When once we are in earnest about the abolition of the social evil, society will find that it must study industry from the point of view of the producer in a sense which has never been done before. Such a study with reference to industrial legislation will ally itself on one hand with the trades-union movement, which insists upon a living wage and shorter hours for the workers, and also upon an opportunity for self-direction, and on the other hand with the efficiency movement, which would refrain from over-fatiguing an operator as it would from over-speeding a machine. In addition to legislative enactment and the historic trade-union effort, the feebler and newer movement on the part of the employers is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who is not only devising recreational and educational plans, but is placing before the employer much disturbing information upon the cost of living in relation to the pitiful wages of working girls. Certainly employers are growing ashamed to use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence of employing only the girl "protected by home influences" as a device for reducing wages. Help may also come from the consumers, for an increasing number of them, with compunctions in regard to tempted young employees, are not only unwilling to purchase from the employer who underpays his girls and thus to share his guilt, but are striving in divers ways to modify existing conditions.

As working women enter fresh fields of labor which ever open up anew as the old fields are submerged behind them, society must endeavor to speedily protect them by an amelioration of the economic conditions which are now so unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health and morals. The world-wide movement for establishing governmental control of industrial conditions is especially concerned for working women. Fourteen of the European countries prohibit all night work for women and almost every civilized country in the world is considering the number of hours and the character of work in which women may be permitted to safely engage.

Although amelioration comes about so slowly that many young girls are sacrificed each year under conditions which could so easily and reasonably be changed, nevertheless it is apparently better to overcome the dangers in this new and freer life, which modern industry has opened to women, than it is to attempt to retreat into the domestic industry of the past; for all statistics of prostitution give the largest number of recruits for this life as coming from domestic service and the second largest number from girls who live at home with no definite occupation whatever. Therefore, although in the economic aspect of the social evil more than in any other, do we find ground for despair, at the same time we discern, as nowhere else, the young girl's stubborn power of resistance. Nevertheless, the most superficial survey of her surroundings shows the necessity for ameliorating, as rapidly as possible, the harsh economic conditions which now environ her.

That steadily increasing function of the state by which it seeks to protect its workers from their own weakness and degradation, and insists that the livelihood of the manual laborer shall not be beaten down below the level of efficient citizenship, assumes new forms almost daily. From the human as well as the economic standpoint there is an obligation resting upon the state to discover how many victims of the white slave traffic are the result of social neglect, remedial incapacity, and the lack of industrial safeguards, and how far discontinuous employment and non-employment are factors in the breeding of discouragement and despair.

Is it because our modern industrialism is so new that we have been slow to connect it with the poverty and vice all about us? The socialists talk constantly of the relation of economic law to destitution and point out the connection between industrial maladjustment and individual wrongdoing, but certainly the study of social conditions, the obligation to eradicate vice, cannot belong to one political party or to one economic school. It must be recognized as a solemn obligation of existing governments, and society must realize that economic conditions can only be made more righteous and more human by the unceasing devotion of generations of men.



CHAPTER IV

MORAL EDUCATION AND LEGAL PROTECTION OF CHILDREN

No great wrong has ever arisen more clearly to the social consciousness of a generation than has that of commercialized vice in the consciousness of ours, and that we are so slow to act is simply another evidence that human nature has a curious power of callous indifference towards evils which have been so entrenched that they seem part of that which has always been. Educators of course share this attitude; at moments they seem to intensify it, although at last an educational movement in the direction of sex hygiene is beginning in the schools and colleges. Primary schools strive to satisfy the child's first questionings regarding the beginnings of human life and approach the subject through simple biological instruction which at least places this knowledge on a par with other natural facts. Such teaching is an enormous advance for the children whose curiosity would otherwise have been satisfied from poisonous sources and who would have learned of simple physiological matters from such secret undercurrents of corrupt knowledge as to have forever perverted their minds. Yet this first direct step towards an adequate educational approach to this subject has been surprisingly difficult owing to the self-consciousness of grown-up people; for while the children receive the teaching quite simply, their parents often take alarm. Doubtless co-operation with parents will be necessary before the subject can fall into its proper place in the schools. In Chicago, the largest women's club in the city has established normal courses in sex hygiene attended both by teachers and mothers, the National and State Federations of Women's Clubs are gradually preparing thousands of women throughout America for fuller co-operation with the schools in this difficult matter. In this, as in so many other educational movements, Germany has led the way. Two publications are issued monthly in Berlin, which promote not only more effective legislation but more adequate instruction in the schools on this basic subject. These journals are supported by men and women anxious for light for the sake of their children. Some of them were first stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama "The Awakening of Spring," which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted school-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents.

A year ago the Bishop of London gathered together a number of influential people and laid before them his convictions that the root of the social evil lay in so-called "parental modesty," and that in the quickening of the parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting up of England's moral tone which has for so long been the despair of England's foremost men."

In America the eighth year-book of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education treats of this important subject with great ability, massing the agencies and methods in impressive array. Many other educational journals and organized societies could be cited as expressing a new conscience in regard to this world-old evil. The expert educational opinion which they represent is practically agreed that for older children the instruction should not be confined to biology and hygiene, but may come quite naturally in history and literature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexual instinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed and spiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotions and sacrifices. The youth thus taught sees this primal instinct not only as an essential to the continuance of the race, but also, when it is transmuted to the highest ends, as a fundamental factor in social progress. The entire subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns that his own struggle is a common experience. He is able to make his own interpretations and to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing companions. After all, no young person will be able to control his impulses and to save himself from the grosser temptations, unless he has been put under the sway of nobler influences. Perhaps we have yet to learn that the inhibitions of character as well as its reinforcements come most readily through idealistic motives.

Certainly all the great religions of the world have recognized youth's need of spiritual help during the trying years of adolescence. The ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this instinct almost to the exclusion of others, and all later religions attempt to provide the youth with shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies ahead of him, for the wise men in every age have known that only the power of the spirit can overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this educational advance, courses of study in many public and private schools are still prepared exactly as if educators had never known that at fifteen or sixteen years of age, the will power being still weak, the bodily desires are keen and insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyttleton, who has given much thought to this gap in the education of youth says, "The certain result of leaving an enormous majority of boys unguided and uninstructed in a matter where their strongest passions are concerned, is that they grow up to judge of all questions connected with it, from a purely selfish point of view." He contends that this selfishness is due to the fact that any single suggestion or hint which boys receive on the subject comes from other boys or young men who are under the same potent influences of ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No wholesome counter-balance of knowledge is given, no attempt is made to invest the subject with dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare of others and to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton contends that this alone can explain the peculiarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women which is a sustained cruelty to be discerned in no other relation of English life. To quote him again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty are not birds or beasts but our own countrywomen, doomed by the hundred thousand to a life of unutterable shame and hopeless misery, then and then only the general average tone of young men becomes hard and brutally callous or frivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not exhibited in relation to any other form of human suffering." At the present moment thousands of young people in our great cities possess no other knowledge of this grave social evil which may at any moment become a dangerous personal menace, save what is imparted to them in this brutal flippant spirit. It has been said that the child growing up in the midst of civilization receives from its parents and teachers something of the accumulated experience of the world on all other subjects save upon that of sex. On this one subject alone each generation learns little from its predecessors.

An educator has lately pointed out that it is an old lure of vice to pretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of life contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that young people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to this attitude, many young people living in our cities at the present moment have failed to apprehend the admonitions of religion and have never responded to its inner control. It is as if the impact of the world had stunned their spiritual natures, and as if this had occurred at the very time that a most dangerous experiment is being tried. The public gaieties formerly allowed in Catholic countries where young people were restrained by the confessional, are now permitted in cities where this restraint is altogether unknown to thousands of young people, and only faintly and traditionally operative upon thousands of others. The puritanical history of American cities assumes that these gaieties are forbidden, and that the streets are sober and decorous for conscientious young men and women who need no external protection. This ungrounded assumption, united to the fact that no adult has the confidence of these young people, who are constantly subjected to a multitude of imaginative impressions, is almost certain to result disastrously.

