she didn't go home to her mother. She cried out, "I can't!
They won't let me! And if I could get away how could I get to
Cincinnati, Ohio, where my mother lives?"

We got her story from the girl, and this is how it ran: She got into
conversation with a well-dressed woman in Cincinnati one day who said
that she could get her a position as stenographer and typewriter at a
fine salary. After telling her mother about it, she and the woman
started for New York, the woman paying the fare. The woman gave her an
address of a party, but when the poor girl got there, there was no job
for a typewriter; it was a very different position. The young girl had
been lured from home on false promises, and here she was a "white slave"
through no fault of her own.

A difficult situation confronted us. The girl was in trouble and needed
help, and what were we going to do about it? She was as pretty a girl as
I ever saw, with large black eyes, a regular Southern type of beauty,
and just beginning the downward career. That means, as the girls on the
Bowery put it, first the Tenderloin, then the white lights and lots of
so-called pleasure, until her beauty begins to fade, which usually takes
about a year. Second, Fourteenth Street, a little lower down the grade.
Third, the Bowery, still lower, where they get nothing but blows and
kicks. The fourth and last step, some joint like this, the back room of
a saloon, down and out, all respect gone, nothing to live for; some
mother's girl picked up some morning frozen stiff; the patrol, the
morgue, and then Potter's Field. Some mother away in a country town is
waiting for her girl who never comes back.

God help the mothers who read this, for it's true. Look to your girls
and don't trust the first strange woman who comes into your house, for
she may be a wolf in sheep's clothing. She wants your daughter's fresh
young beauty, that's her trade, and the Devil pays good and plenty.

I asked the girl whether she had any friends near, and she said she had
an aunt living on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, that she thought might
take her. Then looking around the room she said, "But he won't let me go
anyhow." I followed her look, and there standing with his back to the
wall was a man I knew. Here was this young girl made to slave and earn a
living for this cur! There's lots of it done in New York--well-dressed
men doing no work, living on the earnings of young girls.

We got the address of the aunt in Phil