only moved all Great Britain but it was the beginning of an agitation for the raising of the age of consent all through the United States, and did a world of good in the better protection of girlhood. This healthful agitation took organized form in the W. C. T. U. convention in Philadelphia in 1886. Dr. Parkhurst's crusade has borne fruit already in a notable advance in New York legislation. A law has been passed and has been signed by Governor Morton making the age of consent eighteen years, and the penalty for violation, if in the first degree, imprisonment of not more than twenty years; if in the second degree, imprisonment of not more than ten years.

There is room for improvement in Pennsylvania's law. The age of consent here is sixteen years. A girl of that age cannot legally sell her toys; her consent to a virtuous marriage would not be valid. But she can legally consent to her own pollution, and if the villain who takes advantage of her can make a show of proving that she did not resist to the last limit of her physical strength, the law justifies him and he goes out scot-free. There is manifest room for improvement here. So there is in still another place. The penalty for violation of the age-of-consent law is fairly severe. Forcible violation of a maiden over sixteen years of age, or violation of a girl under sixteen, with or without her consent, is construed as rape, and is punishable with as much as one thousand dollars fine and fifteen years' imprisonment in solitary confinement. But if by hook or by crook any villain can persuade a child sixteen years and one day old to consent to her own dishonor, the crime is simply fornication, and the extreme penalty is one hundred dollars fine. The fine would be the same if a man were convicted of carnal relations with a hardened prostitute. There is a difference between persuading or compelling a virtuous girl of sixteen years and one day old to yield herself to pollution, and indulging in criminal intimacy with a public prostitute who offers her body for hire and solicits its use. But our law recognizes no difference. The law should be so amended as to define degrees of the crime of fornication, and attach imprisonment and not simply a fine to guilt of the first degree. The law as it now stands is an invitation to sin.

Another help in the dissipation of the evil would be the execution of the laws that we already have. The superintendent of our police force claims that there are no laws adequate to the closing of our brothels. The Act of March 31, 1860, reads: "If any person shall keep and maintain a common bawdy house or place for the practice of fornication,

or shall knowingly let or demise a house or part thereof to be so kept, he shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction be sentenced to pay a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and to undergo an imprisonment not exceeding two years." The law would seem explicit enough. But it is only fair to recognize the great difficulty of producing evidence that is satisfactory to our courts of law. The law against massage parlors, for example, in Chicago, would seem sufficiently clear. They are simply houses of prostitution, which the law fosters rather than checks. Policemen have procured evidence against them by taking the "treatment." But the criminal code of Illinois says that no person can be convicted of a crime where the witnesses to the crime have been guilty of participating in the offence in order to procure the evidence necessary to convict.

We may recognize, then, the extreme difficulty of furnishing satisfactory evidence. It would seem as if open solicitation from doors and windows, a laying hold on strange men passing, and apparent efforts to pull them into the house, would be some sort of evidence. This sort of proof any one who wishes may secure by a visit to the streets where the houses swarm. But if this is not convicting evidence, and if one is not permitted to enter a house and secure further proof-if the evil must go on with the open and avowed cognizance of the police department, at least we should be delivered from the feeling that it goes on under police patronage. That such patronage exists one is apt to conclude, when he finds such houses fairly nesting under the eaves of police stations, or when he stands and watches policemen lolling against the open windows conversing with the abandoned inmates of the Bainbridge Street houses, or when he sees the policemen of the eighth district station house playing familiar with the prostitutes of Canton Street, or when he observes a policeman standing for half an hour at a time talking with the street-walkers on Eighth and Ninth Streets. All of this it has been my painful privilege to observe. I do not say that our police department profits by the impure lives of our lost women. But all signs indicate that if our police should undertake to join in prayer with us that the social evil might be abolished, the amen would stick in their throats. A little more diligent use of our police power would be an amazing help in mitigating this evil.

The best mitigation, probably, must come from our homes. Parents have been criminally negligent. Ignorant innocence leads most girls astray. A prudish silence lands many a girl in the brothel and provides her customers as

well. It ought to be possible to impart to our children some instruction about these most important relations of life, without mantling the cheeks of parent or child with a blush. It is little short of criminal to send our young people into the midst of the excitements and temptations of a great city with no more preparation than if they were going to live in paradise.

And I cannot escape the conviction that women hold in their hands the key to the solution of this problem. They are cruel in their severity toward their fallen sisters, but they are criminally indulgent toward the men who cause their fall. The woman sinner is reprobated. But the man sinner is made a hero, is welcomed into respectable homes, is permitted to marry a pure girl and make her the mother of children, cursed before they are born with lecherous appetites. Let woman's attitude be changed. Let the fallen sister be won back to virtue by a kindly pity that can forget the past and say as the Saviour did, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." And let the godless betrayer be spurned as he deserves; be turned down as Colonel Breckinridge has been turned down by the women of Kentucky and of the entire nation. Then you will have put to work the most potent of forces for the suppression of the social evil.

