gainst the traffic in
shame, the snaring of young girls and the immodesty and immorality which
were found in convents, and even in churches. In the reign of Louis XI.,
about 1475, Father Maillard, a bold preacher of the time, excoriated the
whole company of traffickers in girls, especially procuresses and
citizens who let their property for houses of shame. The procuresses, he
said, ought to be burned at the stake, and for women who corrupted the
clergy he had no mercy, but invoked the wrath of God upon them. Louis
XI. was himself extremely immoral, like so many of the kings of France.

Catharine de Medicis, who became queen of France when her husband Henry
II. ascended the throne in 1547, exercised a baneful influence during
three reigns. Her court of two hundred ladies introduced from Italy
worse vices than had before been known in France. She did, however, try
to diminish prostitution in Paris.

An ordinance of 1635 condemned all men engaged in what we now call the
white slave trade to the galleys for life.

Louis XV. at fifteen years of age married Maria, daughter of Stanislas,
the dethroned king of Poland. The whole life of Louis was one of idle
sensuality. When he was old he established a seraglio of
fifteen-year-old girls, the most beautiful that could be bought or
kidnapped. On this harem he spent a hundred million francs, or twenty
million dollars. It was he who, when warned of the impending ruin of his
nation, said "After me the deluge." He died, detested by all, in 1774.

PARIS THE MODERN BABYLON.

Paris, the capital of such kings and the scene of such debauchery,
became the source and headquarters of the world-wide white slave trade
of the present time. With the spread of legitimate commerce to every
part of the world, the long experienced traders in women sought a
world-wide market for girls. There is not a civilized country which has
not been exploited by the traders, alike as a hunting ground for victims
and as a market in which to sell them.

All Europe, North America, Panama, South America, Egypt and other parts
of Africa, India, China and Japan are the fields of operation of these
atrocious men and serpentine women.

By no means all the traffickers are French. Many are Jews, many are
Italians and Sicilians, some are Austrians, Germans, English, Americans,
Greeks. But it is Paris that has made vice a fine art, and has made the
white slave trade a wide-spread systematized commercial enterprise.