d found guilty by the jury and
sentenced to imprisonment in the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth for
one and one-half years each. They thereupon prosecuted an appeal to the
Supreme Court of the United States, alleging among other things that the
law under which they were convicted was unconstitutional, in that the
clause "keep, maintain, control, support, or harbor," attempted to
embrace powers not given by the constitution to Congress, but reserved
to the respective states and to be within their police powers. This
contention was upheld by the Supreme Court. The result is that so much
of Section 3 of the Act of February 20, 1907, as attempted to prosecute
a keeper who simply harbored or permitted to be within his house of
prostitution an alien woman or girl within three years after her arrival
in this country was wiped out of the statute, and the section of the Act
must now be read as follows:

Sec. 3. That the importation into the United States of any alien woman
or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral
purpose, is hereby forbidden; and whoever shall, directly or indirectly,
import, or attempt to import, into the United States, any alien woman or
girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose,
or whoever shall hold or attempt to hold any alien woman or girl for any
such purpose in pursuance of such illegal importation, shall, in every
such case, be deemed guilty of a felony, and on conviction thereof be
imprisoned not more than five years and pay a fine of not more than five
thousand dollars; and any alien woman or girl who shall be found an
inmate of a house of prostitution or practicing prostitution, at any
time within three years after she shall have entered the United States,
shall be deemed to be unlawfully within the United States and shall be
deported as provided by sections twenty and twenty-one of this Act.

It will thus be seen, by comparing the Act as originally signed by the
President and the Act as it now reads, after the decision of the Supreme
Court, that it is necessary in every case to show that the person who
holds the alien had directly or indirectly imported the same alien into
the United States for immoral purposes. In other words, the federal
authorities are now restricted to cases where they are able to prove
that the defendant imported the girl prior to the time she was found in
his house of prostitution. This will very materially lessen the numb