near to protect her from insult. She may be subjected to the most trying
examinations in the presence of policemen with no matron to whom to
appeal. These things constantly happen everywhere save in Scandinavian
countries, where juries of women sit upon such cases and offer the
protection of their presence to the prisoners. Without such protection
even an innocent woman, made to appear a member of this despised class,
receives no consideration. A girl of fifteen recently acting in a South
Chicago theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who gradually
convinced her that he was respectable. Walking with him one evening to
the door of her lodging-house, the girl told him of her difficulties and
quite innocently accepted money for the payment of her room rent. The
following morning as she was leaving the house the milkman met her at
the door and asked her for the five dollars he had given her the night
before. When she said she had used it to pay her debt to the landlady,
he angrily replied that unless she returned the money at once he would
call a policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft. The girl, helpless
because she had already disposed of the money, was taken to court,
where, frightened and confused, she was unable to give a convincing
account of the interview the night before; except for the prompt
intervention on the part of a woman, she would either have been obliged
to put herself in the power of the milkman, who offered to pay her fine,
or she would have been sent to the city prison, not because the proof of
her guilt was conclusive, but because her connection with a cheap
theatre and the hour of the so-called offence had convinced the court
that she belonged to a class of women who are regarded as no longer
entitled to legal protection.

Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable women of Denver appealed
to a large political club of women against the action of the police who
were forcing them to register under the threat of arrest in order later