One day a telephone message came to Hull House from the inspector asking us to take charge of a young girl who had been brought into the station by an older woman for registration.  The girl’s youth and the innocence of her replies to the usual questions convinced the inspector that she was ignorant of the life she was about to enter and that she probably believed she was simply registering her choice of a boarding-house.  Her story which she told at Hull House was as follows:  She was a Milwaukee factory girl, the daughter of a Bohemian carpenter.  Ten days before she had met a Chicago young man at a Milwaukee dance hall and after a brief courtship had promised to marry him, arranging to meet him in Chicago the following week.  Fearing that her Bohemian mother would not approve of this plan, which she called “the American way of getting married,” the girl had risen one morning even earlier than factory work necessitated and had taken the first train to Chicago.  The young man met her at the station, took her to a saloon where he introduced her to a friend, an older woman, who, he said, would take good care of her.  After the young man disappeared, ostensibly for the marriage license, the woman professed to be much shocked that the little bride had brought no luggage, and persuaded her that she must work a few weeks in order to earn money for her trousseau, and that she, an older woman who knew the city, would find a boarding-house and a place in a factory for her.  She further induced her to write postal cards to six of her girl friends in Milwaukee, telling them of the kind lady in Chicago, of the good chances for work, and urging them to come down to the address which she sent.  The woman told the unsuspecting girl that, first of all, a newcomer must register her place of residence with the police, as that was the law in Chicago.  It was, of course, when the woman took her to the police station that the situation was disclosed.  It needed but little investigation to make clear that the girl had narrowly escaped a well-organized plot and that the young man to whom she was engaged was an agent for a disreputable house.  Mr. Clifford Roe took up the case with vigor, and although all efforts failed to find the young man, the woman who was his accomplice was fined one hundred and fifty dollars and costs.

The one impression which the trial left upon our minds was that all the men concerned in the prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage against the method employed to secure the girl, but took for granted that the life she was about to lead was in the established order of things, if she had chosen it voluntarily.  In other words, if the efforts of the agent had gone far enough to involve her moral nature, the girl, who although unsophisticated, was twenty-one years old, could have remained, quite unchallenged, in the hideous life.  The woman who was prosecuted was well known to the police and was fined, not for her daily occupation, but because she had become involved in interstate white