To Mothers

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Apr 1, 1909

MR. EDWIN W. SIMS, United States District Attorney, has for several years been studying the “white slave traffic” in America. He declares that traffic to be an organized system, with branches and distributing centers in nearly all the large cities, and this is what he has to say to the mothers of girls:—

There are, to put it mildly, hundreds, yes, thousands, of trusting mothers in the smaller cities, the towns, the villages, and the farming communities of the United States, who believe that their daughters are “getting on fine” in the city, and too busy to come home on a visit or “to write much,” while the fact is that these daughters have been swept into the gulf of white slavery—the worst doom that can befall a woman. The mother who has allowed her girl to go to the city to work should find out what kind of life that girl is living,—and find out from some other source than the girl herself, no matter how good and fine a girl she has been at home, and how complete the confidence she has always inspired,—find out how she is living, what kind of association she is keeping. Mothers, take nothing for granted. You owe it to yourself and to your daughter, and it is not disloyalty to go beyond her own words for evidence that the wolves of the city have not dragged her from safe paths. It is, instead, the highest form of loyalty to her.

Such a warning from one who knows should not pass unheeded by any mother. Mr. Sims substantiates his declarations with details that are unprintable here.