Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/297

 despair of moralists too prudent to imitate her abandon; she became the white slave, a shanghaied innocent kept under lock and key. And thousands and thousands of her sisters were said to be trapped every year in precisely the same way by the minions of a huge system, organized like any modern combination of rapacity and evil, with luxurious head-*quarters, presumably in some skyscraper in New York, and its own attorneys, agents, kidnappers, crimpers, seducers, panderers and procuresses all over the land, a vast and complicated organization, with baffling ramifications in all the high and low places of the earth. The sensational newspapers referred to it as "the white slave syndicate," as though it were as authentic as the steel trust or Standard Oil. It was even said that somewhere in New York the trust conducted a daily auction! With such a bizarre notion, the victims of their own psychic lasciviousness became obsessed. Raids and "revivals" must be inaugurated, a body of new laws enacted, and a horde of official inspectors, agents and detectives turned loose on the land, empowered to arrest any man and woman traveling together, and hold the man guilty of a felony.

To be sure, it was something to have the conception change. It was something that the prostitute should at last be regarded with some touch of human pity. And it was something, a great deal, indeed, that there was, with all the fanatical and zealous law making, some quiet study of the problem. The word "economic," so long scorned by the proponents of an absolute morality, somehow penetrated the