ns of agony and remorse that have never been surpassed at any public
slave auction America has ever witnessed, as these girls, many of them,
oh! so young, realizing their awful fate, with scalding tears and moans of
horror, shut out from their hearts and lives father or mother or husband
and child, and turned their sob-shaken, tortured bodies to face the years
of final, relentless wretchedness and woe, to be at last thrown out sick
and broken, to die in some alley or to be carted off to Dunning poorhouse
to gradual physical decay and a pauper's burial and grave of obliteration,
while those who sold them just a few years before go out in their diamonds
and fine linen and their great automobiles to buy up more girls (it might
be your daughter, father, mother; or it might be mine) to fill the vacancy
in the ranks of this vast army of White Slaves.

A woman said to me the other day, and it was in a lofty, sneering tone,
too: "I doubt if these women are ever coerced or even imposed upon."

LISTEN; READ, THEN LISTEN.

Sitting in my office one afternoon I listened, my blood almost freezing,
to the following story vouched for by Mr. C----, an immigration inspector
and brother of a well-known Chicago reform worker. Here it is as he told
it to me:

"One evening some time ago I was looking up a case down in the
Twenty-Second Street red-light district, and visited and inspected,
looking for immigrant girls held illegally, a certain house of the
lower class in that neighborhood of prostitution. While in the house
I noticed a young woman lying very ill (in the last stages of
pneumonia, if I remember the story exactly) and in a semi-conscious
condition, and to my horror upon inquiry I learned that in the rush
hours of business this helpless, pain-racked young woman was _open to
all comers_ holding an accredited room check."

Dear friends, there are true stories heard and known every day around the
City's seething, blood-red Soul Market that cannot be put into
print--stories, though, that were they to become known, would make decent
Chicago rise as one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort Sumter,
"White Slavery in Chicago and in America must cease!"

During my years of study of this question of prostitution I learned to
know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and
South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful
aside from her dis