn into the life in the first place when under the influence ofliquor and has continued to drink that she might be able to live througheach day. Furthermore, the drinking habit grows upon her because she isconstantly required to sell liquor and to be "treated. " It is estimated that the liquor sold by such girls nets a profit to thetrade of two hundred and fifty per cent. Over and above the girl's owncommission. Chicago made at least one honest effort to divorce the saleof liquor from prostitution, when the superintendent of police last yearruled that no liquor should be sold in any disreputable house. Thedifficulty of enforcing such an order is greatly increased because suchhouses, as well as the questionable dance halls, commonly obtain aspecial permit to sell liquor under a federal license, which is not onlycheaper than the saloon license obtained from the city, but has theadded advantage to the holder that he can sell after one o'clock in themorning, at which time the city closes all saloons. The aggregate annual profit of the two hundred and thirty-six disorderlysaloons recently investigated in Chicago by the Vice Commission was$4, 307, 000. This profit on the sale of liquor can be traced all alongthe line in connection with the white slave traffic and is no lessdisastrous from the point of view of young men than of the girls. Even aslight exhilaration from alcohol relaxes the moral sense and throws asentimental or adventurous glamor over an aspect of life from which adecent young man would ordinarily recoil, and its continued usestimulates the senses at the very moment when the intellectual and moralinhibitions are lessened. May we not conclude that both chastity andself-restraint are more firmly established in the modern city than werealize, when the white slave traders find it necessary both forcibly todetain their victims and to ply young men with alcohol that they mayprofit thereby? General Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New Yorkcertainly knew whereof he spoke, says: "There is not enough depravity inhuman nature to keep alive this very large business. The immorality ofwomen and the brutishness of men have to be persuaded, coaxed andconstantly stimulated in order to keep the social evil in its presentstate of business prosperity. " We may soberly hope that some of the experiments made by governmentaland municipal authorities to control and regulate the sale of liquorwill at last meet with such a measure of success that the existence ofpublic prostitution, deprived of its artificial stimulus of alcohol, will in the end be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission has made aseries of valuable suggestions for the regulation of saloons and for theseparation of the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all otherplaces known as recruiting grounds for the white slave traffic. There isstill need for a much wider and more thorough education of the public inregard to the historic connection between commercialized vice andalcoholism, of the close relation between politics and the liquorinterests, behind which the social evil so often entrenches itself. In addition to the movements against germ diseases and the suppressionof alcoholism, both of which are mitigating the hard fate of the victimsof the white slave traffic, other public movements mysteriouslyaffecting all parts of the social order will in time threaten the veryexistence of commercialized vice. First among these, perhaps, is theequal suffrage movement. On the horizon everywhere are signs that womanwill soon receive the right to exercise political power, and it isbelieved that she will show her efficiency most conspicuously in findingmeans for enhancing and preserving human life, if only as the result ofher age-long experiences. That primitive maternal instinct, which hasalways been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture, will doubtlesspromptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slavetraffic; women with political power would not brook that men should liveupon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruinand debase young girls, should be permitted to transmit poison to unbornchildren. Life is full of hidden remedial powers which society has notyet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste more flagrant than in thematured deductions and judgments of the women, who are constantly forcedto share the social injustices which they have no recognized power toalter. If political rights were once given to women, if the situationwere theirs to deal with as a matter of civic responsibility, one cannotimagine that the existence of the social evil would remain unchallengedin its semi-legal protection. Those women who are already possessed ofpolitical power have in many ways registered their conscience in regardto it. The Norwegian women, for instance, have guaranteed to everyillegitimate child the right of inheritance to its father's name andproperty by a law which also provides for the care of its mother. Thisis in marked contrast to the usual treatment of the mother of anillegitimate child, who even when the paternity of her child isacknowledged receives from the father but a pitiful sum for its support;moreover, if the child dies before birth and the mother conceals thisfact, although perfectly guiltless of its death, she can be sent to jailfor a year. The age of consent is eighteen years in all of the states in which womenhave had the ballot, although in only eight of the others is it so high. In the majority of the latter the age of consent is between fourteen andsixteen, and in some of them it is as low as ten. These legalregulations persist in spite of the well-known fact that the mass ofgirls enter a disreputable life below the age of eighteen. In equalsuffrage states important issues regarding women and