r the amount with the landlady of the house, he drew a
revolver and killed her. Although the plea of self-defense was urged in
the trial, his abominable manner of life so outraged both judge and jury
that he received the maximum sentence. His mother still insists that he
sincerely loved the girl, whom he so impulsively married and that he
constantly tried to dissuade her from her evil life. Certain it is that
Jim's wife and mother are both filled with genuine sorrow for his fate
and that in some wise the educational and social resources in the city
of his birth failed to protect him from his own lower impulses and from
the evil companionship whose influence he could not withstand. He is but
one of thousands of weak boys, who are constantly utilized to supply the
white slave trafficker with young girls, for it has been estimated that
at any given moment the majority of the girls utilized by the trade are
under twenty years of age and that most of them were procured when
younger. We cannot assume that the youths who are hired to entice and
entrap these girls are all young fiends, degenerate from birth; the
majority of them are merely out-of-work boys, idle upon the streets, who
readily lend themselves to these base demands because nothing else is
presented to them.

All the recent investigations have certainly made clear that the bulk of
the entire traffic is conducted with the youth of the community, and
that the social evil, ancient though it may be, must be renewed in our
generation through its younger members. The knowledge of the youth of
its victims doubtless in a measure accounts for the new sense of
compunction which fills the community.

CHAPTER III

AMELIORATION OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

It may be possible to extract some small degree of comfort from the
recent revelations of the white slave traffic when we reflect that at
the present moment, in the midst of a freedom such as has never been
accorded to young women in the history of the world, under an economic
pressure grinding down upon the working girl at the very age when she
most wistfully desires to be taken care of, it is necessary to organize
a widespread commercial enterprise in order to procure a sufficient
number of girls for the white slave market.

Certainly the larger freedom accorded to woman by our changing social
customs and the phenomenal number of young girls who are utilized by
modern industry, taken in connection with this lack o