No more pitiable condition can be imagined than that of the helpless Indian women and girls who were devoted by their husbands and fathers to prostitution among vile whites. The northern Indians brought down to the Songish reserve at Victoria their young women, many of them girls from ten to fourteen years of age, and remained all summer as pimps and procurers.[46] Reports of American Indian agents along the Coast make frequent mention of this practice. In the interior there is less evidence of its existence, but wherever Indians had a chance to linger around towns, they became demoralized. Employes agencies prostituted Indian women or took them for concubines; the Superintendent of Washington Territory issued a circular warning all employes from such acts.[47] The results of prostitution are found in reports of physicians of the various agencies, who almost always speak of venereal diseases as common. It should very clearly be understood that these facts were not true of all tribes in like degree; the tribes in the interior were more robust physically and morally and farther removed from contamination. Nor should the chastity of all the individuals of a tribe be judged by specimens which hung about the towns. In the interior, particularly, it was probably true that "unchastity among Indians is the exception, as it is among the whites."[48] Everywhere, both north and south of the Boundary, Indian welfare was assailed by the liquor traffic, and everywhere the Government engaged in a less or more futile struggle to combat it. Many of the Indians undoubtedly believed, like an Indian orator at Ft. Simcoe, that they had a right to drink whiskey if they wanted to, especially so long as the white man made it,--and there were always white men ready to sell it.[49] Local government took little part in suppressing the trade in the United States, the work being regarded as belonging to the officials of the general Government. These were hindered by lack of summary powers, by the scarcity of jails, and by the reluctance of juries to convict. Only on the reservations were the powers of the agents ample, and even here they might, in part, be nullified by the planting of resorts on the edges. The whole power of Government in British Columbia, on the other hand, could be utilized for the punishment of offenders. Magistrates had summary powers, and conviction entailed heavy fines and, in the case of regular dealers, loss of license. But the magistrates had the care of immense districts, and the Indians were not localized as they were in the United States after the reservation system was completely established. Yet this form of lawlessness, in common with other forms, was better checked on the whole in British Columbia than in the territories.