A priest who had worked at Paddington for more than 25 years had told him that agents of white slave dealers had been buying leases of houses to use for their business, and that one house had been consistently occupied by agents of the trafic for the last 20 years.
Sir George Middleton, First Church Estates Commissioner, quoted from a letter he had received from Miss Fitzgerald a reference to "Mr. Currie's very unfair motion," and pointed out that the Church owned in some degree or other no less than 30,000 houses in London, Wherever there was bad property on lease, the Commissioners tried to get the lessees to surrender.
In the last few years the Commissioners had spent £1,000,000 under conditions which would produce no return. They were building flats to let at 5s 6d a week.
Referring to Paddington, Sir George said: All kinds of wild' statements have been made. One was that an investigator found a girl chained up in the top storey of one of the Commissioners' flats. When that story was repeated to some high Scotland Yard officials, they laughed in one way, but discounted it by telling an even sadder story.
They said that there was no need to capture girls and chain them up for the white slave traffic, because conditions in London to-day were such that people go, many of them, of their own accord."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.