I am not making these statements on the basis of newspaper stories or travelers' gossip. Let me quote from a report of our investigator. Speaking of one city in California, he says, "The crib system, which means the keeping of many girls in small rooms in large buildings, sometimes under lock and key, sometimes at liberty to come and go, is adopted to a limited degree among Japanese girls. Across the river these girls are kept in the Chinese quarter. They are owned by wealthy Japanese and Chinese men. The property thus used for saloon, gambling and for a slave market for girls is said to belong to an estate controlled by a high official of the state."

Of another city our investigator says: "In conversation with a very intelligent Chinese woman, the direct question was asked, 'Are the Chinese and Japanese women actual prisoners owned and controlled by their keepers?' She said that such was practically the case, and that none of these girls were allowed to leave their rooms without being escorted by older people, whose presence with them would insure their return.

"It is remarkable that the authorities of Oakland seem to regard this crib slavery of young girls as part of the legitimate business of the city."

Of a third city he says: "There is a district in ——, covering five blocks—a crib district—where the floating population gathers by the hundreds. The girls here number from 100 to 600.

"One other similar section of —— is owned by some very prominent and wealthy citizens, who pay taxes on the property. Their names are known. In the suburbs is a field containing the nameless graves of 451 unknown girls."

Many cases are on record of the attempts of missionary workers, some successful and some unsuccessful, to snatch these victims from their owners. One missionary told of an instance where she had been informed that one of five girls confined in a certain room in a house of ill-repute desired to escape. With the help of an honest policeman and two assistants the missionary forced her way into the room. When she found the five girls she was at a loss to determine what to do, because she could not recognize which one wished to escape. She had been informed that the girl she sought would be afraid to indicate her wish. After hesitation the missionary selected one girl and told the detective to seize her. The girl screamed, kicked, scratched and fought her rescuers with the greatest energy, but was carried into the street and into the mission house. As soon as she was inside the house she fell at the feet of the teacher and said, "Teacher, you know I didn't mean what I said. I did not dare to show any desire to go for fear I might be taken back." It happened that the missionary got the girl whom she sought and who desired her liberty. Other attempts at rescue have been less successful. On one occasion a rescue party sought a Chinese girl, whom it was agreed should hold to her mouth a white handkerchief as a signal that she was the one to be taken. When the rescue party entered the place, they saw the girl with the handkerchief to her face, at the soliciting window. Unfortunately, in the excitement of the moment the girl lost her presence of mind, and, waving her handkerchief, cried out, "O teacher!" But a locked door still separated her from her rescuers, and her keepers, suspecting the truth, dragged her back, and she was lost in the house before the door could be forced. Other girls who escaped from the den afterwards told her fate. Her enraged owner kicked her to death in one of the rooms of her slave prison where there was none to defend her. No one was ever punished for this crime.

Horrible as these incidents were, they are but the regular accompaniments of slavery. They have been paralleled in all ages and in all countries where slavery has existed. The shame of it is that in America in the twentieth century such slavery should still be tolerated.

Ought we not to give active support to our government in its fulfillment of its treaty agreement with the nations of Europe? And should not our example in the Orient and our conduct in our own country be more worthy of our national moral standards? If so, then such an association as this has a more than local service to render. Placed in this important center, it must reach out both to the East and to the West, awaken interest, give warning, and help to provide a chain of national protective agencies to combat and destroy the closely linked chain of purveyors of vice.



CHAPTER XVI.

THE YELLOW SLAVE TRADE.

During the administration of President Hayes the United States consul general at Shanghai, Mr. D. H. Bailey, made a report to the president, relating to slavery in China and the menace to our country from that cause. He enclosed with his report a translation of the laws governing slaves, some of which are as follows:

"If a female slave deserts her master's house she shall be punished with eighty blows. Whoever harbors a fugitive wife or slave, knowing them to be fugitives, shall participate equally in their punishment.

"A slave guilty of addressing abusive language to his master shall suffer death by being strangled.

"The master or the relatives of a master of a guilty slave may chastise such slave in any degree short of death, without being liable to any punishment.

"All slaves who are guilty of designedly striking their masters shall, without making any distinction between principals and accessories, be beheaded.

"If accidentally they kill their master, they shall suffer death by being strangled."

In China, and wherever Chinese live, slave girls and women are subject to two forms of slavery, domestic slavery and brothel slavery. Every respectable Chinese family has one or two house slaves. The brothel slave is a literal slave, bought and sold like a sheep or cow. Traffic in Chinese girls for wicked uses extended to Hong Kong as soon as the island became prosperous and populous after being ceded to Great Britain in 1841. From Hong Kong the horrid trade reached to California, and to Singapore and other places.

Commissioners appointed by the governor of Hong Kong made a report in 1880, from which the following accounts are taken:

"Young girls, virgins of thirteen or fourteen years of age, are brought from Canton or elsewhere and deflowered according to bargain, and as a regular business for large sums of money, which go to their owners. The regular earnings of the girls go to the same quarters, and the unfortunate creatures obviously form subjects of speculation to regular traders in this kind of business, who reside beyond our jurisdiction. Mr. Lister speaks of the brothel-keepers as a horrible race of cruel women, cruel to the last degree, who use an ingenious form of torture, which they call prevention of sleep, which he describes in detail."

"Two girls were brought before the registrar general, both of whom pleaded for protection against their owner, stating that she intended to sell them to go to California. One of these had been bought by this woman for eighty dollars; the girl saw the price paid for her. The other said her mother was very poor and sold her for twenty dollars. The inspector said: 'There has been at times a number of women residing in the house, and I do not know what has become of them. I believe that they have been sent to California by the defendant.'"

