In every large city throughout the world thousands of women are so set
aside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered an
impropriety to speak the very word which designates them. Lecky calls
this type of woman "the most mournful and the most awful figure in
history": he says that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise
and fall, the eternal sacrifice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the
people." But evils so old that they are imbedded in man's earliest
history have been known to sway before an enlightened public opinion and
in the end to give way to a growing conscience, which regards them first
as a moral affront and at length as an utter impossibility. Thus the
generation just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the enormous upas
of slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race of man,"
although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives of man's
earliest warfare, even as this existing evil thus originated.

Those of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience in
regard to this twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself
and even more persistent, find a possible analogy between certain civic,
philanthropic and educational efforts directed against the very
existence of this social evil and similar organized efforts which
preceded the overthrow of slavery in America. Thus, long before slavery
was finally declared illegal, there were international regulations of
its traffic, state and federal legislation concerning its extension, and
many extra legal attempts to control its abuses; quite as we have the
international regulations concerning the white slave traffic, the state
and interstate legislation for its repression, and an extra legal power
in connection with it so universally given to the municipal police that
the possession of this power has become one of the great sources of
corruption in every American city.