The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effort
than any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely because
there is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personal
acquaintance with its victims; a distaste and distress that sometimes
leads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished Englishman has
recently written "that sober-minded people who, from motives of pity,
have looked the hideous evil full in the face, have often asserted that
nothing in their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a
loss of reason."

Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philanthropic effort is the more
remarkable because the average age of the recruits to prostitution is
between sixteen and eighteen years, the age at which girls are still
minors under the law in respect to all matters of property. We allow a
minor to determine for herself whether or not she will live this most
abominable life, although if she resolve to be a thief she will, if
possible, be apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a vagrant she
will be restrained; even if she become a professional beggar, she will
be interfered with; but the decision to lead this evil life, disastrous
alike to herself and the community, although well known to the police,
is openly permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment of weakness in a
girl and obtained her consent, although she may thereafter be in dire
need of help she is put outside all protection of the law. The courts
assume that such a girl has deliberately decided for herself and that
because she is not "of previous chaste life and character," she is lost
to all decency. Yet every human being knows deep down in his heart that
his own moral energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be judged fairly
by his hours of defeat, and that after revealing moments of weakness,
although shocked and frightened, he is the same human being, struggling