The poor slave girls, as shown by court proceedings at Hong Kong, had the same terror of being "sold into California" that the negro slaves in this country had of being "sold down the river." One of the girls testified that she had seen several women sent away to California. She had been present when bargains were made, the price varying. In Hong Kong the price was from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars; they would bring in California from two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty dollars.

Owing to the restriction of Chinese immigration, and the penal laws against importing women for evil uses, the value of a slave girl on the Pacific Coast has greatly increased; it is now $3,000.

The system of Chinese brothel slavery differs from the white slave trade, in that the Chinese brothel slaves are not weak or wicked women who have fallen into the clutches of traffickers, as so many of our European and American white slaves unquestionably are, but are good girls who have been sold by their actual owners into a life of shame for money, sometimes sold by their own parents. Some are not sold outright, but are mortgaged to pay off a loan. So much is credited each month until the debt is canceled—unless fresh debts, real or fictitious, keep the victim indefinitely, as with the white slaves. On the marked differences between the white slave and the yellow slave, the commissioners previously quoted say: "Prostitutes in Europe are, as a general rule, fallen women, the victims of seduction, or possibly of innate vice. Being the outcasts of society, and having little, if any, prospect of being admitted again into decent and respectable circles of life, deprived also of their own self-respect as well as the regards of their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of conscience, they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek oblivion in excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese prostitutes of Hong Kong are an entirely different set of people. Very few of them can be called fallen women, scarcely any of them are the victims of seduction in the English sense of the term, refined or unrefined. The great majority of them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women in Canton or Macao, have been brought up for that life and trained in various accomplishments suited to it. They frequently know neither father nor mother, except what they call a pocket-mother, that is, the woman who bought them from others." There are 18,000 such slaves in Hong Kong, if the estimates accepted by the commissioners are correct.

In China the yellow slave has hope of escape from her bondage. If she is pretty and accomplished, some rich man may buy her for his first, second, third or fourth wife. If she is homely some honest working man may take her. Or she may sing or play an instrument and thereby add to her earnings until she can buy her own freedom, if dissipation and disease have not killed her first.

The mortgaged girls are often such as have sacrificed their own to their family's honor, according to the Chinese and Japanese notion of filial piety. The money thus advanced by the keeper is thought necessary to rescue the girl's family or some member of it from calamity or ruin. One Japanese man is quoted as saying that such sacrifice on a girl's part is "Christ-like." He should hear the voice of Christ, saying of all these sins, "which things I also hate." Revelation, 2:6.

YELLOW SLAVES IN AMERICA.

The terrible system of Chinese and Japanese brothel slavery has been imported into San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities of California. Americans and Europeans have invested money and devoted business ability to this enormous iniquity, because it pays well. Apart from the horrors of Chinatown, one thousand Japanese women are held in this form of slavery in California. The San Francisco Chronicle said of this statement: "There is not the slightest doubt of the truth of the assertion, disreputable as it may seem."

The police will generally say after investigating, that these women are willing to remain in their present condition. Doubtless this is true of most of them, but they are slaves, none the less, literal and actual slaves, bought and paid for and acknowledging the ownership. In a letter of Abraham Lincoln, written before the war, he tells of a company of negro slaves that he saw on a boat on the Ohio and he never saw such a happy company of people in his life. When John Brown made his raid into Virginia and captured 200,000 stands of arms at Harper's Ferry, he hoped that the thousands of negro slaves in that region would join him and fight for their freedom. He could only get six or eight negroes to join him, and those at the point of the bayonet. One was shot rather than seek his liberty. At the beginning of the Abolition movement a petition from slaves was sent to Congress in favor of slavery! Women terrorized by such laws as are quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and further terrorized by all the brutal treatment and threats of the slave traders, are not likely to say to the police that they desire liberty. But it is our duty to give them liberty and to punish their owners, who cannot legally own them, but do practically own them under the Stars and Stripes.

The following cases illustrate the traffic and the work of missionaries. These three girls were in the Methodist Home for Chinese Girls, located since the earthquake at Berkeley. One says:

"I am twelve years old; born in Canton; father a laborer; mother a nurse; parents very poor. Mother fell sick and in her need of money sold me to a woman three years ago in Hong Kong. The woman promised my mother to make me her own daughter. My mother cried when she left me; I have heard that she is now dead. The big ship City of Pekin took me soon out of sight. There was trouble in landing me. The woman had no trouble in landing, because she had been in California before. She told me what I was to say. She told me I must swear I was her own daughter. The judge asked me, 'Is this your own mother?' and I said, 'Yes.' This was a lie, but I did not know it was wrong to do as I was told, and I was afraid of my mistress. The Judge said, 'Did this woman give you birth?' and I said, 'Yes.' The judge said, 'did anybody tell you to say all this?' and I said 'No,' because my mistress had instructed me. She taught me on shipboard what to say if I was taken to court. She beat me with thick sticks of firewood. She beat me with the fire tongs. One day she took a hot flatiron, removed my clothes and held it on my naked back until I howled with pain. (The scab was on her back when she came to the Mission.) My forehead is all scars caused by her throwing heavy pieces of wood at my head. One cut a large gash and the blood ran out. She stopped the bleeding and hid me away. I thought I better get away before she killed me. When she was having her hair washed and dressed I ran away. I had heard of the Mission, and inquired the way and came to it. A white man brought me here. I am very happy now."

Another little slave, eleven years old, who was about to be sold from domestic slavery into a brothel, was saved by a Chinaman. She says: "A Chinaman living next door, knowing how I was treated and that I was going to be put in a brothel, when I saw him in the passageway, asked me if I wished to come to the Mission, and I said 'Yes.' My mistress had gone out into the next room, leaving her daughter and another slave girl in the room. I said I would go at once and he brought me. I am very glad to live here and lead a good life."

