devoted to her and always kindly and good-natured. Perhaps it was
because he had been so long dependent upon a self-sacrificing woman that
it became easy for him to be dependent upon his wife, a girl whom he met
when he was temporarily acting as porter in a disreputable hotel.
Through his long familiarity with vice, and the fact that many of his
companions habitually lived upon the earnings of "their girls," he
easily consented that his wife should continue her life, and he
constantly accepted the money which she willingly gave him. After his
marriage he still lived in his mother's house and refused to take more
money from her, but she had no idea of the source of his income. One day
he called at the hotel, as usual, to ask for his wife's earnings, and in
a quarrel over the amount with the landlady of the house, he drew a
revolver and killed her. Although the plea of self-defense was urged in
the trial, his abominable manner of life so outraged both judge and jury
that he received the maximum sentence. His mother still insists that he
sincerely loved the girl, whom he so impulsively married and that he
constantly tried to dissuade her from her evil life. Certain it is that
Jim's wife and mother are both filled with genuine sorrow for his fate
and that in some wise the educational and social resources in the city
of his birth failed to protect him from his own lower impulses and from
the evil companionship whose influence he could not withstand. He is but
one of thousands of weak boys, who are constantly utilized to supply the
white slave trafficker with young girls, for it has been estimated that
at any given moment the majority of the girls utilized by the trade are
under twenty years of age and that most of them were procured when
younger. We cannot assume that the youths who are hired to entice and
entrap these girls are all young fiends, degenerate from birth; the
majority of them are merely out-of-work boys, idle upon the streets, who
readily lend themselves to these base demands because nothing else is
presented to them.