their victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested and
prosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently and
illegally detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturally
through the line of legal action that the most striking revelations of
the white slave traffic have come. For the sake of convenience, we may
divide this legal action into those cases dealing with the international
trade, those with the state and interstate traffic, and the regulations
with which the municipality alone is concerned.

First in value to the white slave commerce is the girl imported from
abroad who from the nature of the case is most completely in the power
of the trader. She is literally friendless and unable to speak the
language and at last discouraged she makes no effort to escape. Many
cases of the international traffic were recently tried in Chicago and
the offenders convicted by the federal authorities. One of these cases,
which attracted much attention throughout the country, was of Marie, a
French girl, the daughter of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor that
he was obliged to take her from her convent school at the age of twelve
years. He sent her to Paris, where she became a little household drudge
and nurse-maid, working from six in the morning until eight at night,
and for three years sending her wages, which were about a franc a day,
directly to her parents in the Breton village. One afternoon, as she was
buying a bottle of milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conversation
by a young man who invited her into a little patisserie where, after
giving her some sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur Paret,
who was gathering together a theatrical troupe to go to America. Paret
showed her pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed and
announcements of their coming tour, and Marie felt much flattered when
it was intimated that she might join this brilliant company. After
several clandestine meetings to perfect the plan, she left the city with