In the following case the rescuer was a negress. A young girl came from China to San Francisco as a merchant's wife. Missionaries visited her in Chinatown, but she disappeared and explanations were not satisfactory. A year later the door bell rang one night at the Mission and when it was opened a Chinese girl fell in a faint across the threshold, a colored girl holding her by the queue. The colored girl saw her running and, to prevent her from being dragged back by her tormentors, seized her by the queue and helped her run to the Mission. It was the merchant's young wife. The wretch had left her on false pretense in a den of shame. She was tied to a window by day and to a bed by night, a thoroughly unwilling slave. Three days before her escape, the chief of police and an interpreter had gone through the house, questioning every inmate as to whether they wished to lead a life of shame or not. She was asked the question in the presence of the divekeeper, the madam and all the girls. She had been told beforehand, "If you dare say you want to escape, we will kill you." The chief of police announced in the papers that there were no slaves in Chinatown. Though watched night and day, she rushed out at an opportune moment and, with the help of the colored girl, ran to safety.

Since the earthquake immense slave pens have been built at Oakland and in San Francisco. A photograph of one large wooden structure, to hold more than a hundred girls, is before me as I write. The girls are kept in small rooms, nine or ten feet square. Americans and Chinamen are partners in the horrible business.

This chapter is a review, in part, of the book, "Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers," written by Dr. Katharine Bushnell and Mrs. Elizabeth Andrew.

It was my good fortune and delight to meet Dr. Bushnell and Mrs. Andrew in Bombay, at the time when Lord Roberts had contradicted their statements about procuring women for British soldiers in India—"Queen's women" as they were called. Upon being convinced that Dr. Bushnell and Mrs Andrew had told the truth, Lord Roberts, then commander-in-chief of the forces in India, said, "I apologize to the ladies without reserve."

E. A. B.



CHAPTER XVII.

HOW SNAKES CHARM CANARIES: METHODS OF PROCURERS.

At the end of May, 1907, Rev. Melbourne P. Boynton, pastor of the Lexington Avenue Baptist Church, was requested by the Chicago Examiner to make a tour of the vice district at Twenty-second street and write against its iniquities for the columns of that newspaper. Pastor Boynton stipulated that I should accompany him, as a recognized worker in the slums and superintendent of the Midnight Mission. Rev. E. L. Williams, a Methodist pastor, also accompanied us, with Detectives Considine and Thomas of the Chicago police.

As we went out I prayed God to give us a thunderbolt to alarm the people of Chicago. We did not foresee the answer to this prayer, but I have always felt that it was answered very quickly and in the following manner:

Shortly after one o'clock on the morning of May 31, we entered a resort on Dearborn street, whose former owner had come to me at midnight to tell me that he had not had one happy minute since he took up that terrible business and that he would quit it, which he did. In this place among the half-dressed inmates we noticed a modestly gowned young woman, sitting at a small drinking table opposite something that ought to have been a man. The thing's name was Neil Jaeger; the girl's name was Macdonald. I asked the girl if she were an inmate or leading a life of that sort and she said no. She told me her true name and address and lied only about her age, as Jaeger had taught her to say she was twenty, when she was only sixteen, that he might sell her in the white slave market. The keeper of the resort, convinced that she was under age, had refused to deal with him. When I began to question the snake, it hissed, "Mind your own business." I replied that this was my business, and asked the detectives to investigate. Discerning quickly what it was that we had discovered, they promptly locked the thing in an iron cage, like any other wild beast. The girl was cared for. Her anxiety was expressed in her words, "What will my mother say?"

At the trial of Jaeger before Judge Fake, he himself told brazenly how he had brought this young girl from her own home in an Illinois town, her mother supposing that she was going to work in Rockford. While the girl was giving her testimony I heard the click of a camera, to my sorrow—for we were doing our utmost to keep the girl's secret and to send her quietly to her mother. More than half a million copies of her photograph went out in the great daily papers of Chicago. When the truth was known, other young girls told what they had escaped by the capture and exposure of this reptile, for he was luring several of them to Chicago, one of them only fifteen years old. About half a million pages were published in the Chicago newspapers at this time against the traffic in girls. Such, it seemed to me, was the thunderbolt, for which I had prayed.

LETTERS OF A DESTROYER OF GIRLS.

In a letter written from Rockton, Illinois, on May 27, the hypocrite Jaeger had said to one of his intended victims: "I have learned to love you as I never loved a girl before and probably never will again. Now, sweetheart, I want you to get away from this town and the life you are leading there as soon as you possibly can. When you are ready let me know, and I will send you plenty of money to start out on, and will meet you wherever you say and then we can be together as much as we please and can live happy ever afterward—that is, of course, if you like me that well and I certainly hope you do. Be a good girl and God bless you and keep you from harm. Lovingly, Neil M. Jaeger."

In another letter he wrote: "From our last conversation I feel determined not to give you up, but to do all in my power to aid you to free yourself from the bondage that undermines your health and temper and open to you a life free from care and strife, where you can go where, when and with whom you please without being kept like a girl in a convent. Your natural vivacious and care-free nature rebels against the shackles, which fate has placed upon you, and I am willing to give you physical, mental, moral and financial support, to give you a life where none of the troubles which now harass you will be manifest, but instead will be a life where love will rule supreme. I will further try to prove myself worthy of your esteem if you will allow me to do something in a financial way. I am a man of character, honesty and uprightness, possess an estate valued at $50,000, own an automobile and a private yacht, have an income of some $2,500 a year and am thoroughly independent. I come from one of the best families in the west. I am willing to take you to Chicago, support you, and if you desire, secure employment for you at Marshall Field & Co.'s, besides taking you to dances, theatres, automobiling and yachting. Surely anything would be better than the life you are leading there."



