the land to illustrate the immorality of slavery. I suspect that it was not altogether true in its dramatic details; surely no such number of lovely and innocent creatures were permitted to fling themselves into the Mississippi from the hurricane decks of steamboats as the repetitions and variations of that tale would indicate; it would have been altogether too harrowing to the voyagers, some few of whom at least must have been virtuous, and journeyed up and down on peaceful moral missions of one sort and another. No doubt it was symbolic of a very wrong condition, and I suppose that is what justified it in the minds of those who told it over and over without the trouble of verifying its essential details. It was a good story, and in the hands of Mr. Howells it made a good poem, and it made surely a pretty good play, which, could it enthrall me now as once it did by its enchantments, I should like to see again to-night! But I doubt if I could sit through any one of the plays that have been written or assuredly are to be written about the white slaves of to-day. The plot has been right at hand in the tale that has gone the rounds of two continents, and resembles that elder story so closely in its incidents of abduction that I presume the adapter of its striking title to the exigencies of current reform must have been old enough to recognize its essential similarity to the parent tradition. It was told in books, it served to ornament sermons and addresses on sociological subjects, and it has, I believe, already been done in novels that are among the best sellers. The newspapers printed it with all its horrific details; it was so precisely the sort of pornography to satisfy the American sense of news--a tale of salacity for the prurient, palliated and rendered aseptic by efforts of officials, heated to the due degree of moral indignation, to bring the concupiscent to justice. I had been in England, too, when the subject was under discussion there, and this same story was told to such effect that Parliament, as hysterical as one of our own state legislatures, had been led to restore the brutality of flogging. It was always the same: some poor girl had been abducted, borne off to a brothel, ruined by men employed for that purpose, turned over to aged satyrs, and never heard of more. Of course there were variations; sometimes the girl was lured away in a motor car, sometimes by a request for assistance to some lady who had fainted, sometimes by other ruses. The story was always told vehemently, but on the authority of some inaccessible third person, to doubt or question whom was to be suspected of sympathy with the outrage. But however high the station, or unimpeachable the character of the informants, anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the rules of evidence, unless he were especially credulous, would have reason to doubt the tales. In Toledo it had its vogue. It went the rounds of