fling themselves into the Mississippi from the hurricane decks of steamboats as the repetitions and variations of that tale would indicate; it would have been altogether too harrowing to the voyagers, some few of whom at least must have been virtuous, and journeyed up and down on peaceful moral missions of one sort and another. No doubt it was symbolic of a very wrong condition, and I suppose that is what justified it in the minds of those who told it over and over without the trouble of verifying its essential details. It was a good story, and in the hands of Mr. Howells it made a good poem, and it made surely a pretty good play, which, could it enthrall me now as once it did by its enchantments, I should like to see again to-night!
But I doubt if I could sit through any one of the plays that have been written or assuredly are to be written about the white slaves of to-day. The plot has been right at hand in the tale that has gone the rounds of two continents, and resembles that elder story so closely in its incidents of abduction that I presume the adapter of its striking title to the exigencies of current reform must have been old enough to recognize its essential similarity to the parent tradition. It was told in books, it served to ornament sermons and addresses on sociological subjects, and it has, I believe, already been done in novels that are among the best sellers. The newspapers printed it with all its horrific details; it was so precisely the sort of pornography to satisfy the American sense of news—a tale of salacity for the prurient, palliated and rendered aseptic by efforts of
