up from
contaminating sources on the street and at school. And I may add that
the world owes a debt to these men who have handled this delicate and
difficult problem in a practical as well as a powerful manner; and I
feel impelled to add that, in face of the horrifying disclosures brought
to me in the form of legal evidence, every boy and girl of high school
age should be taught something of the awful physical as well as the
moral consequences which lurk behind allurements of the life in which
the "white slave" is the central figure. These things cannot be
presented in the public prints, but the father who keeps close to his
boy and the mother who is a companion to her daughter may reveal these
things, in the home, in a way which may save almost untold suffering.
And to such parents I would say that the investigations of the United
States District Attorney's office in Chicago have brought together, as
legal evidence, a mass of facts as to sanitary conditions in the
districts where the "white slaves" are kept, which are horrifying and
scarcely capable of exaggeration.

CHAPTER V.

A WHITE SLAVE CLEARING HOUSE.

A WHITE SLAVE'S OWN STORY.

The most conspicuous work of United States Attorney Sims against the
white slave traders in Chicago was the arrest and indictment of a
notorious French trader and his wife, Alphonse and Eva Dufour. The
federal grand jury voted five indictments against each of them. They
spent six weeks or so in Cook county jail, when they gained their
liberty on bonds of $26,500, which they immediately forfeited and fled
to Paris, in August, 1908.

My missionary duties took me occasionally to the clearing house of the
Dufours, and we have often held gospel meetings in front of their
resort. In this place were about twenty girls, whom the agents of this
wicked couple had snared in different parts of Europe and America. One
girl was from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, who had been deceived into
entering the house and then held there without her street clothes. She
managed to send word out and secured her release. The Dufour woman was
arraigned in court but was not punished seriously for this very common
crime.

A very young black-eyed, black-haired Spanish girl was among the
inmates, and my thoughts inevitably went to some broken-hearted mother
in sunny Spain, whose daughter had been hunted for Chicago's white slave
market. These murderous traffickers drink the heart's blood of weeping
mothers