thousand prostitutes. Multitudes of these are dedicated to such a life
in childhood, given over to it, in some cases by their parents and not
unfrequently kept in connection with the temples. Thousands are searched
for and persuaded and entrapped by old women, whose main business it is
to supply the market. We know of at least one village where beautiful
children, who have been decoyed or purchased from their parents by
these prostitute-hunters, are taken to be reared and trained for the
profession. In Bombay there is actually a caste in which the girls are
in early childhood "married to the dagger," or, in other words,
dedicated to a life of prostitution. In some of the cities old men are
employed as touts to secure customers for the women, who remain in their
haunts, thus seducing and leading into vice crowds of lads and young men
who might otherwise have escaped.

Such suffering, shame, cruelty, and wreckage belong to this crime that
one's heart bleeds to think of the tens of thousands doomed, not by
their own choice, but by the wicked greed of unnatural parents or the
crafty cunning of wicked decoys to such a gehenna, without the least
power to extricate themselves from its torment and its shame.

With so much pity left upon the earth to weep over human woes, with so
much courage still to hack and hew a path through grim forests and
morasses of suffering, there must, and shall, be found "a way out."




CHAPTER XII.

THE CRIMINALS.