is six thousand dollars, as she ordinarily earns six dollars a week, which is three hundred dollars a year, or five per cent. on that sum.  A girl who sells drinks in a disreputable saloon, earning in commissions for herself twenty-one dollars a week, is capitalized at a value of twenty-two thousand dollars.  The report further estimates that the average girl who enters an illicit life under a protector or manager is able to earn twenty-five dollars a week, representing a capital of twenty-six thousand dollars.  In other words, a girl in such a life “earns more than four times as much as she is worth as a factor in the social and industrial economy, where brains, intelligence, virtue and womanly charm should bring a premium.”  The argument is specious in that it does not record the economic value of the many later years in which the honest girl will live as wife and mother, in contrast to the premature death of the woman in the illicit trade, but the girl herself sees only the difference in the immediate earning possibilities in the two situations.

Nevertheless the supply of girls for the white slave traffic so far falls below the demand that large business enterprises have been developed throughout the world in order to secure a sufficient number of victims for this modern market.  Over and over again in the criminal proceedings against the men engaged in this traffic, when questioned as to their motives, they have given the simple reply “that more girls are needed”, and that they were “promised big money for them”.  Although economic pressure as a reason for entering an illicit life has thus been brought out in court by the evidence in a surprising number of cases, there is no doubt that it is often exaggerated; a girl always prefers to think that economic pressure is the reason for her downfall, even when the immediate causes have been her love of pleasure, her desire for finery, or the influence of evil companions.  It is easy for her, as for all of us, to be deceived as to real motives.  In addition to this the wretched girl who has entered upon an illicit life finds the experience so terrible that, day by day, she endeavors to justify herself with the excuse that the money she earns is needed for the support of some one dependent upon her, thus following habits established by generations of virtuous women who cared for feeble folk.  I know one such girl living in a disreputable house in Chicago who has adopted a delicate child afflicted with curvature of the spine, whom she boards with respectable people and keeps for many weeks out of each year in an expensive sanitarium that it may receive medical treatment.  The mother of the child, an inmate of the house in which the ardent foster-mother herself lives, is quite indifferent to the child’s welfare and also rather amused at such solicitude.  The girl has persevered in her course for five years, never however allowing the little invalid to come to the house in which she and the mother live.  The same sort of devotion and self-sacrifice is often poured out upon the miserable man who in the beginning was responsible for the girl’s entrance into the life and who constantly receives her earnings.  She supports him in the luxurious life he may be living in another part of the town, takes an almost maternal pride in his good clothes and general prosperity, and regards him as the one person in all the world who understands her plight.