As a Christian minister, I do not need to say that I believe that a more diligent use should be made of the gospel for the reclamation of the lost. It has been said, I know, that there is no use in attempting to reform a fallen woman. The power of God did it nineteen hundred years ago; it can do it to-day; it does do it. Mr. Crittenton's converts stay. General Booth reports only a small percentage of failures. The earnest workers in the rescue homes of Philadelphia are encouraged by the results they see. But they need a more diligent and general support from Christian people. We ought for the sake of our own homes to feel deeply about it. Mr. Crittenton estimates that there are two hundred and thirty-two thousand prostitutes in our country to-day. Their average life is five years. Every five years, then, two hundred thousand pure girls must be dishonored and spoiled to supply the demand of lust!/Ancient and heathen Athens used to go into mourning because every nine years, seven youths and seven maidens had to be furnished for the devouring Minotaur of Crete. How ought we, then, as a nation to prostrate ourselves before God in seeking deliverance from this monstrous evil that every year devours forty thousand of our pure maidens and pollutes two hundred thousand of our pure youths!

THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY.

BY PROF. FRANK PARSONS.

III.

EVILS OF THE PRESENT SYSTEM (continued).

In the fourth place the Western Union defrauds the public by watering its stock. This process, so much admired by corporations of every class, renders it impossible to reduce rates to a just level, the level of a fair remuneration for the labor involved and the capital actually invested. The people must pay a profit on a large amount of capital that never was invested and on another large amount that was invested but is dead, as well as on the capital really alive in the plant and entitled to sustenance. And if the people wish to buy the telegraph lines they will have to pay for all the millions of water just the same as if they represented a real investment. A corporation may spend a million building its plant, issue five millions of stock, put its charges high enough to pay dividends on it all, and if the government exercises its power of eminent domain the courts will award the corporation five millions compensation, because the stock, or part of it, has been sold to persons who did not have anything to do with the overissue of stock and who are deemed by the law to be "innocent purchasers," although in nine cases out of ten they knew all the facts of the case. George Gould testified recently that corporations have to water their stock, or capitalists will not invest. This is not true of all capitalists, but the statement shows how innocent the majority of those who put their money into corporations really are.

The Western Union reports its stock at 95 millions, and bonds 15 millions-110 millions of capitalization It claims 190,000 miles of line, 800,000 miles of wire, and 21,360 offices. The figures, however, are false. Three-fourths of the offices are railway offices maintained by the railways. And the mileage appears to have been obtained by adding together the mileage of all the lines the Western Union has ever built, bought or leased, a large portion of which has long since ceased to exist, and another portion, consisting

of useless parallels constructed on purpose to be bought by the Western Union, remains on its hands as mere lumber. The total land plant in actual operation under Western Union control is probably less than 100,000 miles of poles and 400,000 miles of wire, and the larger part of this is not in good condition. The total value of the plant, offices and all, appears to be about 20 millions. Subtracting the 15 millions of bonds we have 5 millions of property which the stockholders own after paying their debts-5 millions as the total tangible basis of 95 millions of stock. The evidence of all this is voluminous and convincing. Let us examine it.

In 1860 a telegraph line was built from Brownsville, Neb., 1,100 miles to Salt Lake City. Charles M. Stebbins, a well known telegraph builder constructed 475 miles on the eastern end of the line, for · $67 a mine. The western end was more expensive, being built according to Mr. Stebbins, at a large profit to the contractors. The whole line cost $147,000, overcharge and all. On this expenditure $1,000,000 of stock was issued in the name of the Pacific Telegraph Company, which was owned entirely by men prominent in the Western Union. This Pacific Company was then absorbed by the Western Union, 2 millions of Western Union stock being issued to pay for the 1 million of Pacific stock which was itself about all water. After this the stock of the Western Union was trebled, so that an original expenditure of $147,000 (half of which was itself a fraud) came to represent 6 millions of Western Union stock. The Western Union is not satisfied with ordinary homeopathic dilution of capital; they believe in the high potencies. The most amusing part of it all, to the Western Union folks, is the fact that the expenditure of 147,000 was nearly three times repaid by a bonus of $40,000 a year from the United States government for a period of ten years3-$400,000 in all, or more than 5 times the actual value of the whole line, $400,000 plus $6,000,000 of stock, or $6,400,000 that ought not to have cost, and was not worth, over $75,000-84 parts water to 1 of solid.

In 1884 the Senate Committee on Postoffices and Postroads reported as follows on Western Union water:

"In 1863 its capital stock was only $3,000,000, and even of this amount (small as it seems in comparison with the present [1884] capital stock of $80,000,000) it is quite certain that at least five-sixths consisted of what is known in stock manipulations as water. The original line of the Western Union was from New York to Louisville, via Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, and was constructed at a cost of about $150,000. It early acquired, by purchase at very low rates, the property of embarrassed Western telegraph companies owning lines from Buffalo to Milwaukee, and from Cleveland to

1 Mr. Charles M. Stebbins told the Washburn Com. in 1870 that Western Union stock had had eleven parts of water added to it (H. Rep, 114, p. 82), and it now seems to have 18 parts of water to 1 of solid.

Sen. Rep. 577, pp. 4, 5. Speech of Senator Hill in the U. S. Senate, Jan. 14, 1884. The Voice, May 30, '95.

• Ibid.