Denying rumors of his evil character, he wrote: "I did not go to Davis to see another girl. I went to sign up some policies which I wrote up there a couple of weeks ago. And if you heard anything I said about you, it was some lie those kids made up, like the one about the girl in Davis. I never spoke to the girl in my life and probably wouldn't know her if I met her on the street. I do care very much for you and I love you much more than I profess and I don't run after other girls. I would like to take you with me, but since you say that was impossible, I will be true to you. If you ever want to come to me I will send you the money and will take as good care of you as if you were my own sister."

In another letter the wretch complains: "Say, why did you tell Effie about my writing to you and wanting you to come to Chicago? Please keep these things to yourself if you value love."

Needless to say, the scoundrel had no wealth, and when Judge Fake fined him two hundred dollars, all the punishment our backward laws provided at that time, he had to go to prison until his father could send the money from his home in the state of Washington.

The letters quoted above were obtained by Miss Niblo, a missionary, from the intended victims, and were published by the editor of the Freeport Evening Standard, July 31, 1907.

A very young girl who just escaped this tiger's claws wrote this letter of inquiry and gratitude:

"—— Street.

——, Illinois, August 8, 1907.

Rev. Ernest Bell:

Dear Sir:—Could you tell me if Neil Jaeger is in the bridewell yet or has he been released? I am a girl that he tried to persuade to go away with him, but he did not succeed in getting me to go. You have my heartiest congratulations for capturing such a wretch.

Yours Truly,

——"

There are hundreds of such smooth scoundrels occupied all the time in replenishing the dens of shame in Chicago. They travel, to our positive knowledge, as far as Ohio and Tennessee and in all the nearer states. Fathers and mothers and brothers of girls, and the girls themselves, should be ceaselessly vigilant against these murderous deceivers. They always profess to be in some legitimate business and are apt to transact some honest deals as a blind. Every city that keeps up a red light district breeds these destroyers of girls. Every divekeeper employs such agents, and the principal is worse than the employee.

Mrs. Charlton Edholm, in her book "Traffic in Girls," writes the following confession made to her by a converted bartender: "Mrs. Edholm, I believe I am a converted man now, and that the Lord Jesus Christ has accepted me and I will dwell with him forever, but when I realize how many girls I have sent to houses of shame, I wonder if God ever can forgive me, and I would give my life if I could undo it.

"When I was a bartender for years in a saloon with wine rooms, these procurers used to come there, and often I've seen one of these men bring a beautiful girl to the ladies' entrance, and of course he would try to get her to drink wine or beer, but oftentimes having been brought up in a Christian home, or having signed the total abstinence pledge in the Sunday school,—for you W. C. T. U. women have done so much for the children by having temperance taught in the day schools and Sunday schools,—and she would refuse to touch the wine or beer, then he would wink at me, and I knew that meant an extra dollar for me, and I would drop a little drug into whatever that girl had to eat or drink, and in a few moments she would be unconscious and that fellow would have a carriage drive to the door, that girl would be placed in it and driven straight to a haunt of shame; he would receive his twenty-five or fifty dollars, and that girl would be as surely lost as if the earth had opened and swallowed her. Hundreds of times I've done this, and, Mrs. Edholm, do you think God can forgive me?"

Young men, and older men, who patronize houses of shame should be made to see and feel that all this hellish traffic goes on at their instance and at their expense. The keepers and procurers are the paid agents of the men who foot the bill. Every dollar, with the burning name of God upon it, that any man spends there makes him a stockholder in the white slave market and a partner in the traffic in girls. The men who support the hideous business are the ultimate white slave traders, and when their hired men, the divekeepers and procurers, come to judgment and condemnation, the men who supported them in crime will be arraigned beside them and punished with them.

PERIL OF STAGE-STRUCK GIRLS.

The corruption of the present day theatre is generally admitted. Archbishop Farley, in a sermon at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, on Sunday, February 7, 1909, said that "the stage is worse today then it was in the days of paganism." He added: "We see today men and women—old men and old women—who ought to know better bringing the young to these orgies of obscenity. Instead of that they should be exercising a supervision over the young and should look carefully after their companionship."

Actresses of character are among the foremost to warn young women of the perils of the modern stage. Shakespeare and the older dramatists taught virtue, often with the spirit and energy of a prophet. Multitudes of present day plays are of such moral character and tendency that no one can defend or excuse them. President Taft recently walked out of a theatre to express his disapproval of the play.

Low theatres exist merely to inflame those who visit them. They go to the awful length of naming the vice district as part of the merriment of the performances. Other so-called theatres are a part of the combined saloon and den of shame. I have conversed personally many times with girls who were deceived into going to such places, thinking they were going on the reputable stage.

Mr. Arthur Burrage Farwell, Chicago's well-known reformer, here tells briefly the story of two young girls, whom I have often met in his office, who were lured by a false theatrical agency to go to a vile resort. The agency of a wicked woman, or two of them, will be noted in this case, along with the base deeds of an unscrupulous man. The keen eyes and wise head of a good hearted Scotch woman saved the girls from a terrible doom. Mr. Farwell writes as follows:

"About December 1, 1907, I received a special delivery letter from the managing editor of one of the oldest daily papers in Springfield, Illinois, informing me that two girls had been sent back to Chicago and suggesting that the police department be informed of the facts. I immediately communicated with the assistant general superintendent of police, Hon. Herman F. Schuettler, and the girls were located. The theatrical agent who had sent them from Chicago was arrested and work was started against some of the evil practices of false theatrical agents.

Taking the story from the girls and from their testimony in court, it is as follows: These two girls worked in a large department store in the city of Chicago. One of them was approached one day by a well-dressed woman who requested the judgment of this young lady upon some material to be used in theatrical work. The result was that this woman gave the name of a theatrical agent and told the girl that she could make $25.00 a week by going on the stage, as she had a good voice, etc., etc.