The social relationships in a modern city are so hastily made and often so superficial, that the old human restraints of public opinion, long sustained in smaller communities, have also broken down. Thousands of young men and women in every great city have received none of the lessons in self-control which even savage tribes imparted to their children when they taught them to master their appetites as well as their emotions. These young people are perhaps further from all community restraint and genuine social control than the youth of the community have ever been in the long history of civilization. Certainly only the modern city has offered at one and the same time every possible stimulation for the lower nature and every opportunity for secret vice. Educators apparently forget that this unrestrained stimulation of young people, so characteristic of our cities, although developing very rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not yet seen the outcome. The present education of the average young man has given him only the most unreal protection against the temptations of the city. Schoolboys are subjected to many lures from without just at the moment when they are filled with an inner tumult which utterly bewilders them and concerning which no one has instructed them save in terms of empty precept and unintelligible warning.

We are authoritatively told that the physical difficulties are enormously increased by uncontrolled or perverted imaginations, and all sound advice to young men in regard to this subject emphasizes a clean mind, exhorts an imagination kept free from sensuality and insists upon days filled with wholesome athletic interests. We allow this regime to be exactly reversed for thousands of young people living in the most crowded and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not only does the stage in its advertisements exhibit all the allurements of sex to such an extent that a play without a "love interest" is considered foredoomed to failure, but the novels which form the sole reading of thousands of young men and girls deal only with the course of true or simulated love, resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in variegated misfortunes.

Often the only recreation possible for young men and young women together is dancing, in which it is always easy to transgress the proprieties. In many public dance halls, however, improprieties are deliberately fostered. The waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, the couples leaning heavily on each other barely move across the floor, all the jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as is all the careful decorum of the formal dance. The efforts to obtain pleasure or to feed the imagination are thus converged upon the senses which it is already difficult for young people to understand and to control. It is therefore not remarkable that in certain parts of the city groups of idle young men are found whose evil imaginations have actually inhibited their power for normal living. On the streets or in the pool-rooms where they congregate their conversation, their tales of adventure, their remarks upon women who pass by, all reveal that they have been caught in the toils of an instinct so powerful and primal that when left without direction it can easily overwhelm its possessor and swamp his faculties. These young men, who do no regular work, who expect to be supported by their mothers and sisters and to get money for the shows and theatres by any sort of disreputable undertaking, are in excellent training for the life of the procurer, and it is from such groups that they are recruited. There is almost a system of apprenticeship, for boys when very small act as "look-outs" and are later utilized to make acquaintances with girls in order to introduce them to professionals. From this they gradually learn the method of procuring girls and at last do an independent business. If one boy is successful in such a life, throughout his acquaintance runs the rumor that a girl is an asset that will bring a larger return than can possibly be earned in hard-working ways. Could the imaginations of these young men have been controlled and cultivated, could the desire for adventure have been directed into wholesome channels, could these idle boys have been taught that, so far from being manly they were losing all virility, could higher interests have been aroused and standards given them in relation to this one aspect of life, the entire situation of commercialized vice would be a different thing.

The girls with a desire for adventure seem confined to this one dubious outlet even more than the boys, although there are only one-eighth as many delinquent girls as boys brought into the juvenile court in Chicago, the charge against the girls in almost every instance involves a loss of chastity. One of them who was vainly endeavoring to formulate the causes of her downfall, concentrated them all in the single statement that she wanted the other girls to know that she too was a "good Indian." Such a girl, while she is not an actual member of a gang of boys, is often attached to one by so many loyalties and friendships that she will seldom testify against a member, even when she has been injured by him. She also depends upon the gang when she requires bail in the police court or the protection that comes from political influence, and she is often very proud of her quasi-membership. The little girls brought into the juvenile court are usually daughters of those poorest immigrant families living in the worst type of city tenements, who are frequently forced to take boarders in order to pay the rent. A surprising number of little girls have first become involved in wrong-doing through the men of their own households. A recent inquiry among 130 girls living in a sordid red light district disclosed the fact that a majority of them had thus been victimized and the wrong had come to them so early that they had been despoiled at an average age of eight years. Looking upon the forlorn little creatures, who are often brought into the Chicago juvenile court to testify against their own relatives, one is seized with that curious compunction Goethe expressed in the now hackneyed line from "Mignon:"

"Was hat Man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?"

One is also inclined to reproach educators for neglecting to give children instruction in play when one sees the unregulated amusement parks which are apparently so dangerous to little girls twelve or fourteen years old. Because they are childishly eager for amusement and totally unable to pay for a ride on the scenic railway or for a ticket to an entertainment, these disappointed children easily accept many favors from the young men who are standing near the entrances for the express purpose of ruining them. The hideous reward which is demanded from them later in the evening, after they have enjoyed the many "treats" which the amusement park offers, apparently seems of little moment. Their childish minds are filled with the memory of the lurid pleasures to the oblivion of the later experience, and they eagerly tell their companions of this possibility "of getting in to all the shows." These poor little girls pass unnoticed amidst a crowd of honest people seeking recreation after a long day's work, groups of older girls walking and talking gaily with young men of their acquaintance, and happy children holding their parents' hands. This cruel exploitation of the childish eagerness for pleasure is, of course, possible only among a certain type of forlorn city children who are totally without standards and into whose colorless lives a visit to the amusement park brings the acme of delirious excitement. It is possible that these children are the inevitable product of city life; in Paris, little girls at local fetes wishing to ride on the hobby horse frequently buy the privilege at a fearful price from the man directing the machinery, and a physician connected with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children writes: "It is horribly pathetic to learn how far a nickel or a quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children."

The home environment of such children has been similar to that of many others who come to grief through the five-cent theatres. These eager little people, to whom life has offered few pleasures, crowd around the door hoping to be taken in by some kind soul and, when they have been disappointed over and over again and the last performance is about to begin, a little girl may be induced unthinkingly to barter her chastity for an entrance fee.

Many children are also found who have been decoyed into their first wrong-doing through the temptation of the saloon, in spite of the fact that one of the earliest regulations in American cities for the protection of children was the prohibition of the sale of liquor to minors. That children may be easily demoralized by the influence of a disorderly saloon was demonstrated recently in Chicago; one of these saloons was so situated that the pupils of a public school were obliged to pass it and from the windows of the schoolhouse itself could see much of what was passing within the place. An effort was made by the Juvenile Protective Association to have it closed by the chief of police, but although he did so, it was opened again the following day. The Association then took up the matter with the mayor, who refused to interfere, insisting that the objectionable features had been eliminated. Through months of effort, during which time the practices of the place remained quite unchanged, one group after another of public-spirited citizens endeavored to suppress what had become a public scandal, only to find that the place was protected by brewery interests which were more powerful, both financially and politically, than themselves. At last, after a peculiarly flagrant case involving a little girl, the mothers of the neighborhood arranged a mass meeting in the schoolhouse itself, inviting local officials to be present. The mothers then produced a mass of testimony which demonstrated that dozens and hundreds of children had been directly or indirectly affected by the place whose removal they demanded. A meeting so full of genuine anxiety and righteous indignation could not well be disregarded, and the compulsory education department was at last able to obtain a revocation of the license. The many people who had so long tried to do away with this avowedly disreputable saloon received a fresh impression of the menace to children who became sophisticated by daily familiarity with vice. Yet many mothers, hard pressed by poverty, are obliged to rent houses next to vicious neighborhoods and their children very early become familiar with all the outer aspects of vice. Among them are the children of widows who make friends with their dubious neighbors during the long days while their mothers are at work. I recall two sisters in one family whose mother had moved her household to the borders of a Chicago segregated district, apparently without knowing the character of the neighborhood. The little sisters, twelve and eight years old, accepted many invitations from a kind neighbor to come into her house to see her pretty things. The older girl was delighted to be "made up" with powder and paint and to try on long dresses, while the little one who sang very prettily was taught some new songs, happily without understanding their import. The tired mother knew nothing of what the children did during her absence, until an honest neighbor who had seen the little girls going in and out of the district, interfered on their behalf. The frightened mother moved back to her old neighborhood which she had left in search of cheaper rent, her pious soul stirred to its depths that the children for whom she patiently worked day by day had so narrowly escaped destruction.

