tation for the abolition of slavery in America, there
were statesmen who gradually became convinced of the political and moral
necessity of giving to the freedman the protection of the ballot. In
this current agitation there are at least a few men and women who would
extend a greater social and political freedom to all women if only
because domestic control has proved so ineffectual.

We may certainly take courage from the fact that our contemporaries are
fired by social compassions and enthusiasms, to which even our immediate
predecessors were indifferent. Such compunctions have ever manifested
themselves in varying degrees of ardor through different groups in the
same community. Thus among those who are newly aroused to action in
regard to the social evil are many who would endeavor to regulate it and
believe they can minimize its dangers, still larger numbers who would
eliminate all trafficking of unwilling victims in connection with it,
and yet others who believe that as a quasi-legal institution it may be
absolutely abolished. Perhaps the analogy to the abolition of slavery is
most striking in that these groups, in their varying points of view, are
like those earlier associations which differed widely in regard to
chattel slavery. Only the so-called extremists, in the first instance,
stood for abolition and they were continually told that what they
proposed was clearly impossible. The legal and commercial obstacles,
bulked large, were placed before them and it was confidently asserted
that the blame for the historic existence of slavery lay deep within
human nature itself. Yet gradually all of these associations reached the
point of view of the abolitionist and before the war was over even the
most lukewarm unionist saw no other solution of the nation's difficulty.
Some such gradual conversion to the point of view of abolition is the
experience of every society or group of people who seriously face the
difficulties and complications of the social evil. Certainly all the
national organizations--the National Vigilance Committee, the American
Purity Federation, the Alliance for the Suppression and Prevention of
the White Slave Traffic and many others--stand for the final abolition
of commercialized vice. Local vice commissions, such as the able one
recently appointed in Chicago, although composed of members of varying
beliefs in regard to the possibility of control and regulation, united
in the end in recommending a la