them. After
listening to this confession from one girl after another, hour after
hour until you have heard it repeated perhaps fifty times, you feel like
saying to every mother in the country: Do not trust any man who pretends
to take an interest in your girl if that interest involves her leaving
her own roof. Keep her with you. She is far safer in the country than in
the big city, but if go to the city she must, then go with her yourself;
if that is impossible, place her with some woman who is your friend,
not hers; no girl can safely go to a great city to make her own way who
is not under the eye of a trustworthy woman who knows the ways and
dangers of city life. Above all, distrust the "protection," the "good
offices" of any man who is not a family friend known to be clean and
honorable and above all suspicion.

Of course all the examinations to which I have referred have been
conducted for the specific purpose of finding girls who have been
brought into this country from other lands in defiance of the federal
statute, passed by Congress February 20, 1907. This act declares that
any person who shall "keep, maintain, support or harbor" any alien woman
for immoral purposes within three years after her arrival in this
country shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be liable to a fine
of $5,000 and imprisonment for five years at the discretion of the
court. When the department of justice at Washington decided that this
law was being violated, the United States District Attorney at Chicago
was instructed to take such action as was necessary to apprehend the
violators of the act and convict them. One of the first steps required
was the raiding of the various dives and houses of ill fame and the
arrest of the girl inmates, as well as the arrest of the keepers and the
procurers of the white slaves.

While the federal prosecution is officially concerned only with those
cases involving the importation of girls from other countries--there
being no authority under the present national statutes for the federal
government to prosecute those concerned in securing white slaves who are
natives of this country--it was inevitable that the examination of
scores of these inmates, captured in raids upon the dives, should bring
to officers and agents of the department of justice an immense fund of
information regarding the methods of the white slave traders in
recruiting for their traffic from home fields.

Whether these hunters of