Who cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, overworked and harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing and cooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding and misgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed are slowly slipping away from her control and affection? Such a spectacle forces one into an agreement with Wells, that it is a "monstrous absurdity" that women who are "discharging their supreme social function, that of rearing children, should do it in their spare time, as it were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing some half-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product." Nevertheless, such a woman whose wages are fixed on the basis of individual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, is still held by a legal obligation to support her children with the desperate penalty of forfeiture if she fail.

I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children to the Hull House day nursery with this result at the end of ten years of devotion: the little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect following a case of measles, because her mother could not stop work in order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars; the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys, in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such habitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aid from education. Of the five children three are now in semi-penal institutions, supported by the state. It would not therefore have been so un-economical to have boarded them with their own mother, requiring a standard of nutrition and school attendance at least up to that national standard of nurture which the more advanced European governments are establishing.

The recent Illinois law, providing that the children of widows may be supported by public funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile court, will eventually restore a mother's care to these poor children; but in the meantime, even the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in her forced search for cheap rent may be continually led nearer to the notoriously evil districts. Many appeals made to landlords of disreputable houses in Chicago on behalf of the children living adjacent to such property have never secured a favorable response. It is apparently difficult for the average property owner to resist the high rents which houses in certain districts of the city can command if rented for purposes of vice. I recall two small frame houses identical in type and value standing side by side. One which belonged to a citizen without scruples was rented for $30.00 a month, the other belonging to a conscientious man was rented for $9.00 a month. The supposedly respectable landlords defend themselves behind the old sophistry: "If I did not rent my house for such a purpose, someone else would," and the more hardened ones say that "It is all in the line of business." Both of them are enormously helped by the secrecy surrounding the ownership of such houses, although it is hoped that the laws requiring the name of the owner and the agent of every multiple house to be posted in the public hallway will at length break through this protection, and the discovered landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to which the law specifically states they have made themselves liable. In the meantime, women forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one more handicap in addition to the many others poverty places upon them. Such experiences may explain the fact that English figures show a very large proportion of widows and deserted women among the prostitutes in those large towns which maintain segregated districts.

The deprivation of a mother's care is most frequently experienced by the children of the poorest colored families who are often forced to live in disreputable neighborhoods because they literally cannot rent houses anywhere else. Both because rents are always high for colored people and because the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seven times as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of the white mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in the midst of temptation is abnormally large. So closely is child life founded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows all evil is almost sure in the end to share it. Colored children seldom roam far from their own neighborhoods: in the public playgrounds, which are theoretically open to them, they are made so uncomfortable by the slights of other children that they learn to stay away, and, shut out from legitimate recreation, are all the more tempted by the careless, luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addition to the colored girls who have thus from childhood grown familiar with the outer aspects of vice, are others who are sent into the district in the capacity of domestic servants by unscrupulous employment agencies who would not venture to thus treat a white girl. The community forces the very people who have confessedly the shortest history of social restraint, into a dangerous proximity with the vice districts of the city. This results, as might easily be predicted, in a very large number of colored girls entering a disreputable life. The negroes themselves believe that the basic cause for the high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recent enslavement of their race with its attendant unstable marriage and parental status, and point to thousands of slave sales that but two generations ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at family life. Knowing this as we do, it seems all the more unjustifiable that the nation which is responsible for the broken foundations of this family life should carelessly permit the negroes, making their first struggle towards a higher standard of domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagrant temptations which our civilization tolerates.

The imaginations of even very young children may easily be forced into sensual channels. A little girl, twelve years old, was one day brought to the psychopathic clinic connected with the Chicago juvenile court. She had been detained under police surveillance for more than a week, while baffled detectives had in vain tried to verify the statements she had made to her Sunday-school teacher in great detail of certain horrible experiences which had befallen her. For at least a week no one concerned had the remotest idea that the child was fabricating. The police thought that she had merely grown confused as to the places to which she had been "carried unconscious." The mother gave the first clue when she insisted that the child had never been away from her long enough to have had these experiences, but came directly home from school every afternoon for her tea, of which she habitually drank ten or twelve cups. The skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly establishing the fact of a disordered mind, disclosed an astonishing knowledge of the habits of the underworld.

Even children who live in respectable neighborhoods and are guarded by careful parents so that their imaginations are not perverted, but only starved, constantly conduct a search for the magical and impossible which leads them into moral dangers. An astonishing number of them consult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune tellers. These dealers in futurity, who sell only love and riches, the latter often dependent upon the first, are sometimes in collusion with disreputable houses, and at the best make the path of normal living more difficult for their eager young patrons. There is something very pathetic in the sheepish, yet radiant, faces of the boy and girl, often together, who come out on the street from a dingy doorway which bears the palmist's sign of the spread-out hand. This remnant of primitive magic is all they can find with which to feed their eager imaginations, although the city offers libraries and galleries, crowned with man's later imaginative achievements. One hard-working girl of my acquaintance, told by a palmist that "diamonds were coming to her soon," afterwards accepted without a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond ring from a man whose improper attentions she had hitherto withstood.

In addition to these heedless young people, pulled into a sordid and vicious life through their very search for romance, are many little children ensnared by means of the most innocent playthings and pleasures of childhood. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as it exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring of little girls who are too young to have received adequate instruction of any sort and whose natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has been broken down by the overcrowding of tenement house life. Any educator who has made a careful study of the children from the crowded districts is impressed with the numbers of them whose moral natures are apparently unawakened. While there are comparatively few of these non-moral children in any one neighborhood, in the entire city their number is far from negligible. Such children are used by disreputable people to invite their more normal playmates to house parties, which they attend again and again, lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually learn to trust the vicious hostess. The head of one such house, recently sent to the penitentiary upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile Protective Association, founded her large and successful business upon the activities of three or four little girls who, although they had gradually come to understand her purpose, were apparently so chained to her by the goodies and favors which they received, that they were quite indifferent to the fate of their little friends. Such children, when brought to the psychopathic clinic attached to the Chicago juvenile court, are sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or other physical disabilities from which their conduct may be at least partially accounted for. Sometimes they come from respectable families, but more often from families where they have been mistreated and where dissolute parents have given them neither affection nor protection. Many of these children whose relatives have obviously contributed to their delinquency are helped by the enforcement of the adult delinquency law.

One looks upon these hardened little people with a sense of apology that educational forces have not been able to break into their first ignorance of life before it becomes toughened into insensibility, and one knows that, whatever may be done for them later, because of this early neglect, they will probably always remain impervious to the gentler aspects of life, as if vice seared their tender minds with red-hot irons. Our public-school education is so nearly universal, that if the entire body of the teachers seriously undertook to instruct all American youth in regard to this most important aspect of life, why should they not in time train their pupils to continence and self-direction, as they already discipline their minds with knowledge in regard to many other matters? Certainly the extreme youth of the victims of the white slave traffic, both boys and girls, places a great responsibility upon the educational forces of the community.

