Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls Part 17

5. Wilfulness and love of ease and finery.

6. Insufficient wages in stores and factories.

7. Poverty, especially where children or parents are dependent. One girl sinned to pay her mother's funeral expenses.

8. A few are depraved from choice or heredity.

Doubtless other observers would add other causes, and yet others would put these eight causes here named in different order. But no one will dispute that these eight are constant and fruitful causes of the ruin of girls--these eight, and the greatest of these is the first, Parental Inefficiency.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS GO WRONG.

Within the last six days--it is August 10, 1909, today--the courts of Chicago have had to deal with two girls of only sixteen years who were placed in immoral resorts by young men, one of them only a boy of sixteen years.

A girl named McConnell, only sixteen years old, and a girl named Shubert, three years older, were taken by two Jews, Brodsky and Jacobson, to a resort kept by one Weinstein in South Chicago. The girls were lured from an amus.e.m.e.nt park in the suburb of Forest Park, where they were unattended by parents or friends--fair game for the white slaver.

Judge Walker in p.r.o.nouncing sentence upon Brodsky, who was fined $300 and sent six months to the house of correction, said that Brodsky's wife and child and his confession of his crime stood between him and the extreme penalty of the new law of Illinois against pandering.

"Pandering," said the judge to the prisoner, "is a most abhorrent crime.

A man of your attainments has sunk to the lowest depths when he hangs about parks seeking to betray innocent girls. A murder may be forgotten or the grief lessened, but the living death to which you sought to lead these girls is far worse than for their friends to have placed them in a black box and hauled them to the cemetery."

No words of judge or moralist are too strong to condemn the procurer and his master, the divekeeper. But what must be the feelings of the father and mother who thoughtlessly leave their young daughters exposed to these serpents? A mother bird is more watchful of her chicks or a cat of her kittens.

Only last Sunday afternoon Charles Kaufman, sixteen years old, of Milwaukee, was arrested by Detectives Magner and Dolan in Chicago for placing a sixteen-year-old Chicago girl, named Schwartz, in a resort in Milwaukee. He had lured her from her home, where he had been entertained for several days. Miss Mollie Schwartz, sister of the girl, said that Kaufman had beaten and threatened to kill her sister before he took her to Milwaukee and put her in the den of the white slaver. Kaufman freely admitted having lured the girl.

How terrible a story this is, involving two families, two cities, two states. What exposure could be more horrible than that a boy of sixteen, scarcely more than a child, takes a child of sixteen to another city and receives money for leaving her in a place of infamy?

But what must the father and mother of such a boy and the father and mother of such a girl, think of themselves and the way they have discharged their duty in bringing up their children?

And what must our cities think of themselves while they maintain red light districts to promote such crimes?

In winter the dance halls and in summer the amus.e.m.e.nt parks, and all the year long theaters and drinking resorts of all kinds, are very dangerous for young girls. At one time the superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls, at Geneva, found that eighty-seven per cent of her girls attributed their first wrong steps to temptations such as these.

Every good man and woman must do his or her whole duty against the hideous traffic in girlhood. Preachers, editors, teachers, physicians and rulers, being natural leaders of the people, have very great responsibility. But all else will follow if this end be gained--Parental Efficiency.

We close this chapter with the splendid editorial of Forrest Crissey in Woman's World for August, 1909.

SUMMER: THE SILLY SEASON.

Did you ever notice that, as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circ.u.mspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the b.u.t.terfly nature within her is given wing, inward and outward restraints drop from her almost as inevitably as her cold weather clothing, and she lets herself dance along on the soft breeze of sentiment with the lightness and freedom of a bit of thistledown.

This odd Summer bewitchment might be immensely funny were it not for the fact that its consequences, in thousands of cases, are serious, not to say tragic. The comic papers depend upon this dog-day epidemic of silliness as an unfailing source of excruciatingly amusing jokes and pictures. Summer resort and seash.o.r.e flirtations--what would the "comics" do without them when the mercury creeps high in the slender tube of the thermometer?

In the language of the sportsman, the Summer is everywhere recognized as the "open season" for the hunting of hearts and the pursuit of romance.

The girl who is her own chaperone and protector allows herself a lat.i.tude of unconventionally in the period of Summer outings, of vacations and excursions, of moons.h.i.+ne and frolic, which she would not think of permitting herself at another season. Romance is in the air, and even the careful and well-reared girl finds herself under its spell.

What is the result? Thousands of half-baked romances ending in Gretna Green marriages are the invariable harvest of this season of Summer silliness; marriages which bring suffering and bitter repentance and a tragic climax in the divorce courts--if they do not come to a worse ending.

Wherever the prow of an excursion boat pushes its way through the waters, wherever crowds of young people mingle in the pursuit of pleasure, there are hatched the romances which spell heartbreak and unhappiness. Every Summer furnishes thousands upon thousands of these cases. They are "down in the books"--one entry in the books at the Gretna Green, the runaway marriage headquarters, and the other in the divorce courts.