children, whetherof the sweat-shop or the brothel, have always brought out the womenvoters in great numbers. Certainly enfranchised women would offer some protection to the whiteslaves themselves who are tolerated and segregated, but who, becausetheir very existence is illegal, may be arrested whenever any policecaptain chooses, may be brought before a magistrate, fined andimprisoned. A woman so arrested may be obliged to answer the mostharassing questions put to her by a city attorney with no other womannear to protect her from insult. She may be subjected to the most tryingexaminations in the presence of policemen with no matron to whom toappeal. These things constantly happen everywhere save in Scandinaviancountries, where juries of women sit upon such cases and offer theprotection of their presence to the prisoners. Without such protectioneven an innocent woman, made to appear a member of this despised class, receives no consideration. A girl of fifteen recently acting in a SouthChicago theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who graduallyconvinced her that he was respectable. Walking with him one evening tothe door of her lodging-house, the girl told him of her difficulties andquite innocently accepted money for the payment of her room rent. Thefollowing morning as she was leaving the house the milkman met her atthe door and asked her for the five dollars he had given her the nightbefore. When she said she had used it to pay her debt to the landlady, he angrily replied that unless she returned the money at once he wouldcall a policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft. The girl, helplessbecause she had already disposed of the money, was taken to court, where, frightened and confused, she was unable to give a convincingaccount of the interview the night before; except for the promptintervention on the part of a woman, she would either have been obligedto put herself in the power of the milkman, who offered to pay her fine, or she would have been sent to the city prison, not because the proof ofher guilt was conclusive, but because her connection with a cheaptheatre and the hour of the so-called offence had convinced the courtthat she belonged to a class of women who are regarded as no longerentitled to legal protection. Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable women of Denver appealedto a large political club of women against the action of the police whowere forcing them to register under the threat of arrest in order laterto secure their votes for a corrupt politician. The disreputable women, wishing to conceal their real names and addresses, did not want to beregistered, in this respect at least differing from the lodging-housemen whose venal votes play such an important part in every municipalelection. The women's political club responded to this appeal, and notonly stopped the coercion, but finally turned out of office the chief ofpolice responsible for it. The very fact that the conditions and results of the social evil lie sofar away from the knowledge of good women is largely responsible for thesecrecy and hypocrisy upon which it thrives. Most good women willprobably never consent to break through their ignorance save under asense of duty which has ever been the incentive to action to which eventimid women have responded. At least a promising beginning would be madetoward a more effective social control, if the mass of conscientiouswomen were once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of local viceconditions was a matter of civic obligation, if the entire body ofconventional women, simply because they held the franchise, feltconstrained to inform themselves concerning the social evil throughoutthe cities of America. Perhaps the most immediate result would be achange in the attitude toward prostitution on the part of electedofficials, responding to that of their constituency. Although good andbad men alike prize chastity in women, and although good men require itof themselves, almost all men are convinced that it is impossible torequire it of thousands of their fellow-citizens, and hence connive atthe policy of the officials who permit commercialized vice to flourish. As the first organized Women's Rights movement was inaugurated by thewomen who were refused seats in the world's Anti-Slavery convention heldin London in 1840, although they had been the very pioneers in theorganization of the American Abolitionists, so it is quite possible thatan equally energetic attempt to abolish white slavery will bring manywomen into the Equal Suffrage movement, simply because they too willdiscover that without the use of the ballot they are unable to workeffectively for the eradication of a social wrong. Women are said to have been historically indifferent to socialinjustices, but it may be possible that, if they once really comprehendthe actual position of prostitutes the world over, their sense ofjustice will at last be freed, and become forevermore a new force in thelong struggle for social righteousness. The wind of moral aspiration nowdies down and now blows with unexpected force, urging on the movementsof social destiny; but never do the sails of the ship of state pushforward with such assured progress as when filled by the mighty hopes ofa newly enfranchised class. Those already responsible for existingconditions have come to acquiesce in them, and feel obliged to adducereasons explaining the permanence and so-called necessity of the mostevil conditions. On the other hand, the newly enfranchised view existingconditions more critically, more as human beings and less aspoliticians. After all, why should the woman voter concur in the assumption thatevery large city must either set aside well-known districts for theaccommodation of prostitution, as Chicago does, or continually permit itto flourish in