The state which supports the public school is also coming to the rescue of children through protective legislation. This is another illustration that the beginnings of social advance have often resulted from the efforts to defend the weakest and least-sheltered members of the community. The widespread movement which would protect children from premature labor, also prohibits them from engaging in occupations in which they are subjected to moral dangers. Several American cities have of late become much concerned over the temptations to which messenger boys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly subjected when their business takes them into vicious districts. The Chicago vice commission makes a plea for these "children of the night" that they shall be protected by law from those temptations which they are too young and too untrained to withstand. New York and Wisconsin are the only states which have raised the legal age of messenger boys employed late at night to twenty-one years. Under the inadequate sixteen-year limit, which regulates night work for children in Illinois, boys constantly come to grief through their familiarity with the social evil. One of these, a delicate boy of seventeen, had been put into the messenger service by his parents when their family doctor had recommended out-of-door work. Because he was well-bred and good-looking, he became especially popular with the inmates of disreputable houses. They gave him tips of a dollar and more when he returned from the errands which he had executed for them, such as buying candy, cocaine or morphine. He was inevitably flattered by their attentions and pleased with his own popularity. Although his mother knew that his duties as a messenger boy occasionally took him to disreputable houses, she fervently hoped his early training might keep him straight, but in the end realized the foolhardiness of subjecting an immature youth to these temptations. The vice commission report gives various detailed instances of similar experiences on the part of other lads, one of them being a high-school boy who was merely earning extra money as a messenger boy during the rush of Christmas week.

The regulations in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis for the safeguarding of these children may be but a forecast of the care which the city will at last learn to devise for youth under special temptations. Because the various efforts made in Chicago to obtain adequate legislation for the protection of street-trading children have not succeeded, incidents like the following have not only occurred once, but are constantly repeated: a pretty little girl, the only child of a widowed mother, sold newspapers after school hours from the time she was seven years old. Because her home was near a vicious neighborhood and because the people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked for change when they bought a paper and good-naturedly gave her many little presents, her mother permitted her to gain a clientele within the district on the ground that she was too young to understand what she might see. This continued familiarity, in spite of her mother's admonitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably resulted in so vitiating the standard of the growing girl, that at the age of fourteen she became an inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance concerns three little girls who habitually sold gum in one of the segregated districts. Because they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-hearted policemen who felt that they ought not to be in such a neighborhood, each one of these children had obtained a special permit from the mayor of the city in order to protect herself from "police interference." While the mayor had no actual authority to issue such permits, naturally the piece of paper bearing his name, when displayed by a child, checked the activity of the police officer. The incident was but one more example of the old conflict between mistaken kindness to the individual child in need of money, and the enforcement of those regulations which may seem to work a temporary hardship upon one child, but save a hundred others from entering occupations which can only lead into blind alleys. Because such occupations inevitably result in increasing the number of unemployables, the educational system itself must be challenged.

A royal commission has recently recommended to the English Parliament that "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys be shortened, that they be required to spend the hours so set free, in physical and technological training, that the manufacturing of the unemployable may cease." Certainly we are justified in demanding from our educational system, that the interest and capacity of each child leaving school to enter industry, shall have been studied with reference to the type of work he is about to undertake. When vocational bureaus are properly connected with all the public schools, a girl will have an intelligent point of departure into her working life, and a place to which she may turn in time of need, for help and advice through those long and dangerous periods of unemployment which are now so inimical to her character.

This same British commission divided all of the unemployed, the under-employed, and the unemployable as the results of three types of trades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein women and children are paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard of health and industrial efficiency, so that their wages must be supplemented by relatives or charity; second, labor deteriorating trades, which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, of workers; third, bare subsistence trades, where the worker is forced to such a low level in his standard of life that he continually falls below self-support. We have many trades of these three types in America, all of them demanding the work of young and untrained girls. Yet, in spite of the obvious dangers surrounding every girl who enters one of them, little is done to guide the multitude of children who leave school prematurely each year into reasonable occupations.

Unquestionably the average American child has received a more expensive education than has yet been accorded to the child of any other nation. The girls working in department stores have been in the public schools on an average of eight years, while even the factory girls, who so often leave school from the lower grades, have yet averaged six and two-tenths years of education at the public expense, before they enter industrial life. Certainly the community that has accomplished so much could afford them help and oversight for six and a half years longer, which is the average length of time that a working girl is employed. The state might well undertake this, if only to secure its former investment and to save that investment from utter loss.

Our generation, said to have developed a new enthusiasm for the possibilities of child life, and to have put fresh meaning into the phrase "children's rights," may at last have the courage to insist upon a child's right to be well born and to start in life with its tiny body free from disease. Certainly allied to this new understanding of child life and a part of the same movement is the new science of eugenics with its recently appointed university professors. Its organized societies publish an ever-increasing mass of information as to that which constitutes the inheritance of well-born children. When this new science makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome of the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration, effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible, and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to another generation. Public societies for the prevention of blindness are continually distributing information on the care of new-born children and may at length answer that old, confusing question "Did this man sin or his parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowledge is becoming more widespread every day and the rising interest in infant welfare must in time react upon the very existence of the social-evil itself.

This new public concern for the welfare of little children in certain American cities has resulted in a municipal milk supply; in many German cities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York, Chicago, Boston and other large towns, employ hundreds of nurses each summer to instruct tenement-house mothers upon the care of little children. Doubtless all of this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arouse public opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of disease which thousands of them annually inherit, and which is directly traceable to the vicious living of their parents or grandparents. This slaughter of the innocents, this infliction of suffering upon the new-born, is so gratuitous and so unfair, that it is only a question of time until an outraged sense of justice shall be aroused on behalf of these children. But even before help comes through chivalric sentiments, governmental and municipal agencies will decline to spend the tax-payers' money for the relief of suffering infants, when by the exertion of the same authority they could easily provide against the possibility of the birth of a child so afflicted. It is obvious that the average tax-payer would be moved to demand the extermination of that form of vice which has been declared illegal, although it still flourishes by official connivance, did he once clearly apprehend that it is responsible for the existence of these diseases which cost him so dear. It is only his ignorance which makes him remain inert until each victim of the white slave traffic shall be avenged unto the third and fourth generation of them that bought her. It is quite possible that the tax-payer will himself contend that, as the state does not legalize a marriage without a license officially recorded, that the status of children may be clearly defined, so the state would need to go but one step further in the same direction, to insist upon health certificates from the applicant for a marriage license, that the health of future children might in a certain measure, be guaranteed. Whether or not this step may be predicted, the mere discussion of this matter in itself, is an indication of the changing public opinion, as is the fact that such legislation has already been enacted in two states, which are only now putting into action the recommendation made centuries ago by such social philosophers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense of justice outraged by the wanton destruction of new-born children, may in time unite with that ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture of the young, until the old barriers of silence and inaction, behind which the social evil has so long intrenched itself, shall at last give way.

Certainly it will soon be found that the sentiment of pity, so recently aroused throughout the country on behalf of the victims of the white slave traffic, will be totally unable to afford them protection unless it becomes incorporated in government. It is possible that we are on the eve of a series of legislative enactments similar to those which resulted from the attempts to regulate child labor. Through the entire course of the last century, in that anticipation of coming changes which does so much to bring changes about, the friends of the children were steadily engaged in making a new state, from the first child labor law passed in the English parliament in 1803 to the final passage of the so-called children's charter in 1909. During the long century of transforming pity into political action there was created that social sympathy which has become one of the greatest forces in modern legislation, and to which we may confidently appeal in this new crusade against the social evil.

Another point of similarity to the child labor movement is obvious, for the friends of the children early found that they needed much statistical information and that the great problem of the would-be reformer is not so much overcoming actual opposition—the passing of time gradually does that for him—as obtaining and formulating accurate knowledge and fitting that knowledge into the trend of his time. From this point of view and upon the basis of what has already been accomplished for "the protection of minors," the many recent investigations which have revealed the extreme youth of the victims of the white slave traffic, should make legislation on their behalf all the more feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever more legitimately make an emotional appeal to the higher sensibility of the public.

