eir own families. The Association also collected the personal
histories of two hundred department-store girls, of two hundred factory
girls, of two hundred immigrant girls, of two hundred office girls, and
of girls employed in one hundred hotels and restaurants.

While this experience was most distressing, I was, on the other hand,
much impressed and at times fairly startled by the large and diversified
number of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic
had become unendurable and who promptly responded to any appeal made on
behalf of its victims. City officials, policemen, judges, attorneys,
employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrived
immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men, as under a
profound sense of compunction, were unsparing of time and effort when
given an opportunity to assist an individual girl, to promote
legislation designed for her protection, or to establish institutions
for her rescue.

I therefore venture to hope that in serving my own need I may also serve
the need of a rapidly growing public when I set down for rational
consideration the temptations surrounding multitudes of young people and
when I assemble, as best I may, the many indications of a new
conscience, which in various directions is slowly gathering strength and
which we may soberly hope will at last successfully array itself against
this incredible social wrong, ancient though it may be.

Hull House, Chicago.

CHAPTER I

AN ANALOGY

In every large city throughout the world thousands of women are so set
aside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered an
impropriety to speak the very word which designates them. Lecky calls
this type of woman "the most mournful and the most awful figure in
history": he says that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise
and fall, the eternal sacrifice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the
people." But evils so old that they are imbedded in man's earliest
history have been known to sway before an enlightened public opinion and
in the end to give way to a growing conscience, which regards them first
as a moral affront and at length as an utter impossibility. Thus the
generation just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the enormous upas
of slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race of man,"
although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives of man's
earliest warfare, even as this existing e