readers find themselves no longer mere bewildered spectators of a given
social wrong, but have become conscious of their own hypocrisy in regard
to it, and they realize that a veritable horror, simply because it was
hidden, had come to seem to them inevitable and almost normal.

Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness regarding the social evil
are found in contemporary literature, for while the business of
literature is revelation and not reformation, it may yet perform for the
men and women now living that purification of the imagination and
intellect which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror.

Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary processes, we have learned to
talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility
of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider
outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled
with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience
gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be
constrained to eradicate this ancient evil!




CHAPTER II

RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS


At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that,
first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be called
white slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procure