In the rescue homes recently opened in Chicago by the White Slave Traffic Committee of the League of Cook County Clubs, the tender ages of the little girls who were brought there horrified the good clubwomen more than any other aspect of the situation. A number of the little inmates in the home wanted to play with dolls and several of them brought dolls of their own, which they had kept with them through all their vicissitudes. There is something literally heart-breaking in the thought of these little children who are ensnared and debauched when they are still young enough to have every right to protection and care. Quite recently I visited a home for semi-delinquent girls against each one of whom stood a grave charge involving the loss of her chastity. Upon each of the little white beds or on one of the stiff chairs standing by its side was a doll belonging to a delinquent owner still young enough to love and cherish this supreme toy of childhood. I had come to the home prepared to "lecture to the inmates." I remained to dress dolls with a handful of little girls who eagerly asked questions about the dolls I had once possessed in a childhood which seemed to them so remote. Looking at the little victims who supply the white slave trade, one is reminded of the burning words of Dr. Howard Kelly uttered in response to the demand that the social evil be legalized and its victims licensed. He says: "Where shall we look to recruit the ever-failing ranks of these poor creatures as they die yearly by the tens of thousands? Which of the little girls of our land shall we designate for this traffic? Mark their sweet innocence to-day as they run about in our streets and parks prattling and playing, ever busy about nothing; which of them shall we snatch as they approach maturity, to supply this foul mart?"

It is incomprehensible that a nation whose chief boast is its free public education, that a people always ready to respond to any moral or financial appeal made in the name of children, should permit this infamy against childhood to continue! Only the protection of all children from the menacing temptations which their youth is unable to withstand, will prevent some of them from falling victims to the white slave traffic; only when moral education is made effective and universal will there be hope for the actual abolition of commercialized vice. These are illustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity of which society is so rapidly becoming conscious.



CHAPTER V

PHILANTHROPIC RESCUE AND PREVENTION

There is no doubt that philanthropy often reflects and dramatizes the modern sensitiveness of the community in relation to a social wrong, because those engaged in the rescue of the victims are able to apprehend, through their daily experiences, many aspects of a recognized evil concerning which the public are ignorant and therefore indifferent. However ancient a wrong may be, in each generation it must become newly embodied in living people and the social custom into which it has hardened through the years, must be continued in individual lives. Unless the contemporaries of such unhappy individuals are touched to tenderness or stirred to indignation by the actual embodiments of the old wrong in their own generation, effective action cannot be secured.

The social evil has, on the whole, received less philanthropic effort than any other well-recognized menace to the community, largely because there is something peculiarly distasteful and distressing in personal acquaintance with its victims; a distaste and distress that sometimes leads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished Englishman has recently written "that sober-minded people who, from motives of pity, have looked the hideous evil full in the face, have often asserted that nothing in their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a loss of reason."

Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philanthropic effort is the more remarkable because the average age of the recruits to prostitution is between sixteen and eighteen years, the age at which girls are still minors under the law in respect to all matters of property. We allow a minor to determine for herself whether or not she will live this most abominable life, although if she resolve to be a thief she will, if possible, be apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a vagrant she will be restrained; even if she become a professional beggar, she will be interfered with; but the decision to lead this evil life, disastrous alike to herself and the community, although well known to the police, is openly permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment of weakness in a girl and obtained her consent, although she may thereafter be in dire need of help she is put outside all protection of the law. The courts assume that such a girl has deliberately decided for herself and that because she is not "of previous chaste life and character," she is lost to all decency. Yet every human being knows deep down in his heart that his own moral energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be judged fairly by his hours of defeat, and that after revealing moments of weakness, although shocked and frightened, he is the same human being, struggling as he did before. Nevertheless in some states, a little girl as young as ten years of age may make this irrevocable decision for herself.

Modern philanthropy, continually discovering new aspects of prostitution through the aid of economics, sanitary science, statistical research, and many other agencies, finds that this increase of knowledge inevitably leads it from the attempt to rescue the victims of white slavery to a consideration of the abolition of the monstrous wrong itself. At the present moment philanthropy is gradually impelled to a consideration of prostitution in relation to the welfare and the orderly existence of society itself. If the moral fire seems at times to be dying out of certain good old words, such as charity, it is filling with new warmth such words as social justice, which belong distinctively to our own time. It is also true that those for whom these words contain most of hope and warmth are those who have been long mindful of the old tasks and obligations, as if the great basic emotion of human compassion had more than held its own. Certainly the youth of many of the victims of the white slave traffic, and the helplessness of the older girls who find themselves caught in the grip of an enormous force which they cannot comprehend, make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy moreover discovers many young girls, who if they had not been rescued by protective agencies would have become permanent outcasts, although they would have entered a disreputable life through no fault of their own.

The illustrations in this chapter are all taken from the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago in connection with its efforts to save girls from overwhelming temptation. Doubtless many other associations could offer equally convincing testimony, for in recent years the number of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic has become unendurable and who are determinedly working against it, has enormously increased.

A surprising number of country girls have been either brought to Chicago under false pretences, or have been decoyed into an evil life very soon after their arrival in the city. Mr. Clifford Roe estimates that more than half of the girls who have been recruited into a disreputable life in Chicago have come from the farms and smaller towns in Illinois and from neighboring states. This estimate is borne out by the records of Paris and other metropolitan cities in which it is universally estimated that a little less than one-third of the prostitutes found in them, at any given moment, are city born.

The experience of a pretty girl who came to the office of the Juvenile Protective Association, a year ago, is fairly typical of the argument many of these country girls offer in their own defense. This girl had been a hotel chambermaid in an Iowa town where many of the traveling patrons of the hotel had made love to her, one of them occasionally offering her protection if she would leave with him. At first she indignantly refused, but was at length convinced that the acceptance of such offers must be a very general practice and that, whatever might be the custom in the country, no one in a city made personal inquiries. She finally consented to accompany a young man to Seattle, both because she wanted to travel and because she was discouraged in her attempts to "be good." A few weeks later, when in Chicago, she had left the young man, acting from what she considered a point of honor, as his invitation had been limited to the journey which was now completed. Feeling too disgraced to go home and under the glamour of the life of idleness she had been leading, she had gone voluntarily into a disreputable house, in which the police had found her and sent her to the Association. She could not be persuaded to give up her plan, but consented to wait for a few days to "think it over." As she was leaving the office in company with a representative of the Association, they met the young man, who had been distractedly searching for her and had just discovered her whereabouts. She was married the very same day and of course the Association never saw her again.

From the point of view of the traffickers in white slaves, it is much cheaper and safer to procure country girls after they have reached the city. Such girls are in constant danger because they are much more easily secreted than girls procured from the city. A country girl entering a vicious life quickly feels the disgrace and soon becomes too broken-spirited and discouraged to make any effort to escape into the unknown city which she believes to be full of horrors similar to those she has already encountered. She desires above all things to deceive her family at home, often sending money to them regularly and writing letters describing a fictitious life of hard work. Perhaps the most flagrant case with which the Association ever dealt, was that of two young girls who had come to Chicago from a village in West Virginia, hoping to earn large wages in order to help their families. They arrived in the city penniless, having been robbed en route of their one slender purse. As they stood in the railway station, utterly bewildered, they were accosted by a young man who presented the advertising card of a boarding-house and offered to take them there. They quite innocently accepted his invitation, but an hour later, finding themselves in a locked room, they became frightened and realized they had been duped. Fortunately the two agile country girls had no difficulty in jumping from a second-story window, but upon the street they were of course much too frightened to speak to anyone again and wandered about for hours. The house from which they had escaped bore the sign "rooms to rent," and they therefore carefully avoided all houses whose placards offered shelter. Finally, when they were desperate with hunger, they went into a saloon for a "free lunch," not in the least realizing that they were expected to take a drink in order to receive it. A policeman, seeing two young girls in a saloon "without escort," arrested them and took them to the nearest station where they spent the night in a wretched cell.

At the hearing the next morning, where, much frightened, they gave a very incoherent account of their adventures, the judge fined them each fifteen dollars and costs, and as they were unable to pay the fine, they were ordered sent to the city prison. When they were escorted from the court room, another man approached them and offered to pay their fines if they would go with him. Frightened by their former experience, they stoutly declined his help, but were over-persuaded by his graphic portrayal of prison horrors and the disgrace that their imprisonment would bring upon "the folks at home." He also made clear that when they came out of prison, thirty days later, they would be no better off than they were now, save that they would have the added stigma of being jail-birds. The girls at last reluctantly consented to go with him, when a representative of the Juvenile Protective Association, who had followed them from the court room and had listened to the conversation, insisted upon the prompt arrest of the white slave trader. When the entire story, finally secured from the girls, was related to the judge, he reversed his decision, fined the man $100.00, which he was abundantly able to pay, and insisted that the girls be sent back to their mothers in Virginia. They were farmers' daughters, strong and capable of taking care of themselves in an environment that they understood, but in constant danger because of their ignorance of city life.

