related to neurotic women, to prurient and sentimental men, and in country churches to gaping yokels curious about "life" in the city. It was easy to understand the effect it would have on minds starved and warped by Puritanism, ready for any sensation, especially one that might stimulate their moral emotions, and give them one more excuse for condemning the police. No wonder certain of the elect brethren in gratitude for having been told just what they wished to hear had contributed hundreds of dollars, that the "work" might go on!
I determined, therefore, that in one instance, at least, the truth as to this stock story should be discovered, and I requested Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, to make a complete investigation. He detailed to the task the best of his detectives; the inspectors of the federal government under the white slave laws were called in, and I asked two clergymen of my acquaintance who knew the social worker and said they believed him, to give what aid they could. Together they worked for weeks. They made an exhaustive investigation, and their conclusion, in which the clergymen joined, was that there was not the slightest ground for the silly tale.
It was, of course, simply another variant of the story that had gone the rounds of the two continents, a story which had been somehow psychologically timed to meet the hysteria which the pulpit, the press, and the legislatures had displayed, as had the people, in one of those strange moral movements which now and then seize upon the public mind, and, in effect, make the whole population into a mob,
