It is not even clear that all those who have talked about the "White
Slave Traffic" have been quite sure what they meant by the term. Some
people, indeed, have seemed to think that it meant prostitution in
general. That is, of course, an absurd misapprehension. We are
concerned with a trade which flourishes on prostitution, but that
trade is not itself the trade or (as some prefer to call it) the
profession of prostitutes. Indeed, the prostitute, under ordinary
conditions and unharassed by persecution, is in many respects anything
but a slave. She is much less a slave than the ordinary married woman.
She is not fettered in humble dependence on the will of a husband from
whom it is the most difficult thing in the world to escape; she is
bound to no man and free to make her own terms in life; while if she
should have a child, that child is absolutely her own, and she is not
liable to have it torn from her arms by the hands of the law. Apart
from arbitrary and accidental circumstances, due to the condition of
social feeling, the prostitute enjoys a position of independence which
the married woman is still struggling to obtain.
The White Slave Traffic, therefore, is not prostitution; it is the
_commercialised exploitation of prostitutes_. The independent
prostitute, living alone, scarcely lends herself to the White Slave
trader. It is on houses of prostitution, where the less independent and
usually weaker-minded prostitutes are segregated, that the traffic is
based.
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