letters have supplied both information and inspiration to the
workers who first brought this infamous traffic to public notice in
Chicago.

A WHITE SLAVE'S OWN STORY.

"I want you to know everything I have witnessed in my three years of
slavery. I was first sold in Custom House Place, by a young man working
for Mr. ----, traveling the city and little towns, or wherever he could
find girls.

"Here we were, always from fifteen to eighteen girls, most of us very
young. The man who bought me made us work like real slaves and then
never gave us our money even if it was shamefully earned. His place was
always full of so-called detectives, and if some one came to claim some
one of us, quick she was slipped to some other town.

"Pictures of foreign girls would arrive by mail, and if one was pretty
enough they would wire to Paris and say, 'Send parcel at once.' They
arrive by different ports--New York, Boston, Quebec, San Francisco--and
those poor unfortunates are all claimed by some one pretending to be an
aunt, or father, or husband.

"Letters are received by the resort keepers from all the states, and I
believe from all the prisons of the world. If any one could read all of
those men's mail, I think one would learn horrible things.

"Also we never can receive our mail direct, for the keeper opens the
letters, and if they are indifferent they are closed and given to us,
but if they are any way wrong in his eyes we never see them.

"If we escape and insist on not returning, they will send some one
after us to propose that we leave for Denver, San Francisco, China or
Panama. Most of those men who make their living off those girls are old
thieves and gamblers, and most of them have served terms in prison.
There are very few girls who would tell, for those bad men surely would
kill them if they found out who gave them away.

"If one girl is a good money-maker, they make her take one of those men
to support. They say if she does not do this, she is not respected by
their class of people. They take all those poor girls' money every
night, and they send them back to work the next day penniless. If they
should not make enough for them they are beaten, and sometimes killed.

"When those runners bring us to those houses, they keep us sometimes
weeks to teach us what to say in case the police or some one would try
to rescue us, and with the threat to kill us if ever we would tell.

"Some one ought to do his duty and make war