RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS

At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that, first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be called white slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procure their victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested and prosecuted.  As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently and illegally detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturally through the line of legal action that the most striking revelations of the white slave traffic have come.  For the sake of convenience, we may divide this legal action into those cases dealing with the international trade, those with the state and interstate traffic, and the regulations with which the municipality alone is concerned.

First in value to the white slave commerce is the girl imported from abroad who from the nature of the case is most completely in the power of the trader.  She is literally friendless and unable to speak the language and at last discouraged she makes no effort to escape.  Many cases of the international traffic were recently tried in Chicago and the offenders convicted by the federal authorities.  One of these cases, which attracted much attention throughout the country, was of Marie, a French girl, the daughter of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor that he was obliged to take her from her convent school at the age of twelve years.  He sent her to Paris, where she became a little household drudge and nurse-maid, working from six in the morning until eight at night, and for three years sending her wages, which were about a franc a day, directly to her parents in the Breton village.  One afternoon, as she was buying a bottle of milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conversation by a young man who invited her into a little patisserie where, after giving her some sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur Paret, who was gathering together a theatrical troupe to go to America.  Paret showed her pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed and announcements of their coming tour, and Marie felt much flattered when it was intimated that she might join this brilliant company.  After several clandestine meetings to perfect the plan, she left the city with Paret and a pretty French girl to sail for America with the rest of the so-called actors.  Paret escaped detection by the immigration authorities in New York, through his ruse of the “Kinsella troupe,” and took the girls directly to Chicago.  Here they were placed in a disreputable house belonging to a man named Lair, who had advanced the money for their importation.  The two French girls remained in this house for several months until it was raided by the police, when they were sent to separate houses.  The records which were later brought into court show that at this time Marie was earning two hundred and fifty dollars a week, all of which she gave to her employers.  In spite of this large monetary return