Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls Part 20

It is not by authority of the people of Illinois that segregated districts are proclaimed, whereby a white slave market is established, and the most loathsome criminals of the world are invited to make commerce of American and alien girls.

AN UNPARDONABLE SIN.

Plato taught that the unpardonable sin is to betray a great public trust. What public trust is so great as the health and morals of the people? The old Roman law had at its foundation this motto: "The safety of the people is the supreme law." The Supreme Court of the United States has declared more than once: "No legislature can bargain away the public health or the public morals. The people themselves cannot do it, much less their servants." Stone vs. Mississippi, 101 U. S. Rep., 814-819.

A great lawyer has written: "Even if the legislature does attempt to give sanction and confer its authority upon any enterprise which is immoral in its nature or which results in immorality, then the Governor and the Judge have each an oath registered in heaven to declare such legislation void." Moral Law and Civil Law, p. 90.

SUPREME COURTS ARE UNSTAINED.

It is the settled doctrine of the highest courts, as voiced by the Supreme Court of California in the case of Pon vs. Wittman, in July, 1905, that:

"These houses are common or public nuisances. Their maintenance directly tends to corrupt and debase public morals, to promote vice, and to encourage dissolute and idle habits, and the suppression of nuisances of this character and having this tendency is one of the important duties of government."

But notwithstanding the unequivocal declarations of Supreme Courts, there are nearly always politicians whose political creed is learned from the white slave trader, and the serpentine woman who keeps the glittering vestibule of h.e.l.l. Such a mother of harlots, clothed in silks and decked in diamonds, can state the argument for regulation much more logically and eloquently than any policeman, politician, or rare misguided preacher (lineally descended from the Bishop of Winchester aforementioned) can state it for her benefit and profit.

Let us be careful that we be not numbered among those of whom it is written, "There were false prophets among the people."

The white slave traders, and all who wilfully or ignorantly aid and abet their abominable commerce in girls, are ardent advocates of segregation or some form of regulation--whereby they obtain a police status which enables them to exploit the helpless and foolish, and ignorant, and vicious to dispense alike to guilty men and innocent wives and babies, blindness, insanity, locomotor ataxia, abscesses, tumors, surgical operations and coffins.

To protect these loathsome resorts is like maintaining a thousand pest houses, not for purposes of quarantine, but with the sole result of advertising and spreading the pestilence.

THE SHAME OF BRUSSELS, INDIA AND HONG KONG.

In Brussels, where regulation was held to be perfect, and a model for other countries, English girls were found enslaved, and the chief of police resigned after being exposed as a partner with the white slave traders.

In India, regulation went the abhorrent length that an army circular memorandum, under authority of Sir Frederick, afterwards Lord Roberts, made the army itself a procurer of prost.i.tutes, saying: "It is necessary to have a sufficient number of women; to take care that they are sufficiently attractive; and to provide them with proper houses"--free quarters. When Dr. Kate Bushnell and Mrs. Andrew, two American ladies, exposed the frightful conditions existing, by authority, in India, Lord Roberts at first said that they spoke falsely, but afterwards said, when convicted of the truth, "I apologize to the ladies without reserve."

In Hong Kong, under regulation, government money was used by detectives to induce women to sin with them, in order to enroll them as public women. In India and Hong Kong alike, under the reign of Queen Victoria, of happy memory, these registered women were called "Queen's women."

Under such shameful misrule Hong Kong became the base for the s.h.i.+pment of Chinese slave girls to California, by which Mongolian brothel slavery was introduced into America--a horror worse than the bubonic plague.

BLAMELESS GIRLS ENSNARED IN CHICAGO.

In this First Ward of Chicago, said to be the most influential and richest ward in the world, are nearly two miles of indecent resorts.

Since a district in this ward was thrown open to this most diabolical commerce, blameless Chicago virgins have been lured to apartments on Wabash avenue, under the shadow of churches of cathedral importance, and then sold into the adjacent white slave market--the illegal red light district. This was shown in court at Harrison Street, before Judge Newcomer, June 1, 1907.

Intoxicating liquor has been sold illegally, without a license, in hundreds, perhaps thousands of resorts in the city, against the protest of the Chicago Law and Order League repeatedly addressed to the Mayor.

Surely this will not be allowed to continue--the virtual payment of a bounty of a thousand dollars a year, the price of a saloon license, to the keeper of an indecent resort. Surely the First Ward debauch in the Coliseum will never be allowed again.

REPEAL OF REGULATION NOW DEMANDED IN EUROPE.

The International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, representing every country in Europe, except Turkey, has recently written:

"We are anxious to call the attention of our readers to the fact that when we started the work for the suppression of the white slave traffic, we maintained that, apart altogether from that direct work, the respective governments would have their attention drawn to the importance of the question of the repeal of the system of regulation of vice. Our antic.i.p.ations are being fully realized in different countries, where the National Committees are declaring by vote that the White Slave traffic is promoted and kept alive by the government regulation of vice, and are calling upon their respective governments to abolish the system." (23d Annual Report of the National Vigilance a.s.sociation, London, page 17.)