The methods employed to secure city girls must be much more subtle and complicated than those employed with the less sophisticated country girl. Although the city girl, once procured, is later allowed more freedom than is accorded either to a country girl or to an immigrant girl, every effort is made to demoralize her completely before she enters the life. Because she may, at any moment, escape into the city which she knows so well, it is necessary to obtain her inner consent. Those whose profession it is to procure girls for the white slave trade apparently find it possible to decoy and demoralize most easily that city girl whose need for recreation has led her to the disreputable public dance hall or other questionable places of amusement.

Gradually those philanthropic agencies that are endeavoring to be of service to the girls learn to know the dangers in these places. Many parents are utterly indifferent or ignorant of the pleasures that their children find for themselves. From the time these children were five years old, such parents were accustomed to see them take care of themselves on the street and at school, and it seems but natural that when the children are old enough to earn money, they should be able to find their own amusements.

The girls are attracted to the unregulated dance halls not only by a love of pleasure but by a sense of adventure, and it is in these places that they are most easily recruited for a vicious life. Unfortunately there are three hundred and twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago, one hundred and ninety of them connect directly with saloons, while liquor is openly sold in most of the others. This consumption of liquor enormously increases the danger to young people. A girl after a long day's work is easily induced to believe that a drink will dispel her lassitude. There is plenty of time between the dances to persuade her, as the intermissions are long, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dances short, occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the halls are hot and dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water. Often the entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arranged intermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has brought together. After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer, who is often in league with the "spieler" who frequents the dance hall, is comparatively easy. He assumes one of two roles, that of the sympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover. In the character of the former, he tells "the down-trodden working girl" that her wages are a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her with higher wages if she will trust him. He often makes allusions to the shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it "a shame that such a pretty girl cannot dress better." In the second role he apparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents, complaining that they want him to marry, "a society swell," but that he really prefers a working girl like herself. In either case he establishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind, through the excitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimate understanding and protection.

Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with him for a restaurant because, as he truthfully says, she is exhausted and in need of food. At the supper, however, she drinks much more, and it is not surprising that she is at last persuaded that it is too late to go home and in the end consents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby lodging house. Six young girls, each accompanied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, were recently followed to a chop suey restaurant and then to a lodging-house, which the police were instigated to raid and where the six girls, more or less intoxicated, were found. If no one rescues the girl after such an experience, she sometimes does not return home at all, or if she does, feels herself initiated into a new world where it is possible to obtain money at will, to easily secure the pleasures it brings, and she comes at length to consider herself superior to her less sophisticated companions. Of course this latter state of mind is untenable for any length of time and the girl is soon found openly leading a disreputable life.

The girls attending the cheap theatres and the vaudeville shows are most commonly approached through their vanity. They readily listen to the triumphs of a stage career, sure to be attained by such a "good looker," and a large number of them follow a young man to the woman with whom he is in partnership, under the promise of being introduced to a theatrical manager. There are also theatrical agencies in league with disreputable places, who advertise for pretty girls, promising large salaries. Such an agency operating with a well-known "near theatre" in the state capital was recently prosecuted in Chicago and its license revoked. In this connection the experience of two young English girls is not unusual. They were sisters possessed of an extraordinary skill in juggling, who were brought to this country by a relative acting as their manager. Although he exploited them for his own benefit for three years, paying them the most meager salaries and supplying them with the simplest living in the towns which they "toured," he had protected them from all immorality, and they had preserved the clean living of the family of acrobats to which they belonged. Last October, when appearing in San Francisco, the girls, then sixteen and seventeen years of age, demanded more pay than the dollar and twenty cents a week each had been receiving, representing the five shillings with which they had started from home. The manager, who had become discouraged with his American experience, refused to accede to their demands, gave them each a ticket for Chicago, and heartlessly turned them adrift. Arriving in the city, they quite naturally at once applied to a theatrical agency, through which they were sent to a disreputable house where a vaudeville program was given each night. Delighted that they had found work so quickly, they took the position in good faith. During the very first performance, however, they became frightened by the conduct of the girls who preceded them on the program and by the hilarity of the audience. They managed to escape from the dressing-room, where they were waiting their turn, and on the street appealed to the first policeman, who brought them to the Juvenile Protective Association. They were detained for several days as witnesses against the theatrical agency, entering into the legal prosecution with that characteristic British spirit which is ever ready to protest against an imposition, before they left the city with a travelling company, each on a weekly salary of twenty dollars.

The methods pursued on excursion boats are similar to those of the dance halls, in that decent girls are induced to drink quantities of liquor to which they are unaccustomed. On the high seas, liquor is sold usually in original packages, which enormously increases the amount consumed. It is not unusual to see a boy and girl drinking between them an entire bottle of whiskey. Some of these excursion boats carry five thousand people and in the easy breakdown of propriety which holiday-making often implies, and the absence of police, to which city young people are unaccustomed, the utmost freedom and license is often indulged in. Thus the lake excursions, one of the most delightful possibilities for recreation in Chicago, through lack of proper policing and through the sale of liquor, are made a menace to thousands of young people to whom they should be a great resource.

When a philanthropic association, with a knowledge of the commercial exploitation of youth's natural response to gay surroundings, attempts to substitute innocent recreation, it finds the undertaking most difficult. In Chicago the Juvenile Protective Association, after a thorough investigation of public dance halls, amusement parks, five-cent theatres, and excursion boats, is insisting upon more vigorous enforcement of the existing legislation, and is also urging further legal regulation; Kansas City has instituted a Department of Public Welfare with power to regulate places of amusement; a New York committee has established model dance halls; Milwaukee is urging the appointment of commissions on public recreation, while New York and Columbus have already created them.

Perhaps nothing in actual operation is more valuable than the small parks of Chicago in which the large halls are used every evening for dancing and where outdoor sports, swimming pools and gymnasiums daily attract thousands of young people. Unless cities make some such provision for their youth, those who sell the facilities for amusement in order to make a profit will continue to exploit the normal desire of all young people for recreation and pleasure. The city of Chicago contains at present eight hundred and fourteen thousand minors, all eager for pleasure. It is not surprising that commercial enterprise undertakes to supply this demand and that penny arcades, slot machines, candy stores, ice-cream parlors, moving-picture shows, skating rinks, cheap theatres and dance halls are trying to attract young people with every device known to modern advertising. Their promoters are, of course, careless of the moral effect upon their young customers if they can but secure their money. Until municipal provisions adequately meet this need, philanthropic and social organizations must be committed to the establishment of more adequate recreational facilities.

