The recent examination of more than two hundred “white slaves” by the office of the United States District Attorney of Chicago has brought to light the fact that literally thousands of innocent girls from the country districts are every year entrapped into a life of hopeless slavery and degredation because parents in the country do not understand conditions as they exist and how to protect their daughters from the “white slave” traders who have reduced the art of ruining young girls to a national and international system. I sincerely believe that nine-tenths of the parents of these thousands of girls who are every year snatched from lives of decency and comparative peace and dragged under the slime of an existence in the “white slave” world have no idea that there is really a trade in the ruin of girls as much as there is trade in cattle or sheep or the other products of the farm. If these parents had known the real conditions, had believed that there is actually a syndicate which does as regular, as steady and persistent a “business” in the ruination of girls as the great packing houses do in the sale of meats, it is wholly probable that their daughters would not now be in dens of vice and almost utterly without hope of release excepting by the hand of death. It is only necessary to say that the legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: That the white slave traffic is a system—a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific ocean, with “clearing houses” or “distributing centers” in nearly all the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is $15.00 and that the selling price is generally about $200.00—if the girl is especially attractive, the white slave dealer may be able to sell her for $400.00 or $600.00; that this syndicate did not make less than $200,000 last year in this almost unthinkable commerce; that it is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims; that the man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as “The Big Chief.” Judge John R. Newcomer of Chicago, said before the National Purity Congress at Battle Creek, Michigan: “Within one week I had seven different letters from fathers, from Madison, Wisconsin, on the north, to Peoria, Illinois, on the south, asking me in God’s name to do something to help them find their daughters, because they had come to Chicago and they had never heard from them afterward. “If you mean by the 'white slave’ traffic the placing of young girls in a brothel for a price, it is undoubtedly a real fact, based upon statements that have been made in my court during the past three months by defendants, both men and women, who have pleaded guilty to that crime, and in a sense it is both interstate and international.