which is, of coarse, the most moral thing in the world. The subject was investigated in England and it was shown that not one of the stories told in this cause there had any foundation in fact.[1] So far as I know, no authentic verification of the story in any of its forms has ever been made. And yet it was the stock in trade of the professional moralists and was employed by them in two continents to generate that hysteria without which they cannot carry on their reforms. It was repeated and accepted—that is all, and to doubt it was to make oneself particeps criminis, a sort of accessory after the fact.
XLIX
It is a subject which only the student of morbid
psychology, I suppose, can illuminate properly, but
I fancy he would find somewhere a significance in
the phrase "white slave," when acted upon by minds
that had never been refined enough to imagine any
but the grossest of objective crimes, and out of all
this there arose a new conception of the prostitute
quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She
was no longer the ruined and abandoned thing she
once was, too vile for any contact with the virtuous
and respectable; she no longer occupied even the
sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and
Lecky in our own time figured her; she was not even
that daughter of joy whose dalliance is the secret
- ↑ "The Truth About the White Slave Traffic," by Teressa Billington-Greig. The English Review, June, 1913.