This girl spoke to another friend, working in the same store, and together they called upon this theatrical agent whose name was given them by the woman. After being taken to a saloon, an attempt being made to compromise them, they were given tickets to the city where they were supposed to go upon the stage. They reached the city and providentially were guided to a boardinghouse of a Scotch woman who lived next door to the alleged theatre, which proved to be a saloon in the front and a vaudeville in the rear and upstairs a most awful place.

The proprietor of the alleged theatre declined to employ the young ladies unless they would stay in the rooms over the saloon or theatre. On the advice of the Scotch woman they declined to stay over the theatre, and the woman furnished them tickets and they returned to Chicago.

The preliminary hearing of the People vs. —— was held in the Municipal Court of Chicago before Judge Wells, January 14, 1908, and lasted about five days, and twenty-seven witnesses were heard, the testimony covering 373 pages. The theatrical agent ——, was held to the grand jury. His license to operate a theatrical agency was revoked by the state.

The sworn testimony showed a condition of affairs that would be a disgrace to the most ignorant, vicious and debased people. That such things are allowed in a republic where the people rule, as were allowed in Springfield and in other cities, is a sad commentary upon the average indifference of the authorities and the people, which should be called criminal indifference.

The theatrical agent and one of the owners of the property in Springfield were indicted for conspiracy, but in the criminal court these charges were not sustained.

The two girls were living with a woman and one day when they were needed as witnesses it was found they were not there. A letter with no signature was received by the president of the Chicago Law and Order League, informing him that the two girls were living under assumed names in Milwaukee, and immediately representatives of the Chicago Law and Order League and of the State of Illinois, went to Milwaukee and found the girls and brought them back.

The men who were responsible for sending these state's witnesses away were indicted and were found guilty and the woman re-indicted.

The expense in this one case to the Chicago Law and Order League and the State of Illinois was probably not less than $2,000.

If the young girls who are seeking a living upon the stage could know of the pitfalls that are in their way, I believe many of them would seek other employment. One of the girls is now married and living very happily.

Arthur Burrage Farwell, President Chicago Law and Order League."

E. A. B.



CHAPTER XVIII.

PROCURESSES AND THE CONFESSION OF ONE OF THEM.

Here is a story from the London Times, which might easily be repeated in the New York Herald or the Chicago Tribune:

"I was standing on a railway platform at —— with a friend waiting for a train, when two ladies came into the station. I was acquainted with one of them, the younger, well. She told me she was going to London, having been fortunate enough to get a liberal engagement as governess in the family of the lady under whose charge she then was, and who had even taken the trouble to come into the country to see her and her friends, to ascertain that she was likely in all respects to suit. The train coming in sight, the fares were paid, the elder lady paying both. I saw them into the car, and the door being closed, I bowed to them and rejoined my friend, who happened to be a London man about town. 'Well, I will say,' said he, 'you country gentlemen are pretty independent of public opinion. You are not ashamed of your little transactions being known!' 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'Why, I mean your talking to that girl and her duenna on an open platform.' 'Why, that is Miss ——, an intimate of friend of ours.' 'Well, then, I can tell you,' said the Londoner to me coolly, 'her friend is Madam ——, one of the most noted procuresses in London, and she has got hold of a new victim, if she is a victim, and no mistake.' I saw there was not a minute to lose; I rushed to the guard of the train and got him to wait a moment. I then hurried to the car door where the ladies were. 'Miss ——, you must get out; that person is an unfit companion for you. Madam ——, we know who you are.' That one victim was rescued, but how many are lost?"

With "Prisoner Number 503," whose story follows, I have conversed personally and I have not the slightest doubt that her story is true. It surprised me to hear her say that she was and is a member of a Baptist church, with an implication in her words and manner that members of other churches are not quite so safe as members of her denomination. Her story was published January 28, 1909. She was brought to justice by the Chicago Law and Order League.

BY PRISONER NUMBER 503.

I am writing this message to the readers of The National Prohibitionist and to the world from behind the bars in that gloomy pile of buildings alongside the Drainage Canal, where Chicago every year spends some millions of dollars to protect herself from the criminal classes which she constantly creates and breeds.

It may shock the respectable people who read these lines to find that their author is an imprisoned criminal. I lay emphasis on the word "imprisoned," because my not very long experience with the world has taught me that violation of the law is not particularly offensive to the mass of the world's inhabitants so long as it is not attended with the "pains and penalties" that are prescribed for the law's violation.

I may as well shock my readers still more at once by the frank confession that I am in prison convicted of being what is commonly known as a "white slave trader" and I was justly convicted and was guilty of the offense charged.

And having made this confession, let me introduce myself.

Behold me, a very common sort of a woman, twenty nine years old, an ex-schoolteacher, born and piously brought up in the good state of Arkansas, fairly well educated, and, until within the last few months, almost wholly inexperienced in the ways of the wicked world.

Six years ago, in my Arkansas home, I married a man whom I believed to be in every way worthy of the respect and love that I gave him and, bidding goodby to my mother and my childhood friends in the old home, went with him to St. Louis.

I wonder if the good men who let the saloons flourish in all our cities and excuse themselves with the assertion that if a man will drink it is his own business, and if he makes a fool of himself, he is the only one that suffers—I wonder if those men really know what they are doing for thousands of women who do not drink but who SUFFER?

Years ago, somewhere I read an article about the saloons written by some great minister or bishop, whose name I have forgotten, and, indeed, I have forgotten most of what he said, but I remember he did say that the victims of the saloon are willing victims.

Great God! I have been a victim and God knows that I never was willing!

