all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputable house.  Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not be despised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support of her child.  Often she has received the address of such a house from one of her companions in the maternity ward where, among the fifty per cent, of the unmarried mothers, at least two or three sophisticated girls are always to be found, eager to “put wise” the girls who are merely unfortunate.  Occasionally a girl who follows such baneful advice still insists upon keeping her child.  I recall a pathetic case in the juvenile court of Chicago when such a mother of a five-year-old child was pronounced by the judge to be an “improper guardian.”  The agonized woman was told that she might retain her child if she would completely change her way of life; but she insisted that such a requirement was impossible, that she had no other means of earning her living, and that she had become too idle and broken for regular work.  The child clung piteously to the mother, and, having gathered from the evidence that she was considered “bad,” assured the judge over and over again that she was “the bestest mother in the world.”  The poor mother, who had begun her wretched mode of life for her child’s sake, found herself so demoralized by her hideous experiences that she could not leave the life, even for the sake of the same child, still her most precious possession.  Only six years before, this mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working in the household of a good woman, whose sense of duty had expressed itself in dismissing “the outcast.”

These discouraged girls, who so often come from domestic service to supply the vice demands of the city, are really the last representatives of those thousands of betrayed girls who for many years met the entire demand of the trade; for, while a procurer of some sort has performed his office for centuries, only in the last fifty years has the white slave market required the services of extended business enterprises in order to keep up the supply.  Previously the demand had been largely met by the girls who had voluntarily entered a disreputable life because they had been betrayed.  While the white slave traffic was organized primarily for profit it could of course never have flourished unless there had been a dearth of these discouraged girls.  Is it not also significant that the surviving representatives of the girls who formerly supplied the demand are drawn most largely from the one occupation which is farthest from the modern ideal of social freedom and self-direction?  Domestic service represents, in the modern world, more nearly than any other of the gainful occupations open to women, the ancient labor conditions under which woman’s standard of chastity was developed and for so long maintained.  It would seem obvious that both the girl over-restrained at home, as well as the girl in domestic service, had been too much