and mothers, who let
their girls grow up and go out into the world without a word of real
instruction that will protect them in such crises which may come in life
to any woman, are not wholly innocent--I am tempted to say are
frightfully guilty of the destruction of their own daughters.

To make a long story short, and to tell a hideous tale in a few very
plain words, I accepted the proposition and found myself installed in
one of the protected vice dens of Chicago as housekeeper and the special
personal slave of this man, whom I now found to be a slave trader, the
practical owner of other women and girls in various dives, as well as
the driver of gangs of procurers. This man almost owned me. My
salary--such small parts of it as I got--went into his pocket upon one
excuse and another, while I was subject to his brutal will constantly.

I will not shock my readers by telling the details of my horrid life in
that place, but I must give them some facts that ought to be in
possession of the unsuspecting decent people who sit quietly and
virtuously in their own homes while a slaughter more terrible than Herod
ever dreamed of goes on unceasingly.

I am asked to say whether the unfortunate girls in these places are
slaves in the sense that they can not get away. My answer to that must
depend upon your interpretation of "can not."

In my own case there never was a time when I could not have walked out
of the building, had I chosen to do so, but my promised salary was
always in arrears and I was penniless, with nowhere to go and no
friends.

To walk out on a winter's day into the streets of Chicago, with nothing
with which to buy a meal and no shelter and no friend under the wide,
pitiless sky, is a heroic course to which some resolute Spartan matron
might be driven in protection of her virtue, but it's a course which can
hardly be expected from a mistreated, deluded, ignorant, disgraced,
modern American girl.

And it must be understood that my situation was very different from that
of the "girls." I was in the position of a superintendent. They were
under me. What would have been possible for me was practically
impossible for them.

To begin with: No inmate of these vice dens is allowed to have clothing
with which she could appear on the street. It is taken away from her by
fraud or by force, as soon as she arrives, and is locked up. She never
sees it again until she is regarded as thoroughly trustworthy and sure
to co