r will.

To this refuge which had been a dive, Edith E---- fled one morning,
having escaped from a resort on Custom House Place. She ran first to a
drug store, telephoned to the police to get her street clothes from the
dive, and then came to the rescue home. She explained that she had heard
the midnight missionaries two nights before singing, in a gospel meeting
which they were holding in front of the den where she was:

"Throw out the life-line to danger-fraught men,
Sinking in anguish where you've never been."

So deep an impression was made upon her that she was wretched all the
next day, quite unfitted for her old life. Next morning she escaped.
She told me that she had been a very wicked girl, that her young husband
had committed suicide because of her sin. She never went back to her
evil life. Her physical heart was seriously weakened from her addiction
to drugs, liquor and vice.

In October, 1906, the National Purity Federation, of which Mr. B. S.
Steadwell of La-Crosse, Wisconsin, is president, held a conference in
Chicago, at Abraham Lincoln Center. Among the speakers was the late Rev.
Sidney C. Kendall, whose whole soul was torn and bleeding over the shame
of making commerce of women. He told us of the crimes of the French
traders, of their systematized traffic in girls and of their
organization for defense when any of them is under prosecution in the
courts. Mr. Kendall was sick when he was here and died the next summer.
With his latest strength and his dying breath he antagonized the
loathsome white slave trade. He was a member of the National Vigilance
Committee for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. Mr. Kendall's
most conspicuous work was done in Los Angeles. Some of his spirit
remained with a few of us in Chicago and we could not rest until some
effort was made here to rid us of the shame of slavery in the twentieth
century under the flag of the free.

On January 30, 1907, Mr. O. H. Richards told me how he had rescued a
girl, with the help of the police, from a resort after the woman who
kept the place had refused to surrender the girl to her mother and
stepfather, on the claim that the girl owed twenty dollars for clothes.
As there were three good witnesses to the illegal detention--the mother,
the stepfather and Mr. Richards--I saw that this was a good case to
bring into court. I asked the mother if, for the sake of other mothers'
girls, she would take the witness stand. She heart