The only righteous att.i.tude of government toward all crime and vice is eternal antagonism. The government should educate the people concerning the frightful effects of vice and never encourage these ruinous practices. The responsibility of government in this connection are nothing less than awful.

POSITION OF THE CLERGY.

The editor of a great Chicago daily said to me, concerning the readiness of many people to segregate and regulate vice. "The clergy won't stand for it."

Mr. Huxley, shortly before his death, addressing a company of clergymen, said that men of science in their search for the truth, may find themselves obliged to return to the guardians of Divine revelation, the ministers of G.o.d, and that if they did so return, he hoped that the clergy would not have betrayed the gates.

James Russell Lowell has told us truly that compromise in a matter of fundamental morals, that is, slavery, cost us the Civil War. In matters of eternal truth, and in matters of fundamental morals, we must not, we will not, compromise. WE WILL NEVER BETRAY THE GATES.

E. A. B.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE WHITE SLAVES AND THE BLACK PLAGUES.

The White Slave Trade means two things, snaring girls and spreading disease. As tuberculosis has been called the White Plague, the diseases spread by vice are now called the Black Plagues. Every father and mother, every youth and maiden should be instructed at once in the right way and put on guard against the reptiles that lure unprotected girls, and against the sting of deadly disease that inevitably punishes all who break the moral law, which is physical law as well.

It is not enough to hint softly at these horrors. The truth must be told as plainly as the preacher's Bible and the physician's microscope tell it. Delicacy is excellent in telling the truth, but the delicacy that suppresses the truth is sin. Our loins are to be girt about with truth--our loins, the apostle says, the region of our s.e.x life--girt with truth, not with ignorance and false modesty.

The general public must be made to realize the enormous extent and serious character of these diseases. They cause one-seventh of the suffering of the human race, and in cities more than one-seventh.

Physicians have heretofore concealed the truth from the public, but now are foremost in telling it.

When a girl is induced to take up an immoral life she is quickly infected with the diseases that go with that misconduct, and is dead while she lives and a source of death to others. A physician whose former duty it was to inspect depraved women in Paris said to an audience of young men in a vice district of Chicago that ninety-five in a hundred of those women were walking pest-houses.

The victims of the loathsome commerce in girls are first ensnared, then enslaved or at least exploited, inevitably infected with the loathsome disease and all the time compelled to make money for their wicked masters. Constantly they are spreading the pestilence to the men and youths who patronize them and then pa.s.s on the plagues to their present or future wives and children.

The red light districts, like a lake of fire, are perpetually engulfing unwary and unprotected girls, along with the wilfully depraved. They are misled by crafty women and villainous young men with smooth manners and false tongues, on promises of light work, big pay, fine clothes, jewels and great happiness. The route to the abyss is commonly by way of dance halls and amus.e.m.e.nt resorts of all kinds having drinking attachments.

The girl who drinks puts herself at the mercy of the young man in whose company she may be. The girl who dances is in very great peril, and she puts young men with whom she dances under greater temptation than herself.

Soon after the fatal plunge a girl becomes immodest, indecent, lawless, homeless, a victim and distributer of vile diseases. When the plain people know the horrors of the white slaves and the black plagues, the sane plain people will demand the destruction of the white slave market and the extirpation of the black plagues.

The committee of seven physicians, appointed by the Medical Society of the County of New York, after elaborate investigation reported that 225,000 persons were treated in New York City in the year 1900 for the diseases caused by vice. The majority of these were immoral men and immoral women, but a large and deeply wronged minority consisted of virtuous wives and children of all ages.

HALF A MILLION BLIND.

Any medical professor can tell any inquirer that there are at least ten or twelve thousand blind in the United States today, whose blindness dates from a few days after birth and was caused by disease which their mothers contracted innocently from their guilty husbands--who in most cases supposed themselves cured before marriage.

Dr. Neisser, of Berlin, who in 1879 isolated the germ that causes ophthalmia of the new-born, a vice germ, after careful investigation throughout Germany concludes from the statistics that there are thirty thousand blind in Germany from this cause. If the same proportion would hold throughout Europe, there are two hundred thousand blind in Europe from this cause--more than the three armies engaged at Waterloo.

But to be very conservative, let us cut the figures in two, and we have still one hundred thousand sightless persons, blind from babyhood, in Europe alone. Including America, and adding Asia, Africa and the islands of the South Seas, we shall find in the world half a million persons blind or one million sightless eyes, from this pestilent germ--at which many young men laugh as no worse than a cold and which is on sale all the time in every immoral resort in the world.

HELEN KELLER'S "I MUST SPEAK."