incomprehensible that a nation whose chief boast is its free
public education, that a people always ready to respond to any moral or
financial appeal made in the name of children, should permit this infamy
against childhood to continue! Only the protection of all children from
the menacing temptations which their youth is unable to withstand, will
prevent some of them from falling victims to the white slave traffic;
only when moral education is made effective and universal will there be
hope for the actual abolition of commercialized vice. These are
illustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity of which society is so
rapidly becoming conscious.

CHAPTER V

PHILANTHROPIC RESCUE AND PREVENTION

There is no doubt that philanthropy often reflects and dramatizes the
modern sensitiveness of the community in relation to a social wrong,
because those engaged in the rescue of the victims are able to
apprehend, through their daily experiences, many aspects of a recognized
evil concerning which the public are ignorant and therefore indifferent.
However ancient a wrong may be, in each generation it must become newly
embodied in living people and the social custom into which it has
hardened through the years, must be continued in individual lives.
Unless the contemporaries of such unhappy individuals are touched to
tenderness or stirred to indignation by the actual embodiments of the
old wrong in their own generation, effective action cannot be secured.

The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effort
than any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely because
there is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personal
acquaintance with its victims; a distaste and distress that sometimes
leads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished Englishman has
recently written "that sober-minded people who, from motives of pity,
have looked the hideous evil full in the face, have often asserted that
nothing in their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a
loss of reason."

Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philanthropic effort is the more
remarkable because the average age of the recruits to prostitution is
between sixteen and eighteen years, the age at which girls are still
minors under the law in respect to all matters of property. We allow a
minor to determine for herself whether or not she will live this most
abominable life, although if she resolve to be a