putable neighborhoods because they literally cannot rent houses
anywhere else. Both because rents are always high for colored people and
because the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seven
times as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of the
white mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in the
midst of temptation is abnormally large. So closely is child life
founded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows all
evil is almost sure in the end to share it. Colored children seldom roam
far from their own neighborhoods: in the public playgrounds, which are
theoretically open to them, they are made so uncomfortable by the
slights of other children that they learn to stay away, and, shut out
from legitimate recreation, are all the more tempted by the careless,
luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addition to the colored
girls who have thus from childhood grown familiar with the outer aspects
of vice, are others who are sent into the district in the capacity of
domestic servants by unscrupulous employment agencies who would not
venture to thus treat a white girl. The community forces the very people
who have confessedly the shortest history of social restraint, into a
dangerous proximity with the vice districts of the city. This results,
as might easily be predicted, in a very large number of colored girls
entering a disreputable life. The negroes themselves believe that the
basic cause for the high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recent
enslavement of their race with its attendant unstable marriage and
parental status, and point to thousands of slave sales that but two
generations ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at family life. Knowing
this as we do, it seems all the more unjustifiable that the nation which
is responsible for the broken foundations of this family life should
carelessly permit the negroes, making their first struggle towards a
higher standard of domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagrant
temptations which our civilization tolerates.

The imaginations of even very young children may easily be forced into
sensual channels. A little girl, twelve years old, was one day brought
to the psychopathic clinic connected with the Chicago juvenile court.
She had been detained under police surveillance for more than a week,
while baffled detectives had in vain tried to verify the statements she
had made to her Sunday-school