The prices paid to agents depend upon the girl's youth and beauty, ranging from $20 to $1000, and even more.
The enormous and thoroughly organized traffic in girl-children in England was exposed by the revelations of the "Pall Mall Gazette," which roused the people to earnest efforts against this commerce and secured the formation of the "Society for the Prevention of Traffic in English Girls." In giving details of this traffic the paper said:
"London, the great metropolis of Christian England, the largest city of ancient and modern times, is acknowledged by statisticians and sociologists to be the point where crime, vice, despair, and misery are found in their deepest depth and greatest diversity. Not Babylon of old, whose name is the synonym of all that is vile; not Rome, "Mother of Harlots," not Corinth, in whose temple a thousand girls were kept for prostitution in service of God, not the most savage lands in all their barbarity have ever shown a thousandth part of the human woe to be found in the city of London, that culmination of modern Christian civilization. The nameless crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, the vileness of ancient Greece, which garnered its most heroic men, its most profound philosophers, are but amusements among young men of the highest rank in England; West End, the home of rank and wealth, of university education, being the central hell of this extended radius of vice."
As in many countries priests and police departments have failed to stop this heinous traffic in young girls, women must step in, and, by their votes, must place such legislators and police commissioners in office, that proper laws and their strict enforcement can be expected.
In Germany the "white slave trade" is practically unknown. For many years two women associations have existed,—a Protestant and a Catholic,—whose representatives, recognizable by distinct arm bands, patrol all important railway stations, in order to furnish correct information to incoming girls who are looking for positions, and to escort them to the homes of the associations, where they may stay till respectable places have been found for them.
It is obvious, that the problems connected with the temperance question, child-labor and the white slave trade are of vital importance to every woman and mother. Salvation must come through the woman's ballot. They must defend themselves and their children as men have done: by co-operating in the elections, by controlling those that make the laws, and by controlling those who are appointed to enforce them.
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A few words may be said in regard to the claim that woman would cease to vote "after the novelty of her new
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