But there is another and a darker side to this matter of Summer silliness. Not long ago, in the Woman's World, Mrs. Ophelia L. Amigh, superintendent of the Illinois State Training School for Girls, at Geneva, Illinois, warned our readers that the runaway marriage is a favorite trick of the White Slaver. Mrs. Amigh knows what she is talking about when she says this. The White Slaver haunts the excursion boat, makes love to the girl whose head is turned with silly notions about romantic courts.h.i.+ps and marriages; he takes her to a Justice of the Peace or a "marrying parson" of the excursion resort type, and a ceremony is performed. Then they go to the big city and she is sold into a slavery worse than death! This sounds sensational, but it has happened so many times that it is a tame and threadbare tale to those who know the dark things of metropolitan life, the black and ugly secrets of the Under World.

Mothers should wake up to the fact that of all times daughters most need their strongest warnings and their most devoted care during the season of Summer silliness, of vacations and excursions, of unconventional meetings with young men under the easy familiarity of fun and frolic and a general "good time." And to the girl who has no mother at hand thus to warn her; take it from us that as your own chaperone you must recognize the silly season as your period of special peril, as the time when it is insidiously easy to relax your vigilance, to let down the protecting bars of strict social conventionality and to give yourself a little lat.i.tude in the matter of "harmless flirtation."

The only safe way is to be just a little more particular about the acquaintances you form during the silly season than at any other time.

E. A. B.

CHAPTER XX.

CHICAGO'S WHITE SLAVE MARKET--THE "LEVEE."

It is no pleasure to me to impeach my city, but it is false patriotism to allow the crimes of one's own country to go without rebuke. We are responsible for the evil that we have power to abolish. It is the duty of a patriotic preacher to lash the sins of his people till they are lashed out of existence.

One afternoon last summer Captain Wood of the Twenty-second street police station, who has always taken splendid care of our missionaries, told me that Jesus did not try to destroy the "levee" in Jerusalem, but forgave the repentant woman who washed his feet with her tears. That evening a Jew who was born and brought up in Jerusalem came to help us in our street meeting. I asked him publicly if there is any "levee,"

that is, a vice district, in Jerusalem. He said that the Arabs would not tolerate one such house of shame but would burn it down before morning.

Mr. Archibald Forder, for seventeen years a pioneer missionary in the interior of Arabia, says that among the Arabs this vice is unknown--"and a great big UNKNOWN it is."

Rev. Dr. Spencer Lewis, for many years a missionary in China, said when he preached with us in midnight Chicago, that even heathen China, which is very impure, does not obtrude vice as does Chicago.

In New York City Mayor Low broke up the "tenderloin" some years ago, and though vice is shamefully abundant and flagrant in that metropolis, the city government no longer gives the white slave traders a practical license to commit their crimes, by setting apart a portion of the city where they may operate with impunity.

In Philadelphia, when three of us conferred with Mr. Gibboney, secretary of the Law and Order Society, concerning a proposed exploration of a questionable district, one of the questions immediately raised was how we might gain our liberty if arrested in a raid on an immoral resort which we might be investigating. This was a vital and serious question, in Philadelphia. There vice is a thousand times too abundant, but it is contemptible, suspicious, secluded and afraid.

In Chicago our politicians have set apart several districts for the traffickers in slaves. The traders in girls are public, bold, defiant.

They feel clean, almost virtuous, after the city hall and a deluded preacher or two have given them an immunity bath--provided only the fiction of segregation is preserved.

MAYOR A COWARD.

Mr. Gibboney called the former mayor of Philadelphia a coward, because the mayor expressed his desire to segregate vicious resorts, but not in his own neighborhood--but among the poor and helpless. Let the advocates of segregation in Chicago propose to put these resorts on Michigan avenue and Prairie avenue, where certain advocates of this shameful policy live, or in the vicinity of Mayor Busse's residence. Then we can at least believe in their sincerity and manliness. But as it is, they curse the children of the poor by protecting these resorts in districts where the poor must live.

Former State's Attorney Healy asked former Mayor Dunne why the Italian, Jewish and negro children near Twenty-second street have not the same right to a decent environment as Mayor Dunne's own children in Edgewater. Why have not the little children on Archer avenue the same right to grow up in a decent neighborhood, that the little girl has who puts her arms around Mayor Busse's neck and calls him "Uncle Fred"?

A FRIGHTENED GIRL.

I have seen with my own eyes a young girl under seventeen years of age, a member of Immanuel Baptist Church, running like a frightened gazelle, to her home near Twenty-second street, to avoid insult on the public streets, from the thousands of young men who are encouraged to throng that district for immoral purposes. She ran to her home for this reason for three or four years. I lifted my hat in reverence to such a girl.

But, Oh, how I felt the shame of the city and of the churches near her home, that permitted conditions that put a good girl to tests like this.

I afterward talked face to face with her mother.