In view of what I have learned in the course of the recent investigation and prosecution of the "white slave" traffic, I can say, in all sincerity, that if I lived in the country and had a young daughter I would go any length of hardship and privation myself rather than allow her to go into the city to work or to study--unless that studying were to be done in the very best type of an educational institution where the girl students were always under the closest protection. The best and the surest way for parents of girls in the country to protect them from the clutches of the "white slaver" is to keep them in the country. But if circumstances should seem to compel a change from the country to the city, then the only safe way is to go with them into the city; but even this last has its disadvantages from the fact that, in that case the parents would themselves be unfamiliar with the usages and pitfalls of metropolitan life, and would not be able to protect their daughters as carefully as if they had spent their own lives in the city. One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character. And it is hardly too much to say that a week does not pass in Chicago without the publication in some daily paper of the details of a police court case in which the ice cream parlor of this type is the scene of a regrettable tragedy. The only safe rule is to keep away from places of this kind, whether in a big city like Chicago or in a large country town. I believe that there are good grounds for the suspicion that the ice cream parlor, kept by the foreigner in the large country town, is often a recruiting station, and a feeder for the "white slave" traffic. It is certain that this is the case in the big city, and many evidences point to the conclusion that there is a kind of free-masonry among these foreign proprietors of refreshment parlors which would make it entirely natural and convenient for the proprietor of a city establishment of this kind, who is entangled in the "white slave" trade, to establish relations with a man in the same business and of the same nationality in the country town. I do not mean to intimate by this that all the ice cream and fruit "saloons" having foreign-born proprietors are connected with the "white slave" traffic--but some of them are, and this fact is sufficient to cause all careful and thoughtful parents of young girls to see that they do not frequent these places.