Station in
Philadelphia, and yet, with all of these opportunities of making his
trouble known, and escaping from the clutches of the man, the boy had
taken advantage of none of them, but had sat silent and apparently a
willing victim. In spite of these extenuating circumstances, it only
took the jury a few moments to convict and send the guilty man to the
penitentiary for a long period. Had the boy been a girl, and had she not
made any more effort than he did to escape from her captor, and had the
fact been known that the man had taken advantage of her innocence not
only to kidnap her, but also rob her of her virtue, it would have been
absolutely impossible to convict him of kidnaping. A recent case
prosecuted in Baltimore, of a similar character, with these added
features, proves the truth of this statement, the child being a girl
eleven years old. The man was given a sentence of twenty-one years only,
and that upon the ground of the child being under the age of consent.
Even this verdict was considered extreme by many who believed that the
child was willing to go with him because she had written a letter to her
father and mother, in which she had not complained of ill treatment. It
was proven that the little girl was made to write the letter by the man,
who took it out and mailed it himself, and who forced her to write just
what he said. Had little Billy Whitla been a little girl, and it was
proven that she had sat in a buggy and had taken candy and accepted
favors, and had been perfectly happy, as a child might, with her captor,
it would have been a very much more difficult case to prosecute than
that when the victim was a boy. In one the sex question would almost
certainly have been introduced to the further undoing of the punishment
for the crime.

Such work as the Woman's World is doing, as well as the Ladies' Home
Journal and other well-known magazines, in giving publicity to these
facts, will be of inestimable value in the protection of youth. Soon it
will be impossible for human ingenuity to devise schemes for the undoing
of girls that have not already been exposed by the daily papers and
magazines, thus warning girls and their parents or guardians of the
conditions under which they are placed. Had this information been given
to the mothers alone, many of them are so ignorant of the present
conditions that they would not have seen the necessity of informing
their daughters. But coming, as it does, through the