tenement and apartment houses, as is done in New York?Smaller communities and towns throughout the land are free from at leastthis semi-legal organization of it, and why should it be accepted as apermanent aspect of city life? The valuable report of the Chicago ViceCommission estimates that twenty thousand of the men daily responsiblefor this evil in Chicago live outside of the city. They are the men whocome from other towns to Chicago in order to see the sights. They aresupposedly moral at home, where they are well known and subjected to theconstant control of public opinion. The report goes on to state thatduring conventions or "show" occasions the business of commercializedvice is enormously increased. The village gossip with her vituperativetongue after all performs a valuable function both of castigation andretribution; but her fellow-townsman, although quite unconscious of herrestraint, coming into a city hotel often experiences a great sense ofrelief which easily rises to a mood of exhilaration. In addition to thishe holds an exaggerated notion of the wickedness of the city. A visitingcountryman is often shown museums and questionable sights reservedlargely for his patronage, just as tourists are conducted to luridParisian revels and indecencies sustained primarily for their horrifiedcontemplation. Such a situation would indicate that, because control ismuch more difficult in a large city than in a small town, the citydeliberately provides for its own inability in this direction. During a recent military encampment in Chicago large numbers of younggirls were attracted to it by that glamour which always surrounds thesoldier. On the complaint of several mothers, investigators discoveredthat the girls were there without the knowledge of their parents, someof them having literally climbed out of windows after their parents hadsupposed them asleep. A thorough investigation disclosed not only anenormous increase of business in the restricted districts, but thedownfall of many young girls who had hitherto been thoroughlyrespectable and able to resist the ordinary temptations of city life, but who had completely lost their heads over the glitter of a militarycamp. One young girl was seen by an investigator in the late eveninghurrying away from the camp. She was so absorbed in her trouble and soblinded by her tears that she fairly ran against him and he heard herpraying, as she frantically clutched the beads around her neck, "Oh, Mother of God, what have I done! What have I done!" The Chicagoencampment was finally brought under control through the combinedefforts of the park commissioners, the city police, and the militaryauthorities, but not without a certain resentment from the last toward"civilian interference. " Such an encampment may be regarded as anhistoric survival representing the standing armies sustained in Europesince the days of the Roman Empire. These large bodies of men, deprivedof domestic life, have always afforded centres in which contempt for thechastity of women has been fostered. The older centres of militarismhave established prophylactic measures designed to protect the health ofthe soldiers, but evince no concern for the fate of the ruined women. Itis a matter of recent history that Josephine Butler and the men andwomen associated with her, subjected themselves to unspeakable insultfor eight years before they finally induced the English Parliament torepeal the infamous Contagious Disease Acts relating to the garrisontowns of Great Britain, through which the government itself not onlypermitted vice, but legally provided for it within certain specifiedlimits. The primary difficulty of military life lies in the withdrawal of largenumbers of men from normal family life, and hence from the domesticrestraints and social checks which are operative upon the mass of humanbeings. The great peace propagandas have emphasized the unjustifiableexpense involved in the maintenance of the standing armies of Europe, the social waste in the withdrawal of thousands of young men fromindustrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barrennegative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress uponthe loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, theperversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability andrefinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of thesebasic emotions. Social customs are instituted so slowly and even imperceptibly, so faras the conforming individual is concerned, that the mass of men submitto control in spite of themselves, and it is therefore always difficultto determine how far the average upright living is the result ofexternal props, until they are suddenly withdrawn. This is especiallytrue of domestic life. Even the sordid marriages in which the senseshave forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of familyaffection. The young couple who may have been brought together inmarriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard workin meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and manymistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfoldedlives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group ofchildren. They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation whichfalls to the lot of the majority of men and women, with its high rewardsand painful sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints offamily life are denied to the soldier. A somewhat similar situation isfound in every large construction camp, and in the crowded citytenements occupied by thousands of immigrant men who have preceded theirfamilies to America. In the light of the history of prostitution in relation to militarism, nothing could be more absurd than the familiar statement that virtuouswomen could not safely walk the streets unless opportunity for