Although many dangers are encountered by the pleasure-loving girl who demands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation, a large number of girls meet with difficulties and temptations while soberly at work. Many of these tempted girls are newly-arrived immigrant girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty, who find their first work in hotels. Polish girls especially are utilized in hotel kitchens and laundries, and for the interminable scrubbing of halls and lobbies where a knowledge of the English language is not necessary, but where their peasant strength is in demand. The work is very heavy and fatiguing and until the Illinois law limited the work of women to ten hours a day, it often lasted late into the night. Even now the girls report themselves so tired that at the end of the day, they crowd into the dormitories and fall upon their beds undressed. When food and shelter is given them, their wages are from $14.00 to $18.00 a month, most of which is usually sent back to the old country, that the remaining members of the family may be brought to America. Such positions are surrounded by temptations of every sort. Even the hotel housekeepers, who are honestly trying to protect the girls, admit that it is impossible to do it adequately. One of these housekeepers recently said "that it takes a girl who knows the world to work in any hotel," and regretted that the sophisticated English-speaking girl who might protect herself, was unable to endure the hard work. She added that as soon as a girl learned English she promoted her from the laundry to the halls and from there to the position of chambermaid, but that the latter position was the most dangerous of all, as the girls were constantly exposed to insults from the guests. In the less respectable hotels these newly-arrived immigrant girls, inevitably seeing a great deal of the life of the underworld and the apparent ease with which money may be earned in illicit ways, find their first impression of the moral standards of life in America most bewildering. One young Polish girl had worked for two years in a down-town hotel, and had steadfastly resisted all improper advances even sometimes by the aid of her own powerful fist. She yielded at last to the suggestions of the life about her when she received a telegram from Ellis Island stating that her mother had arrived in New York, but was too ill to be sent on to Chicago. All of her money had gone for the steamer ticket and as the thought of her old country mother, ill and alone among strangers, was too much for her long fortitude, she made the best bargain possible with the head waiter whose importunities she had hitherto resisted, accepted the little purse the other Polish girls in the hotel collected for her and arrived in New York only to find that her mother had died the night before.

The simple obedience to parents on the part of these immigrant girls, working in hotels and restaurants, often miscarries pathetically. Their unspoiled human nature, not yet immune to the poisons of city life, when thrust into the midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies at the foundation of all complex luxury, often results in the most fatal reactions. A young German woman, the proprietor of what is considered a successful "house" in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces her career directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of "bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and every Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days "off," were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularly scolded, "sometimes slapped," by her parents, jeered at by her more vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers. She tried to shorten her hours by doing "rush-work" as a waitress at noon, but she found this still beyond her strength, and worst of all, the pay of two dollars and a half insufficient to satisfy her mother. Confiding her troubles to the other waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her how she could make money through appointments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so take home an increased amount of money easily called "a raise in wages." So strong was the habit of obedience, that the girl continued to take money home every Saturday night until her eighteenth birthday, in spite of the fact that she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks after her first experience. Although all of this happened ten years ago and the German mother is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended the story with the infamous hope that "the old lady was now suffering the torments of the lost, for making me what I am." Such a girl was subjected to temptations to which society has no right to expose her.

A dangerous cynicism regarding the value of virtue, a cynicism never so unlovely as in the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because of long hours and overwork, has been unable to preserve either her health or spirits and has lost all measure of joy in life. That this premature cynicism may be traced to an unhappy and narrow childhood is suggested by the fact that a large number of these girls come from families in which there has been little affection and the poor substitute of parental tyranny.

A young Italian girl who earned four dollars a week in a tailor shop pulling out hastings, when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown on one of the hottest days of last summer, replied that she was obliged to earn money for her clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after hours; that she had found no such work lately and that her father would not allow her anything from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because he was buying a house.

This parental control sometimes exercised in order to secure all of a daughter's wages, is often established with the best intentions in the world. I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally supported her two daughters until they were of working age, when she quite naturally expected them to conform to the careful habits of living necessary during her narrow years. In order to save carfare, she required her daughters to walk a long distance to the department store in which one was a bundle wrapper and the other a clerk at the ribbon counter. They dressed in black as being the most economical color and a penny spent in pleasure was never permitted. One day a young man who was buying ribbon from the older girl gave her a yard with the remark that she was much too young and pretty to be so somberly dressed. She wore the ribbon at work, never of course at home, but it opened a vista of delightful possibilities and she eagerly accepted a pair of gloves the following week from the same young man, who afterwards asked her to dine with him. This was the beginning of a winter of surreptitious pleasures on the part of the two sisters. They were shrewd enough never to be out later than ten o'clock and always brought home so-called overtime pay to their mother. In the spring the older girl, finding herself worn out by her dissipation and having resolved to cut loose from her home, came to the office of the Juvenile Protective Association to ask help for her younger sister. It was discovered that the mother was totally ignorant of the semi-professional life her daughters had been leading. She reiterated over and over again that she had always guarded them carefully and had given them no money to spend. It took months of constant visiting on the part of a representative of the Association before she was finally persuaded to treat the younger girl more generously.

While this family is fairly typical of those in which over-restraint is due to the lack of understanding, it is true that in most cases the family tyranny is exercised by an old-country father in an honest attempt to guard his daughter against the dangers of a new world. The worst instances, however, are those in which the father has fallen into the evil ways of drink, and not only demands all of his daughter's wages, but treats her with great brutality when those wages fall below his expectations. Many such daughters have come to grief because they have been afraid to go home at night when their wage envelopes contained less than usual, either because a new system of piece work had reduced the amount or because, in a moment of weakness, they had taken out five cents with which to attend a show, or ten cents for the much-desired pleasure of riding back and forth the full length of an elevated railroad, or because they had in a thirsty moment taken out a nickel for a drink of soda water, or worst of all, had fallen a victim to the installment plan of buying a new hat or a pair of shoes. These girls, in their fear of beatings and scoldings, although they are sure of shelter and food and often have a mother who is trying to protect them from domestic storms, have almost no money for clothing, and are inevitably subject to moments of sheer revolt, their rebellion intensified by the fact that after a girl earns her own money and is accustomed to come and go upon the streets as an independent wage earner, she finds unsympathetic control much harder to bear than do schoolgirls of the same age who have never broken the habits of their childhood and are still economically dependent upon their parents.

In spite of the fact that domestic service is always suggested by the average woman as an alternative for the working girl whose life is beset with danger, the federal report on "Women and Child Wage Earners in the United States" gives the occupation of the majority of girls who go wrong as that of domestic service, and in this it confirms the experience of every matron in a rescue home and the statistics in the maternity wards of the public hospitals. The report suggests that the danger comes from the general conditions of work: "These general conditions are the loneliness of the life, the lack of opportunities for making friends and securing recreation and amusement in safe surroundings, the monotonous and uninteresting nature of the work done as these untrained girls do it, the lack of external stimulus to pride and self-respect, and the absolutely unguarded state of the girl, except when directly under the eye of her mistress."

In addition to these reasons, the girls realize that the opportunities for marriage are less in domestic service than in other occupations, and after all, the great business of youth is securing a mate, as the young instinctively understand. Unlike the working girl who lives at home and constantly meets young men of her own neighborhood and factory life, the girl in domestic service is brought into contact with very few possible lovers. Even the men of her former acquaintance, however slightly Americanized, do not like to call on a girl in someone else's kitchen, and find the entire situation embarrassing. The girl's mistress knows that for her own daughters mutual interests and recreation are the natural foundations for friendship with young men, which may or may not lead to marriage, but which is the prerogative of every young girl. The mistress does not, however, apply this worldly wisdom to the maid in her service, only eighteen or nineteen years old, utterly dependent upon her for social life save during one afternoon and evening a week.

The majority of domestics are employed in families where there is only one, and the tired and dispirited girl, often without a taste for reading, spends many lonely hours. That most fundamental and powerful of all instincts has therefore no chance for diffusion or social expression and like all confined forces, tends to degenerate. The girl is equipped with no weapon with which to contend with those poisonous images which arise from the senses, and these images, bred of fatigue and loneliness, make a girl an easy victim. This is especially true of the colored girl, who because of her traditions, is often treated with so little respect by white men, that she is constantly subjected to insult. Even the colored servants in the New York apartment houses, who live at home and thus avoid this loneliness, because their hours extend until nine in the evening, are obliged to seek their pleasures late into the night. American cities offer occupation to more colored women than colored men and this surplus of women, in some cities as large as one hundred and thirty or forty women to one hundred men, affords an opportunity to the procurer which he quickly seizes. He is often in league with certain employment bureaus, who make a business of advancing the railroad or boat fare to colored girls coming from the South to enter into domestic service. The girl, in debt and unused to the city, is often put into a questionable house and kept there until her debt is paid many times over. In some respects her position is not unlike that of the imported white slave, for although she has the inestimable advantage of speaking the language, she finds it even more difficult to have her story credited. This contemptuous attitude places her at a disadvantage, for so universally are colored girls in domestic service suspected of blackmail that the average court is slow to credit their testimony when it is given against white men. The field of employment for colored girls is extremely limited. They are seldom found in factories and workshops. They are not wanted in department stores nor even as waitresses in hotels. The majority of them therefore are engaged in domestic service and often find the position of maid in a house of prostitution or of chambermaid in a disreputable hotel, the best-paying position open to them.

