It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere a significance in the phrase “white slave,” when acted upon by minds that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any contact with the virtuous and respectable; she no longer occupied even the sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and Lecky in our own time figured her; she was not even that daughter of joy whose dalliance is the secret despair of moralists too prudent to imitate her abandon; she became the white slave, a shanghaied innocent kept under lock and key. And thousands and thousands of her sisters were said to be trapped every year in precisely the same way by the minions of a huge system, organized like any modern combination of rapacity and evil, with luxurious headquarters, presumably in some sky-scraper in New York, and its own attorneys, agents, kidnappers, crimpers, seducers, panderers and procuresses all over the land, a vast and complicated organization, with baffling ramifications in all the high and low places of the earth. The sensational newspapers referred to it as “the white slave syndicate,” as though it were as authentic as the steel trust or Standard Oil. It was even said that somewhere in New York the trust conducted a daily auction! With such a bizarre notion, the victims of their own psychic lasciviousness became obsessed. Raids and “revivals” must be inaugurated, a body of new laws enacted, and a horde of official inspectors, agents and detectives turned loose on the land, empowered to arrest any man and woman traveling together, and hold the man guilty of a felony.