secretvice were offered to the men of the city. It is precisely the men whohave not submitted to self-control who are dangerous and they only, asthe court records themselves make clear. In addition to the large social movements for the betterment of PublicHealth, for the establishment of Temperance, for the promotion of EqualSuffrage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitration is theworld-wide organization and active propaganda of InternationalSocialism. It has always included the abolition of this ancient evil inits program of social reconstruction, and since the publication ofBebel's great book, nearly thirty years ago, the leaders of theSocialist party have never ceased to discuss the economics ofprostitution with its psychological and moral resultants. The Socialistscontend that commercialized vice is fundamentally a question of poverty, a by-product of despair, which will disappear only with the abolition ofpoverty itself; that it persists not primarily from inherent weakness inhuman nature, but is a vice arising from a defective organization ofsocial life; that with a reorganization of society, at least all ofprostitution which is founded upon the hunger of the victims and uponthe profits of the traffickers, will disappear. Whether we are Socialists or not, we will all admit that every level ofculture breeds its own particular brand of vice and uncovers newweaknesses as well as new nobilities in human nature; that a givensocial development--such, for instance as the conditions of life forthousands of young people in crowded city quarters--may produce suchtemptations and present such snares to virtue, that average human naturecannot withstand them. The very fact that the existence of the social evil is semi-legal inlarge cities is an admission that our individual morality is souncertain that it breaks down when social control is withdrawn and theopportunity for secrecy is offered. The situation indicates either thatthe best conscience of the community fails to translate itself intocivic action or that our cities are too large to be civilized in asocial sense. These difficulties have been enormously augmented duringthe past century so marked by the rapid growth of cities, because thegreat principle of liberty has been translated not only into theunlovely doctrine of commercial competition, but also has fostered inmany men the belief that personal development necessitates a rebellionagainst existing social laws. To the opportunity for secrecy which themodern city offers, such men are able to add a high-soundingjustification for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for ourmoral progress, the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom areconstantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowlyestablishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporarygovernment, that the state has a responsibility for conditions whichdetermine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in theinterest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must berestrained by the demonstrable needs of society. This new and more vigorous development of social control, whilereflecting something of that wholesome fear of public opinion which theintimacies of a small community maintain, is much more closely allied tothe old communal restraints and mutual protections to which the humanwill first yielded. Although this new control is based upon thevoluntary co-operation of self-directed individuals, in contrast to theforced submission that characterized the older forms of socialrestraint, nevertheless in predicting the establishment of adequatesocial control over the instinct which the modern novelists so oftendescribe as "uncontrollable, " there is a certain sanction in this oldand well-nigh forgotten history. The most superficial student of social customs quickly discovers thepractically unlimited extent to which public opinion has alwaysregulated marriage. If the traditions of one tribe were endogamous, allthe men dutifully married within it; but if the customs of anotherdecreed that wives must be secured by capture or purchase, all the menof that tribe fared forth in order to secure their mates. From theprimitive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange for his sistersor daughters, and never dreams of obtaining them in any other way, tothe sophisticated young Frenchman, who without objection marries thebride his careful parents select for him; from the ancient Hebrew, whocontentedly married the widow of his deceased brother because it wasaccording to the law, to the modern Englishman who refused to marry hisdeceased wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire pathway ofthe so-called uncontrollable instinct has been gradually confinedbetween carefully clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house ofconventional domesticity. Men have fallen in love with their cousins ordeclined to fall in love with them, very much as custom declaredmarriages between cousins to be desirable or undesirable, as theyformerly married their sisters and later absolutely ceased to desire tomarry them. In fact, regulation of this great primitive instinct goesback of the human race itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys arestrictly monogamous, and many species of birds are faithful to one mate, season after season. According to the great authority, Forel, prostitution never became established among primitive peoples. Evensavage tribes designated the age at which their young men were permittedto assume paternity because feeble children were a drag upon theircommunal resources. As primitive control lessened with the disappearanceof tribal organization and later of the patriarchal family, a socialcontrol, not less binding, was slowly established, until throughout