thief she will, if
possible, be apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a vagrant she
will be restrained; even if she become a professional beggar, she will
be interfered with; but the decision to lead this evil life, disastrous
alike to herself and the community, although well known to the police,
is openly permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment of weakness in a
girl and obtained her consent, although she may thereafter be in dire
need of help she is put outside all protection of the law. The courts
assume that such a girl has deliberately decided for herself and that
because she is not "of previous chaste life and character," she is lost
to all decency. Yet every human being knows deep down in his heart that
his own moral energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be judged fairly
by his hours of defeat, and that after revealing moments of weakness,
although shocked and frightened, he is the same human being, struggling
as he did before. Nevertheless in some states, a little girl as young as
ten years of age may make this irrevocable decision for herself.

Modern philanthropy, continually discovering new aspects of prostitution
through the aid of economics, sanitary science, statistical research,
and many other agencies, finds that this increase of knowledge
inevitably leads it from the attempt to rescue the victims of white
slavery to a consideration of the abolition of the monstrous wrong
itself. At the present moment philanthropy is gradually impelled to a
consideration of prostitution in relation to the welfare and the orderly
existence of society itself. If the moral fire seems at times to be
dying out of certain good old words, such as charity, it is filling with
new warmth such words as social justice, which belong distinctively to
our own time. It is also true that those for whom these words contain
most of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the old
tasks and obligations, as if the great basic emotion of human compassion
had more than held its own. Certainly the youth of many of the victims
of the white slave traffic, and the helplessness of the older girls who
find themselves caught in the grip of an enormous force which they
cannot comprehend, make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy moreover
discovers many young girls, who if they had not been rescued by
protective agencies would have become permanent outcasts, although they
would have entered a disreputable life through no fault o