w enforcement looking towards final
abolition. Even the most sceptical of Chicago citizens, after reading
the fearless document, shared the hope of the commission that "the city,
when aroused to the truth, would instantly rebel against the social evil
in all its phases." A similar recommendation of ultimate abolition was
recently made unanimous by the Minneapolis vice commission after the
conversion of many of its members. Doubtless all of the national
societies have before them a task only less gigantic than that faced by
those earlier associations in America for the suppression of slavery,
although it may be legitimate to remind them that the best-known
anti-slavery society in America was organized by the New England
abolitionists in 1836, and only thirty-six years later, in 1872, was
formally disbanded because its object had been accomplished. The long
struggle ahead of these newer associations will doubtless claim its
martyrs and its heroes, has indeed already claimed them during the last
thirty years. Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood;
nevertheless, to paraphrase Lincoln's speech, if blood were exacted drop
by 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 the
sexual commerce permitted to exist in every large city, usually in a
segregated district, wherein the chastity of women is bought and sold.
Modifications of legal codes regarding marriage and divorce, moral
judgments concerning the entire group of questions centring about
illicit affection between men and women, are quite other questions which
are not considered here. Such problems must always remain distinct from
those of commercialized vice, as must the treatment of an irreducible
minimum of prostitution, which will doubtless long exist, quite as
society still retains an irreducible minimum of murders. This volume
does not deal with the probable future of prostitution, and gives only
such historical background as is necessary to understand the present
situation. It endeavors to present the contributory causes, as they have
become registered in my consciousness through a long residence in a
crowded 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