Marie has since married a man who wishes to protect her from the
influence of her old life, but although not yet twenty years old and
making an honest effort, what she has undergone has apparently so far
warped and weakened her will that she is only partially successful in
keeping her resolutions, and she sends each month to her parents in
France ten or twelve dollars, which she confesses to have earned
illicitly. It is as if the shameful experiences to which this little
convent-bred Breton girl was forcibly subjected, had finally become
registered in every fibre of her being until the forced demoralization
has become genuine. She is as powerless now to save herself from her
subjective temptations as she was helpless five years ago to save
herself from her captors.

Such demoralization is, of course, most valuable to the white slave
trader, for when a girl has become thoroughly accustomed to the life and
testifies that she is in it of her own free will, she puts herself
beyond the protection of the law. She belongs to a legally degraded
class, without redress in courts of justice for personal outrages.

Marie, herself, at the end of her third year in America, wrote to the
police appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to her
letter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there of
her own volition and that therefore he could do nothing for her. It is
easy to see why it thus becomes part of the business to break down a
girl's moral nature by all those horrible devices which are constantly
used by the owner of a white slave. Because life is so often shortened
for these wretched girls, their owners degrade them morally as quickly
as possible, lest death release them before their full profit has been
secured. In addition to the quantity of sacrificed virtue, to the bulk
of impotent suffering, which these white slaves represent, our