vil thus originated.

Those of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience in
regard to this twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself
and even more persistent, find a possible analogy between certain civic,
philanthropic and educational efforts directed against the very
existence of this social evil and similar organized efforts which
preceded the overthrow of slavery in America. Thus, long before slavery
was finally declared illegal, there were international regulations of
its traffic, state and federal legislation concerning its extension, and
many extra legal attempts to control its abuses; quite as we have the
international regulations concerning the white slave traffic, the state
and interstate legislation for its repression, and an extra legal power
in connection with it so universally given to the municipal police that
the possession of this power has become one of the great sources of
corruption in every American city.

Before society was ready to proceed against the institution of slavery
as such, groups of men and women by means of the underground railroad
cherished and educated individual slaves; it is scarcely necessary to
point out the similarity to the rescue homes and preventive associations
which every great city contains.

It is always easy to overwork an analogy, and yet the economist who for
years insisted that slave labor continually and arbitrarily limited the
wages of free labor and was therefore a detriment to national wealth was
a forerunner of the economist of to-day who points out the economic
basis of the social evil, the connection between low wages and despair,
between over-fatigue and the demand for reckless pleasure.

Before the American nation agreed to regard slavery as unjustifiable
from the standpoint of public morality, an army of reformers, lecturers,
and writers set forth its enormity in a never-ceasing flow of invective,
of appeal, and of portrayal concerning the human cruelty to which the
system lent itself. We can discern the scouts and outposts of a similar
army advancing against this existing evil: the physicians and
sanitarians who are committed to the task of ridding the race from
contagious diseases, the teachers and lecturers who are appealing to the
higher morality of thousands of young people; the growing literature,
not only biological and didactic, but of a popular type more closely
approaching "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Throughout the agi