About the same time, at a session of the National Social Purity Congress held in Baltimore, the following statement was made: “Of the 230,000 erring girls in this country, over half have been snared or sold into their lives of shame. Their average life is five years. Forty-six thousand are carted out to Potters Field every year. Over one hundred American homes have to be desolated every day to recruit the ranks of shame. Isn’t it time for somebody to try to save these girls from falling into those dens of iniquity? Twenty million Christians can rescue 230,000 erring girls, or surely the religion of Jesus Christ is a failure.” Terrible happenings, as for instance the murder of Ruth Cruger of New York in 1917, and similar cases in February and March, 1919, have disclosed that gangs of white slave traders still exist in America and do a flourishing business. The prices paid to agents depend upon the girl’s youth and beauty, ranging from $20 to $1000, and even more. The enormous and thoroughly organized traffic in girl-children in England was exposed by the revelations of the “Pall Mall Gazette,” which roused the people to earnest efforts against this commerce and secured the formation of the “Society for the Prevention of Traffic in English Girls.” In giving details of this traffic the paper said: “London, the great metropolis of Christian England, the largest city of ancient and modern times, is acknowledged by statisticians and sociologists to be the point where crime, vice, despair, and misery are found in their deepest depth and greatest diversity. Not Babylon of old, whose name is the synonym of all that is vile; not Rome, “Mother of Harlots,” not Corinth, in whose temple a thousand girls were kept for prostitution in service of God, not the most savage lands in all their barbarity have ever shown a thousandth part of the human woe to be found in the city of London, that culmination of modern Christian civilization. The nameless crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, the vileness of ancient Greece, which garnered its most heroic men, its most profound philosophers, are but amusements among young men of the highest rank in England; West End, the home of rank and wealth, of university education, being the central hell of this extended radius of vice.” As in many countries priests and police departments have failed to stop this heinous traffic in young girls, women must step in, and, by their votes, must place such legislators and police commissioners in office, that proper laws and their strict enforcement can be expected.