I found that my husband was a drunkard. A railroad man with a good "job," able to earn a comfortable living for himself and me; he never for a day could be depended upon. Many a morning did he kiss me goodby, leaving me the impression that he had gone to his work, when it would be three days, a week, a month, sometimes three months before I saw or heard from him again, though I might be in the sorest straits for the necessities of life. Three times he did this when he knew that I was soon to become a mother. Once, after three months' absence, I heard from him in a hospital in another city. I went to him, nursed him, brought him home and when he was able to work, gave him out of my own earnings money to pay his board until payday (for his work would oblige him to board in another town) and he went away and I never saw him again for months.

Forced to work for a living, I came to Chicago, finding a position in a legitimate business, although, unfortunately, it was the sort of a business that brought me into contact with many people of bad morals, and tended to deteriorate my own moral ideals.

Here in Chicago, while I was buying a railroad ticket one day in a ticket broker's office, I was introduced by the clerk to a man who appeared to be a gentleman, with the suggestion that he would be willing to do for me a slight service which I needed at the moment, regarding my baggage. A few weeks after, this man, whom I had no reason to suspect of any evil motive, sought me with the offer of a good place to work. He promised me a good salary, and the offer was specially attractive in view of the fact that I was then without work, and I accepted the place in perfect good faith.

I want to emphasize what I now say for the benefit of those who may read these lines who are parents of young girls.

I suppose I may claim to be a reasonably intelligent woman, with a fair education, some years of observation of the world and a little opportunity to know of the world's wickedness, but I was at that time absolutely ignorant of the existence of such a thing as a business in vice.

I had never heard that girls were bought and sold.

I did not know the character of what are called "disorderly houses."

It seems to me that good people, pious fathers and mothers, who let their girls grow up and go out into the world without a word of real instruction that will protect them in such crises which may come in life to any woman, are not wholly innocent—I am tempted to say are frightfully guilty of the destruction of their own daughters.

To make a long story short, and to tell a hideous tale in a few very plain words, I accepted the proposition and found myself installed in one of the protected vice dens of Chicago as housekeeper and the special personal slave of this man, whom I now found to be a slave trader, the practical owner of other women and girls in various dives, as well as the driver of gangs of procurers. This man almost owned me. My salary—such small parts of it as I got—went into his pocket upon one excuse and another, while I was subject to his brutal will constantly.

I will not shock my readers by telling the details of my horrid life in that place, but I must give them some facts that ought to be in possession of the unsuspecting decent people who sit quietly and virtuously in their own homes while a slaughter more terrible than Herod ever dreamed of goes on unceasingly.

I am asked to say whether the unfortunate girls in these places are slaves in the sense that they can not get away. My answer to that must depend upon your interpretation of "can not."

In my own case there never was a time when I could not have walked out of the building, had I chosen to do so, but my promised salary was always in arrears and I was penniless, with nowhere to go and no friends.

To walk out on a winter's day into the streets of Chicago, with nothing with which to buy a meal and no shelter and no friend under the wide, pitiless sky, is a heroic course to which some resolute Spartan matron might be driven in protection of her virtue, but it's a course which can hardly be expected from a mistreated, deluded, ignorant, disgraced, modern American girl.

And it must be understood that my situation was very different from that of the "girls." I was in the position of a superintendent. They were under me. What would have been possible for me was practically impossible for them.

To begin with: No inmate of these vice dens is allowed to have clothing with which she could appear on the street. It is taken away from her by fraud or by force, as soon as she arrives, and is locked up. She never sees it again until she is regarded as thoroughly trustworthy and sure to come back if she does get out.

Then, too, she is in debt. As soon as she arrives at the house, an account is opened with her, although, perhaps, she never sees the books. She is charged with the railroad fare that has been paid to bring her to the city; she is charged with the price that was paid for her to the thief who betrayed and stole her; she is charged for the alleged garments that are given her in exchange for her clothing—charged four times the price that they cost.

Of course, the police will tell you nowadays that the old debt system has been abolished, and that girls are not allowed to be in debt to the house where they are kept, and it may be that a sort of fiction is maintained, by which, if an investigation were forced, the divekeeper would pretend to be an agent for the storekeeper that sells the supplies. But the condition of debt is none the less real, although as always it be fraudulent. The divekeeper, the storekeeper and the police are all partnership in it.

Of course, it is not lawful to keep a girl a prisoner because she happens to be in debt, but she is made to believe that it is. She is told strange stories about laws that are enacted for the government of her "class," and she recognizes, all too plainly, the power of the arm of the police always outstretched in behalf of the divekeeper.

Police officers come and go in the dive. They register all "inmates" upon arrival and give formal, though, of course, unlawful sanction to the business. If a girl becomes refractory and the divekeeper threatens her with the vengeance of the police, she has every reason to believe that the threat is well founded, whether it is or not.

If, in spite of all this, a girl should be brave enough or rash enough to try to make her way out of the dive, and escape, almost nude, as she is kept, into the street, perhaps she would be allowed to go. Perhaps, too, the police might not bring her back, but they certainly would not assist her escape; and if they did not force her back into the den from which she had escaped they would certainly send her to prison.

I have seen dozens of girls who wanted to get out from these dives, wanted to leave the life that they were living, but who, under the conditions that I have enumerated, did not—I think I may fairly say—could not do it.

I had been in my position as housekeeper but a little while when my owner discovered that I could be profitably employed in another line, that is, in importing slaves from other cities.

Some months before, the firm for which I was then working had sent me to Milwaukee to sell toilet preparations, and this business had brought me in contact with a considerable number of foolish young women. I knew that some of them were anxious to come to Chicago and I was sent to Milwaukee to induce them to come and bring them with me.

I made several such journeys to Milwaukee and other cities, bringing a number of victims for Chicago's slave market. I attempt no defense for this infamous work. I ask for no moderation of judgment against me, but I feel that I have a right to call the attention of the public to the glaring injustice of the situation that puts me behind these bars, with long months of imprisonment before me, and leaves others who were equally guilty with me, and who are equally well known in their guilt, to go on with their wicked work.



