seems impossible to
arouse parents--especially those in the country--to a realization that
there is in every big city a class of men and women who live by trapping
girls into a life of degradation and who are as inhumanely cunning in
their awful craft as they are in other instincts; that these beasts of
the human jungle are as unbelievably desperate as they are unbelievably
cruel, and that their warfare upon virtue is as persistent, as
calculating, and as unceasing as was the warfare of the wolf upon the
unprotected lamb of the pioneer folk in the early days of the Western
frontier.

I cannot escape the conclusion that the country girl is in greater
danger from the "white slavers" than the city girl. The perusal of the
testimony of many "white slaves" enforces this conclusion. That is
because they are less sophisticated, more trusting and more open to the
allurements of those who are waiting to prey upon them.

It is a fact which parents of girls in the country should remember that
the "white slavers" are busy on the trains coming into the city and make
it a point to "cut out" an attractive girl whenever they can. This
"cutting out" process (I use the technical term) consists of making the
girl's acquaintance, gaining her confidence and, on one pretext or
another, inducing her to leave the train before the main depot is
reached. This is done because the various protective and law and order
organizations have watchers at the main railroad stations who are
trained to the work of "spotting," and quickly detect a girl in the
hands of one of these human beasts of prey. Generally these watchers are
women and wear the badges of their organizations.

But suppose that the girl from the country does not chance to fall in
with the "white slaver" on the train, that she reaches the city in
safety, becomes located in a position--or perhaps in the stenographic
school or business college which she has come to attend--and secures a
room in a boarding house. No human being, it seems to me, is quite so
lonely as the young girl from the country when she first comes to the
city and starts in the struggle of life there without acquaintances. All
her instincts are social, and she is, for the time being, almost
desolately alone in a wilderness of strange human beings. She must have
some one to talk to--it is the law of youth as well as the law of her
sex to crave constant companionship. And the consequences? She is
sentimentally in a condit