s consideration, and never to allow a daughter
to go to one of these places on an excursion or under any pretext
whatever, unless accompanied by some older member of the family. And
even then there is something unwholesome and contaminating in the very
atmosphere of such a place.

Do you think that I overstate the perils of places of this kind? Of
these gay excursion centers, these American Gretna Greens? I hesitate to
say how many girls I have had under my care who were enticed into a
"runaway marriage" at these places--and then promptly sold into white
slavery by the men whom they had married, the men who married them for
no other purpose than to sell them to the houses of the red-light
district and live in luxury from the proceeds of their shame.

Let every mother teach her daughter that the man who proposes an
elopement, a runaway marriage, is not to be trusted for an instant, and
puts himself under suspicion of being that most loathsome of all things
in human form--a white slave trader!

CHAPTER IX.

THE TRAFFIC IN GIRLS.

By Charles Nelson Crittenton, President of the
National Florence Crittenton Mission.

Twenty-six years ago in New York City when I first began to feel an
interest in unfortunate girls and established the first Florence
Crittenton Home, now known as the Mother Mission, one of the things
which surprised and impressed me most in coming close in touch with the
subject, was that almost every girl that I met in a house of sin was
supporting some man from her ill-gotten earnings. Either the man was her
husband, who had driven her on the street in order that he might live in
luxury and ease, or else he was her paramour, upon whom with a woman's
self-forgetful devotion she delighted to shower everything that she
could earn. In addition to this form of slavery I also found that the
majority had to pay a certain percentage of their earnings to some
individual or organization who had promised them immunity from arrest
and to whom they looked for protection.

These were well recognized facts. Every policeman and every judge of the
police court knew the true conditions and no one thought of denying
them. Although frequently the poor girls would be kept at their trade
by slaps and blows and threats of death, the authorities would contend
that they were "willing slaves" and that they therefore deserved no
consideration or sympathy.

But when we began to get closer to the hearts of the girls, to