her and it is not disloyalty to go beyond her own words for evidence that the wolves of the city have not dragged her from safe paths. It is, instead, the highest form of loyalty to her. Again, there is, in another particular, a remarkable and impressive sameness in the stories related by these wretched girls. In the narratives of nearly all of them is a passage describing how some man of their acquaintance had offered to “help” them to a good position in the city, to “look after” them, and to “take an interest” in them. After listening to this confession from one girl after another, hour after hour, until you have heard it repeated perhaps fifty times, you feel like saying to every mother in the country: Do not trust any man who pretends to take an interest in your girl if that interest involves her leaving your own roof. Keep her with you. She is far safer in the country than in the big city, but if, go to the city she must, then go with her yourself; if that is impossible, place her with some woman who is your friend, not hers; no girl can safely go to a great city to make her own way who is not under the eye of a trustworthy woman who knows the ways and dangers of city life. Above all, distrust the “protection,” the “good offices” of any man who is not a family friend known to be clean and honorable and above all suspicion. Of course all the examinations to which I have referred have been conducted for the specific purpose of finding girls who have been brought into this country from other lands in defiance of the federal statute, passed by Congress February 20, 1907. This act declares that any person who shall “keep, maintain, support or harbor” any alien woman for immoral purposes within three years after her arrival in this country shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be liable to a fine of $5,000 and imprisonment for five years at the discretion of the court. When the department of justice at Washington decided that this law was being violated, the United States district attorney at Chicago was instructed to take such action as was necessary to apprehend the violators of the act and convict them. One of the first steps required was the raiding of the various dives and houses of ill-fame and the arrest of the girl inmates as well as the arrest of the keepers and the procurers of the white slaves. While the federal prosecution is officially concerned only with those cases involving the importation of girls from other countries—there being no authority under the present national statutes for the federal government to prosecute those concerned in securing white slaves who are natives of this country—it was inevitable that the examination of scores of these inmates, captured in raids upon the dives, should bring to officers and agents of the department of justice an immense fund of information regarding the methods of the white slave traders in recruiting for the traffic from home fields.