The methods employed to secure city girls must be much more subtle and complicated than those employed with the less sophisticated country girl.  Although the city girl, once procured, is later allowed more freedom than is accorded either to a country girl or to an immigrant girl, every effort is made to demoralize her completely before she enters the life.  Because she may, at any moment, escape into the city which she knows so well, it is necessary to obtain her inner consent.  Those whose profession it is to procure girls for the white slave trade apparently find it possible to decoy and demoralize most easily that city girl whose need for recreation has led her to the disreputable public dance hall or other questionable places of amusement.

Gradually those philanthropic agencies that are endeavoring to be of service to the girls learn to know the dangers in these places.  Many parents are utterly indifferent or ignorant of the pleasures that their children find for themselves.  From the time these children were five years old, such parents were accustomed to see them take care of themselves on the street and at school, and it seems but natural that when the children are old enough to earn money, they should be able to find their own amusements.

The girls are attracted to the unregulated dance halls not only by a love of pleasure but by a sense of adventure, and it is in these places that they are most easily recruited for a vicious life.  Unfortunately there are three hundred and twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago, one hundred and ninety of them connect directly with saloons, while liquor is openly sold in most of the others.  This consumption of liquor enormously increases the danger to young people.  A girl after a long day’s work is easily induced to believe that a drink will dispel her lassitude.  There is plenty of time between the dances to persuade her, as the intermissions are long, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dances short, occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the halls are hot and dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water.  Often the entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arranged intermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has brought together.  After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer, who is often in league with the “spieler” who frequents the dance hall, is comparatively easy.  He assumes one of two roles, that of the sympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover.  In the character of the former, he tells “the down-trodden working girl” that her wages are a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her with higher wages if she will trust him.  He often makes allusions to the shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it “a shame that such a pretty girl cannot dress better.”  In the second role he apparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents, complaining that they want him to marry, “a society swell,” but that he really prefers a working girl like herself.  In either case he establishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl’s mind, through the excitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimate understanding and protection.