I know that ignorance of law is no excuse for its violation, but I was certainly ignorant that I was breaking any law. I never dreamed of it until, just before my arrest, the proprietress of one of the houses from which a girl whom I had brought to the city had run away, told me of my danger. I asked her why she was not also in danger, and she replied that it was because she carefully followed the instructions of the police and maintained an ignorance concerning the sources from which the girls were brought who came to her house.

I may or may not be believed, but I state the truth when I say that I never brought to this slavery a girl whom I believed to be an innocent girl. I brought only girls whom I found in bad surroundings, usually in disorderly saloons, and girls who claimed to be and appeared to be beyond the protection of that extremely virtuous law, which our wise lawmakers have given us, known as the "age of consent" law. How any sane person must hate such cursed nonsense as such a law!

Now, let me ask why—why, when I was sent as a mere agent of others, when I brought girls from well-known dens where they had been ruined, brought them into a recognized slave market, delivered them to well-known slave owners, where they were used to enrich their owners and the police—why, while the slave market goes on and while the slave owners drive their new gangs, and while the police keep up their system of protection and graft—WHY AM I LOCKED UP HERE ALONE?

Now, let me make it perfectly clear on just what ground I have been sentenced to prison. I was convicted under what is known as the "pandering act," which makes it an offense to secure an inmate for a disorderly resort in the state of Illinois.

I was guilty and the protest I make is the protest of a convict, but I cry out to the good people to know why, if I must be behind prison walls for procuring an inmate for such a place, they walk free and grow rich and hold offices who allow such places to be.

IF IT BE A CRIME WORTHY OF THE PRISON TO PROCURE AN INMATE FOR A VICE RESORT, IS IT A SURE PROOF OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE VIRTUE THAT VICE RESORTS COVER SQUARE MILES OF THIS CITY AND THE CITY GOVERNMENT "REGULATES" THEM?

Ten long months hence, when, broken, disgraced, without a cent, without a friend, they turn me out into Chicago's cold November storms, will justice have been vindicated, will some great and good ends have been attained by the punishment of me—a tool, a cat's-paw—while seven thousand saloons and square miles of houses of prostitution have gone on in their bloody, damning work under sanction of the government run by you pious men?

E. A. B.



CHAPTER XIX.

WANTED—FATHERS AND MOTHERS.

After conversing with many thousands of fallen women and misguided girls, I believe that the principal causes of their downfall are the following, in the order named:

1. Parental inefficiency, through lack of character, knowledge or vigilance.

2. Amusements that pander to passion, such as many theaters, some of the amusement parks, cafes and dance halls with drinking attachments, some Chinese restaurants, some Greek and other fruit and candy stores, and some pleasure boats that run at night.

3. Unsafe hours and unreasonable liberty; walks, drives and automobile rides, unattended, especially at night.

4. Betrayal of girls and desertion by husbands.

5. Wilfulness and love of ease and finery.

6. Insufficient wages in stores and factories.

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

8. A few are depraved from choice or heredity.

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

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS GO WRONG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUMMER: THE SILLY SEASON.

Did you ever notice that, as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circumspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the butterfly nature within her is given wing, inward and outward restraints drop from her almost as inevitably as her cold weather clothing, and she lets herself dance along on the soft breeze of sentiment with the lightness and freedom of a bit of thistledown.

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

In the language of the sportsman, the Summer is everywhere recognized as the "open season" for the hunting of hearts and the pursuit of romance. The girl who is her own chaperone and protector allows herself a latitude of unconventionally in the period of Summer outings, of vacations and excursions, of moonshine and frolic, which she would not think of permitting herself at another season. Romance is in the air, and even the careful and well-reared girl finds herself under its spell.

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

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

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

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

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

E. A. B.



CHAPTER XX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Chicago our politicians have set apart several districts for the traffickers in slaves. The traders in girls are public, bold, defiant. They feel clean, almost virtuous, after the city hall and a deluded preacher or two have given them an immunity bath—provided only the fiction of segregation is preserved.

MAYOR A COWARD.

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

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

A FRIGHTENED GIRL.

I have seen with my own eyes a young girl under seventeen years of age, a member of Immanuel Baptist Church, running like a frightened gazelle, to her home near Twenty-second street, to avoid insult on the public streets, from the thousands of young men who are encouraged to throng that district for immoral purposes. She ran to her home for this reason for three or four years. I lifted my hat in reverence to such a girl. But, Oh, how I felt the shame of the city and of the churches near her home, that permitted conditions that put a good girl to tests like this. I afterward talked face to face with her mother.

GRAFT INEVITABLE.

Segregation as practised, colonizes and fosters vice, maintains a white slave market under executive protection, and provides an overwhelming temptation and facility for graft. Bribeless government cannot exist for any considerable time where these facilities for corruption are so assiduously maintained. It is not in politicians, or anybody else, to resist temptation when the temptation itself is protected and cherished.

Nothing is said by our officials, or by the high priests of segregation, about corraling immoral men into segregation districts. It is therefore not segregation of vice, but only an attempted or pretended, and never a complete or successful cornering of depraved women. There are wide open resorts on more than twenty streets outside of the big "levee." Segregation as practised is not a restriction of vice so much as it is a practical license to lawbreakers to wreck human lives and blight the homes of the people, by corrupting husbands and sons and taking captive wives and daughters. You would be astounded to learn how many ruined women are wives who have been allured to sin.

A MAELSTROM FOR YOUNG MEN.

Into the red light districts, so long as they remain, men and youths from the whole city and the whole world are irresistibly drawn, if only by curiosity. The "levee," blazing with electric lights and floating in liquor, is regarded by thousands of visitors as one of the chief sights of Chicago.

