I determined, therefore, that in one instance, at least, the truth as to this stock story should be discovered, and I requested Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, to make a complete investigation. He detailed to the task the best of his detectives; the inspectors of the federal government under the white slave laws were called in, and I asked two clergymen of my acquaintance who knew the social worker and said they believed him, to give what aid they could. Together they worked for weeks. They made an exhaustive investigation, and their conclusion, in which the clergymen joined, was that there was not the slightest ground for the silly tale. It was, of course, simply another variant of the story that had gone the rounds of the two continents, a story which had been somehow psychologically timed to meet the hysteria which the pulpit, the press, and the legislatures had displayed, as had the people, in one of those strange moral movements which now and then seize upon the public mind, and, in effect, make the whole population into a mob, which is, of coarse, the most moral thing in the world. The subject was investigated in England and it was shown that not one of the stories told in this cause there had any foundation in fact.[C] So far as I know, no authentic verification of the story in any of its forms has ever been made. And yet it was the stock in trade of the professional moralists and was employed by them in two continents to generate that hysteria without which they cannot carry on their reforms. It was repeated and accepted--that is all, and to doubt it was to make oneself _particeps criminis_, a sort of accessory after the fact. XLIX