CHAPTER IV.

MENACE OF THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE.

By Edwin W. Sims, United States District Attorney,
Chicago.

Right at the outset let me say in all frankness that I would never, from
personal choice, write upon a subject of this character. Its
sensationalism is personally repellent to me. On the other hand, no
matter how carefully the public prosecutor may preserve the legal
viewpoint and the legal temperament, his work may lead him into
situations where he feels that he cannot, in common humanity, withhold
from the public a knowledge of the things which he knows cannot fail to
be of actual protective benefit to many homes; that to withhold the
facts and disclosures which have come to him as an officer of the law
would be to deprive the innocent and the worthy of a protection which
might save many a home from sorrow, disgrace and ruin.

Again: The results of this legal work and of the explanations of the
conditions uncovered in my former article have brought to me a
gratifying knowledge of the practical and most effective rescue work
being done by Rev. Ernest A. Bell of the Illinois Vigilance
Association, of which Rev. M. P. Boynton is the president. These men
and many of the settlement and slum workers of Chicago with whom I have
come in contact are not only specialists in this field, but they are as
devoted as they are practical. More perhaps because of the urgent
assurances of the Rev. M. P. Boynton, Mr. Bell and others that giving to
the public a statement of actual conditions has been of a great service
to them in their hand to hand fight than to any other reason, I am moved
to make another statement.

When the editor of the Woman's World urged me to write of "The White
Slave Traffic of Today," I felt that I had an official knowledge of
facts which the fathers and mothers of the country had a right to know
in order to prevent the possibility of their daughters falling victims
to the most hideous form of human slavery known in the world today. This
consideration moved me to put aside my strong personal feelings against
appearing in print in connection with a subject so abhorrent. Many
results of that article have made me glad that I did so--and those
results have also contributed to overcome my antipathy to a further
pursuit of that subject. But in following this topic as I now do, I
shall again emphasize the fact that I wish to say what seems to be
needful in as unsensational a way as possible, and that I a