When a girl who has been in domestic service loses her health, or for any other reason is unable to carry on her occupation, she is often curiously detached and isolated, because she has had so little opportunity for normal social relationships and friendships. One of the saddest cases ever brought to my personal knowledge was that of an orphan Norwegian girl who, coming to America at the age of seventeen, had been for three years in one position as general housemaid, during which time she had drawn only such part of her wages as was necessary for her simple clothing. At the end of three years, when she was sent to a public hospital with nervous prostration, her employer refused to pay her accumulated wages, on the ground that owing to her ill health she had been of little use during the last year. When she left the hospital, practically penniless, advised by the physician to find some outdoor work, she sold a patented egg-beater for six months, scarcely earning enough for her barest necessities and in constant dread lest she could not "keep respectable." When she was found wandering upon the street she not only had no capital with which to renew her stock, but had been without food for two days and had resolved to drown herself. Every effort was made to restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunately hospital restraint was not considered necessary, and a month later, in spite of the vigilance of her new employer, her body was taken from the lake. One more of those gentle spirits who had found the problem of life insoluble, had sought refuge in death.

A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by their lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered, and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl, assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain for another hour in a good home. In full command of the situation, she usually succeeds in convincing the wretched girl that she is irreparably ruined. Her very phraseology, although unknown to herself, is a remnant of that earlier historic period when every woman was obliged in her own person to protect her home and to secure the status of her children. The indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that social restraint which should have been exercised by the community and which would have naturally protected the girl, if she had not been so withdrawn from it, in order to serve exclusively the interests of her mistress's family. Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child. The baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for such cases tells her that upon the payment of forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of the child for a year and that "maybe it won't live any longer than that," and unless the hospital is equipped with a social service department, such as the one at the Massachusetts General, the girl leaves it weak and low-spirited and too broken to care what becomes of her. It is in moments such as these that many a poor girl, convinced that all the world is against her, decides to enter a disreputable house. Here at least she will find food and shelter, she will not be despised by the other inmates and she can earn money for the support of her child. Often she has received the address of such a house from one of her companions in the maternity ward where, among the fifty per cent, of the unmarried mothers, at least two or three sophisticated girls are always to be found, eager to "put wise" the girls who are merely unfortunate. Occasionally a girl who follows such baneful advice still insists upon keeping her child. I recall a pathetic case in the juvenile court of Chicago when such a mother of a five-year-old child was pronounced by the judge to be an "improper guardian." The agonized woman was told that she might retain her child if she would completely change her way of life; but she insisted that such a requirement was impossible, that she had no other means of earning her living, and that she had become too idle and broken for regular work. The child clung piteously to the mother, and, having gathered from the evidence that she was considered "bad," assured the judge over and over again that she was "the bestest mother in the world." The poor mother, who had begun her wretched mode of life for her child's sake, found herself so demoralized by her hideous experiences that she could not leave the life, even for the sake of the same child, still her most precious possession. Only six years before, this mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working in the household of a good woman, whose sense of duty had expressed itself in dismissing "the outcast."

These discouraged girls, who so often come from domestic service to supply the vice demands of the city, are really the last representatives of those thousands of betrayed girls who for many years met the entire demand of the trade; for, while a procurer of some sort has performed his office for centuries, only in the last fifty years has the white slave market required the services of extended business enterprises in order to keep up the supply. Previously the demand had been largely met by the girls who had voluntarily entered a disreputable life because they had been betrayed. While the white slave traffic was organized primarily for profit it could of course never have flourished unless there had been a dearth of these discouraged girls. Is it not also significant that the surviving representatives of the girls who formerly supplied the demand are drawn most largely from the one occupation which is farthest from the modern ideal of social freedom and self-direction? Domestic service represents, in the modern world, more nearly than any other of the gainful occupations open to women, the ancient labor conditions under which woman's standard of chastity was developed and for so long maintained. It would seem obvious that both the girl over-restrained at home, as well as the girl in domestic service, had been too much withdrawn from the healthy influence of public opinion, and it is at least significant that domestic control has so broken down that the girls most completely under its rule are shown to be those in the greatest danger. Such a statement undoubtedly needs the modification that the girls in domestic service are frequently those who are unadapted to skilled labor and are least capable of taking care of themselves, yet the fact remains that they are belated morally as well as industrially. As they have missed the industrial discipline that comes from regular hours of systematized work, so they have missed the moral training of group solidarity, the ideals and restraints which the friendships and companionships of other working girls would have brought them.

When the judgment of her peers becomes not less firm but more kindly, the self-supporting girl will have a safeguard and restraint many times more effective than the individual control which has become so inadequate, or the family discipline that, with the best intentions in the world, cannot cope with existing social conditions.

The most perplexing case that comes before the philanthropic organizations trying to aid and rescue the victims of the white slave traffic, is of the type which involves a girl who has been secured by the trafficker when so lonely, detached and discouraged that she greedily seized whatever friendship was offered her. Such a girl has been so eager for affection that she clings to even the wretched simulacrum of it, afforded by the man who calls himself her "protector," and she can only be permanently detached from the life to which he holds her, when she is put under the influence of more genuine affections and interests. That is doubtless one reason it is always more possible to help the girl who has become the mother of a child. Although she unjustly faces a public opinion much more severe than that encountered by the childless woman who also endeavors to "reform," the mother's sheer affection and maternal absorption enables her to overcome the greater difficulties more easily than the other woman, without the new warmth of motive, overcomes the lesser ones. The Salvation Army in their rescue homes have long recognized this need for an absorbing interest, which should involve the Magdalen's deepest affections and emotions, and therefore often utilize the rescued girl to save others.

Certainly no philanthropic association, however rationalistic and suspicious of emotional appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmed by desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull her back into the stream of kindly human fellowship and into a life involving normal human relations. Such an association must needs remember those wise words of Count Tolstoy: "We constantly think that there are circumstances in which a human being can be treated without affection, and there are no such circumstances."



CHAPTER VI

INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL

When certain groups in a community, to whom a social wrong has become intolerable, prepare for definite action against it, they almost invariably discover unexpected help from contemporaneous social movements with which they later find themselves allied. The most immediate help in this new campaign against the social evil will probably come thus indirectly from those streams of humanitarian effort which are ever widening and which will in time slowly engulf into their rising tide of enthusiasm for human betterment, even the victims of the white slave traffic.

Foremost among them is the world-wide movement to preserve and prolong the term of human life, coupled with the determination on the part of the medical profession to eliminate all forms of germ diseases. The same physicians and sanitarians who have practically rid the modern city of small-pox and cholera and are eliminating tuberculosis, well know that the social evil is directly responsible for germ diseases more prevalent than any of the others, and also communicable. Over and over again in the history of large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medical profession has been urged to control the diseases resulting from the commercialized vice which the municipal authorities themselves permitted. But the experiments in segregation, in licensed systems, and certification have not been considered successful. The medical profession, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasibility of such undertakings, is virtually united in the conclusion that so long as commercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city against the spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatal alike to the individual and to his offspring. The medical profession agrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become the purveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type, safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercialized vice. They point out the indirect ways in which this contagion can spread exactly as any other can, but insist that its control is enormously complicated by the fact that the victims of these diseases are most unwilling to be designated and quarantined. The medical profession is at last taking the position that the community wishing to protect itself against this contagion will in the end be driven to the extermination of the very source itself. A well-known authority states the one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is the social institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred and cultivated there, they then spread through the community, attacking alike both the innocent and the guilty.