,
nor in anywise different from what it is. This ancient evil is indeed
social in the sense of community responsibility and can only be
understood and at length remedied when we face the fact and measure the
resources which may at length be massed against it. Perhaps the most
striking indication that our generation has become the bearer of a new
moral consciousness in regard to the existence of commercialized vice is
the fact that the mere contemplation of it throws the more sensitive men
and women among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt. It
is doubtless an instinctive shrinking from this emotion and an
unconscious dread that this modern sensitiveness will be outraged, which
justifies to themselves so many moral men and women in their persistent
ignorance of the subject. Yet one of the most obvious resources at our
command, which might well be utilized at once, if it is to be utilized
at all, is the overwhelming pity and sense of protection which the
recent revelations in the white slave traffic have aroused for the
thousands of young girls, many of them still children, who are yearly
sacrificed to the "sins of the people." All of this emotion ought to be
made of value, for quite as a state of emotion is invariably the organic
preparation for action, so it is certainly true that no profound
spiritual transformation can take place without it.

After all, human progress is deeply indebted to a study of
imperfections, and the counsels of despair, if not full of seasoned
wisdom, are at least fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur to
action. Sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human
problem, and the line of least resistance into the jungle of human
wretchedness must always be through that region which is most thoroughly
explored, not only by the information of the statistician, but by
sympathetic understanding. We are daily attaining the latter through
such authors as Sudermann and Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their
readers to comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful
portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality. Their realism
has rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding an impossible
Camille quite as their fellow-craftsmen in realism have replaced the
weeping Amelias of the Victorian period by reasonable women transcribed
from actual life.

The treatment of this subject in American literature is at present in
the pamphleteering stage, althou