omes of poverty, occasionally a child
of well-to-do parentage is numbered among the victims. The alert agents
of the traffic move from place to place, alluring peasant girls and
farmers' daughters from their homes, entrapping innocent victims at
railway stations and public resorts. Not a few girls who go to the
cities to seek their fortunes and fail are caught by these harpies. And
remember, I am alluding now not to those who go astray because of
incidental misfortunes of circumstance, condition, or blind trust in
some unworthy lover, but only to those who are entrapped by the agents
of the organized white slave traffic system.

The above statements have been abundantly established by the
investigations of the National Vigilance Committee within the past two
years and have been confirmed by other competent authorities. These
conditions have been due not to the wish or the intention of our people,
but to our blindness or our ignorance. We forget that eternal vigilance
is the price of liberty, as one declaiming of political freedom has
said. The same price must be paid for every other civic excellence or
right. The liberty of woman, quite as much as the liberty of man, should
be protected, and woman's moral freedom, quite as much as man's
political freedom, demands for its protection unceasing vigilance.

Without going further into general conditions, I wish to present a
statement regarding America's relations to the white slave traffic in
China and Japan and to the yellow slave traffic in the Pacific Coast
states of our own country. My information regarding China and Japan is
based primarily on my own personal observations and inquiries in those
countries. My information regarding conditions in California is based
upon the report of a special agent of the National Vigilance Committee
and upon the reports of missionaries and other workers among the Chinese
and Japanese women on our Western coast.

I shall consider my subject in two divisions: First, white slave traffic
in Asia; second, yellow slave traffic in AMERICA. I trust I do not seem
to be stretching the application of the subject of my address in the
title of the second division. It is the traffic in the bodies and souls
of women, and I care not whether they are white, yellow or black.
(Applause.) Our responsibility is independent of the color of the
victims.

THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC IN ASIA: OUR SHAME IN THE ORIENT.

The record of white slave traffic in the