thecenturies, in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass of men havelived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements ofthe state, and the surveillance of the community, if only because theyfeared social ostracism. It is easy, however, to forget these men andtheir prosaic virtues because history has so long busied herself inrecording court amours and the gentle dalliances of the overlord. The great primitive instinct, so responsive to social control as to bealmost an example of social docility, has apparently broken with all therestraints and decencies under two conditions: first and second, whenthe individual felt that he was above social control and when theindividual has had an opportunity to hide his daily living. Prostitutionupon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for itbecomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that socialcontrol may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feelssuperior to it. When a city is so large that it is extremely difficultto fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries wasconsidered the luxury of the king comes within the reach of everyoffice-boy, and that lack of community control which belonged only tothe overlord who felt himself superior to the standards of the people, may be seized upon by any city dweller who can evade his acquaintances. Against such moral aggression, the old types of social control arepowerless. Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions which make moral isolationpossible, constantly tend to develop a new restraint founded upon themutual dependences of city life and its daily necessities. The cityitself socializes the very instruments that constitute the apparatus ofsocial control--Law, Publicity, Literature, Education and Religion. Through their socialization, the desirability of chastity, which hashitherto been a matter of individual opinion and decision, comes to beregarded, not only as a personal virtue indispensable in women anddesirable in men, but as a great basic requirement which society haslearned to demand because it has been proven necessary for humanwelfare. To the individual restraints is added the conviction of socialresponsibility and the whole determination of chastity is reinforced bysocial sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is already obviouslytaking place in regard to the chastity of women. Formerly all that thebest woman possessed was a negative chastity which had been carefullyguarded by her parents and duennas. The chastity of the modern woman ofself-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which givesher an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a newvalue and importance in the establishment of social standards. There wasa certain basis for the belief that if a woman lost her personal virtue, she lost all; when she had no activity outside of domestic life, thesituation itself afforded a foundation for the belief that a man mightclaim praise for his public career even when his domestic life wascorrupt. As woman, however, fulfills her civic obligations while stillguarding her chastity, she will be in position as never before to upholdthe "single standard, " demanding that men shall add the personal virtuesto their performance of public duties. Women may at last force men to doaway with the traditional use of a public record as a cloak for awretched private character, because society will never permit a woman tomake such excuses for herself. Every movement therefore which tends to increase woman's share of civicresponsibility undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social control willbe extended over men, similar to the historic one so long establishedover women. As that modern relationship between men and women, which theRomans called "virtue between equals" increases, while it will continueto make women freer and nobler, less timid of reputation and more human, will also inevitably modify the standards of men. On the other hand, there is no doubt that this new freedom from domesticand community control, with the opportunity for escaping observationwhich the city affords, is often utilized unworthily by women. Thereport of the Chicago vice commission tells of numerous girls living insmall cities and country towns, who come to Chicago from time to timeunder arrangements made with the landlady of a seemingly respectableapartment. They remain long enough to earn money for a spring or fallwardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances arequite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure themuch-admired costumes brought from the city. Often an unattached countrygirl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into avicious life from sheer lack of social restraint. Such a girl, whenliving in a smaller community, realized that good behavior was aprotective measure and that any suspicion of immorality would quicklyruin her social standing; but when removed from such surveillance, shehopes to be able to pass from her regular life to an irregular one andback again before the fact has been noted, quite as many young men aretrying to do. Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to temptation of this sort thanthe one who works in an office where she may be the sole woman employedand where the relation to her employer and to her fellow-clerks isalmost on a social basis. Many office girls have taken "businesscourses" in their native towns and have come to the city in search ofthe large salaries which have no parallels at home. Such a position isnot only new to the individual, but it is so recent an outcome of modernbusiness methods, that it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl iswithout the wholesome social restraint afforded by the companionship ofother working-women and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger. Aninvestigation disclosed that a startling number of Chicago girls hadfound their positions through advertisements and had no means ofascertaining the respectability of their employers. In addition to this, the girls who seek such positions are sometimes vain and pretentious, and will take any sort of office work because it seems to them "moreladylike. " A girl of this sort came to Chicago from the country threeyears ago at the age of seventeen and secured a position as astenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She was pretty andattractive, and in her desire to see more of the wonderful city to whichshe had come, she accepted many invitations to dinners and theatres froma younger member of the firm. The other girls in the office, representing the more capable type of business women, among whom acareful code of conduct is developing, although at present it is oftenmanifested only by the social ostracism of the one of their number whohas broken the conventions, protested against her conduct, first to thegirl and then to the head of the office. The usual story developedrapidly, the girl lost her position, her brother-in-law, learning thecause, refused her a home and she became absolutely dependent upon theman. As their relations became notorious, he at length was requested towithdraw from the firm. When brought to my knowledge she had alreadybeen deserted for a year. The only people she had known during that timewere those in the disreputable hotel in which she had been living whenher lover disappeared, and it was through their mistaken kindness inmaking an opportunity for her in the only life with which they werefamiliar, that she had been drawn into the worst vice of the city. She was but one of thousands of young women whose undisciplined mindsare fatally assailed by the subtleties and sophistries of city life, andwho have lost their bearings in the midst of a multitude of newimaginative impressions. It is hard for a girl, thrilled by the merepropinquity of city excitements and eager to share them, to keep to thegray and monotonous path of regular work. Almost every such girl of thehundreds who have come to grief, "begins" by accepting invitations todinners and places of amusement. She is always impressed with the easefor concealment which the city affords, although at the same timevaguely resentful that it is so indifferent to her individual existence. It is impossible to estimate the amount of clandestine prostitutionwhich the modern city contains, but there is no doubt that the growth ofthe social evil at the present moment, lies in this direction. Anotherof its less sinister developments is perhaps a contemporarymanifestation of that break, long considered necessary, betweenestablished morality and artistic freedom represented by the hetaira inAthens, the gifted actress in Paris, the geisha in Japan. Insofar assuch women have been treated as independent human beings and prized fortheir mental and social charm, even although they are on a commercialbasis, it makes for a humanization of this most sordid business. Suchopen manifestations of prostitution hasten social control, becausepublicity has ever been the first step toward community understandingand discipline. Doubtless the attitude toward the victims of commercialized vice will bemodified by many reactions upon the public consciousness, through athousand manifestations of the great democratic movement which isdeveloping all about us. Certainly we are safe in predicting that whenthe solidarity of human interest is actually realized, it will becomeunthinkable that one class of human beings should be sacrificed to thesupposed needs of another; when the rights of human life havesuccessfully asserted themselves in contrast to the rights of property, it will become impossible to sell the young and heedless intodegradation. An age marked by its vigorous protests against slavery andclass tyranny, will not continue to ignore the multitudes of women whoare held in literal bondage; nor will an age characterized by a newtenderness for the losers in life's race, always persist in denyingforgiveness to the woman who has lost all. A voice which has come acrossthe centuries, filled with pity for her who has "sinned much, " must atlast be joined by the forgiving voices of others, to whom it has beenrevealed that it is hardness of heart which has ever thwarted the divinepurposes of religion. A generation which has gone through so manysuccessive revolts against commercial aggression and lawlessness, willat last lead one more revolt on behalf of the young girls who are thevictims of the basest and vilest commercialism. As that consciousness ofhuman suffering, which already hangs like a black cloud over thousandsof our more sensitive contemporaries, increases in poignancy, it mustfinally include the women who for so many generations have receivedneither pity nor consideration; as the sense of justice fast widens toencircle all human relations, it must at length reach the women who haveso long been judged without a hearing. In that vast and checkered undertaking of its own moralization to whichthe human race is committed, it must constantly free itself from thesurvivals and savage infections of the primitive life from which itstarted. Now one and then another of the ancient wrongs and uncouthcustoms which have been so long familiar as to seem inevitable, rise tothe moral consciousness of a passing generation; first for uneasycontemplation and then for gallant correction. May America bear a valiant part in this international crusade of thecompassionate, enlisting under its banner not only those sensitive tothe wrongs of others, but those conscious of the destruction of the raceitself, who form the standing army of humanity's self-pity, which isbecoming slowly mobilized for a new conquest!