hen a property owner knows that his real estate is particularly
available for houses of this character he is, if unprincipled enough to
do so, bound to encourage the use of his premises for that which will
bring him the largest money returns. This puts him in the way of
fattening upon the wages of the social vice without incurring danger of
punishment. Naturally he becomes a friend of the traffic and ready to
aid and abet it wherever and whenever he can. Therefore it seems to me
he should no longer be allowed to escape the penalties attached to
those who engage in this infamous trade. As the owner of the property on
which unlawful acts are persistently committed, and as a sharer in the
unlawful profits of those acts, he should be made to share also in its
perils and punishments; he should be made to feel that, as the owner of
the property used for the purpose of harboring fallen women he is a link
in the chain which draws innocent womanhood to its doom and that he must
suffer to the full proportion of his guilt. Again, it is the first
instinct of the lessee or keeper of such a house, on coming in contact
with the law, to flee and forfeit his or her bonds. By making the
property itself liable to forfeiture, absolute security against this
kind of thing is established, thereby preventing many a miscarriage of
justice and of just penalties.

Since the beginning of the recent prosecutions in Chicago a score of
keepers, realizing their guilt and fearing prosecution, have fled the
country and have not yet been apprehended. If both the federal and the
state governments had a law of this kind the escape of these criminals
would not have involved a complete defeat of the law in their cases, for
prosecution could have been brought against some person connected with
their establishments, and when a conviction was secured the property
occupied by them could have been closed out. A statute of this kind,
wherever enacted, can scarcely fail to prove one of the most powerful
and effective of all possible weapons against the white slave traffic.
And the smaller the city, the more effective will this weapon be
found--which is only another way of saying that the larger the city the
larger the toleration of the social vice.

One of the greatest weapons in the hands of the white slavers and of the
keepers of houses of ill-fame to prevent the escape of fresh recruits
and to submerge them into hopeless slavery is the system of indebtedness
wh