When the Shriners, a Masonic order, held a convention here, their red fezzes and Arabian symbols were seen by hundreds in the "levee" towards midnight. Not all, perhaps not very many of them, were there for a vile purpose. They were simply inspecting one of Chicago's pet institutions—not the cattle market at the stockyards, but the white slave market in the "levee."

Cattle men from Texas and Montana come with their carloads of cattle to Chicago, and having disposed of their stock and received their money, many of these men hurry to the "levee," of whose attractions they have heard a thousands miles away. Thus the immorality and diseases of the "levee" are spread over the land.

So far from being an efficient restriction of vice, a red light district is the greatest advertisement the horrible trade can have—and is just what it desires. Every divekeeper and madam in Chicago and every other city, delights in segregation as practised by our rulers, who have sworn to the Almighty and contracted with the people to enforce the laws—and draw their salaries upon this contract and this oath.

"Give us a district to ourselves," say all the dives with one mind, and our obliging executives forthwith bow down to them and do as they say, giving these detestable criminals permission to trample the laws in the sewers. "To hell with the laws" some of the divekeepers have said to our missionaries. Why not give murderers, thugs, thieves, gamblers, forgers, a district where they may break the laws, after an immunity bath at City Hall, as well as to the filthy offenders who promote even the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, and invite upon Chicago the doom of those cities of the plain?

A divekeeper recently paid his first fine in twenty years. For twenty years this man had carried on his murderous trade without ever being made to feel even once that he is a criminal. What astounding privilege, in a city where many men have been arrested and fined for spitting on the sidewalk.

The French and Japanese importers of women have been amazingly exempt from punishment at the hands of our local authorities. The federal government has done its duty, as all the world knows. The work of Mr. Sims and his assistants at Chicago is affecting the whole nation and Canada for good. But why are the wild beasts who trade in girls immune from punishment at the hands of our city and state authorities?

We ought to say, and do say very heartily, that our authorities in Chicago are beginning to listen to the cry of the white slaves, native and foreign. Something has been done to punish procurers and such like reptilia who do not count in politics. But the divekeepers, the buyers and holders of women, have not been seriously disturbed, except by the national government.

SEGREGATION MAKES A SLAVE MARKET.

It is impossible to abolish brothel slavery and to license, either formally or practically, the slave market, the red light district. While the divekeeper enjoys the indulgence of the mayor and the police and of their masters, the citizens, he will keep his dive—and his dive must be restocked with new victims, to make money for him, all the time. These victims will be obtained, as heretofore, by procurers who travel city and country to trap them, and they will be imported from Europe and Asia as heretofore. To maintain a segregation district is to maintain a slave market, as things are.

Unless we make energetic and successful war upon the red light districts and all that pertains to them, we shall have Oriental brothel slavery thrust upon us from China and Japan, and Parisian white slavery, with all its unnatural and abominable practices, established among us by the French traders. Jew traders, too, will people our "levees" with Polish Jewesses and any others who will make money for them.

Shall we defend our American civilization, or lower our flag to the most despicable foreigners—French, Irish, Italians, Jews and Mongolians? We do not speak against them for their nationality, but for their crimes. American traders of equal infamy, to the shame of the American name, have stocked Asiatic cities with American girls.

On the Pacific Coast eternal vigilance alone can save us from a flood of Asiaticism, with its weak womanhood, its men of scant chivalry, its polluting vices and its brothel slavery. Bubonic plague in San Francisco and Seattle was alarming. Mongolian brothel slavery, the Black Death in morals, is more alarming.

On both coasts and throughout all our cities, only an awakening of the whole Christian conscience and intelligence can save us from the importation of Parisian and Polish pollution, which is already corrupting the manhood and youth of every large city in this nation.

MONEY IN VICE

There is money in vice, so long as the public conscience sleeps and officials are chloroformed with bribes, or otherwise persuaded to make it easy for lawbreakers. Frenchmen, Japanese, and Jews know what a good rich market America is, and they are exploiting it with enterprise. They will continue to do so more and more, if pulpit and press are ignorant or cowardly, and sworn officers of the law make void the law. Both native and foreign exploiters of vice immediately improve the facilities afforded by every wicked or deluded executive who proclaims a segregation district. These shrewd, diabolical men quickly stock the red light districts with their victims. The traders are organized, capitalized, ready to pay for their privileges to trample on our statute books, our flag, our Bibles, our homes.

WORSE THAN PARIS!

All Europe except Turkey is organized against the traffic in womanhood. Many criminals of this sort have been driven out of Paris—only to find a cordial welcome in the open arms of our deluded if not debauched officials, who provide for them segregation districts in this and other American cities. Thus our American cities become dumps for the outcast filth of Paris.

In our "levee" at Twenty-second street, fourteen resorts had "Paris" or "Parisian" as part of their signs until Chief Shippy ordered the signs removed six months ago. Numerous other resorts have French managers and French inmates. Patriotic Americans would do well to reflect upon Sedan and the French lilies that withered there, after trainloads of women had rolled out of Paris to the French camp, while the Germans sang "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" and "The Watch on the Rhine."

We remember La Fayette and French service for American liberty, but from organized, capitalized, cunning, brazen, Parisian licentiousness in addition to that of native Americans,

Good Lord deliver us!

About a score of resorts in the same "levee," all of them extremely flagrant, are managed by Jews. Two or three places are managed by Italian men, though there are few Italian prostitutes in Chicago. One resort is controlled and occupied by Japanese—for American men; and several places contain American girls for Chinese men. I know of no resorts controlled by English, Scotch, German or Scandinavian men.

In one respect our American red light districts are worse than Paris. In Paris, if Dr. Sanger is right in his standard work, "A History of Prostitution," men are not permitted to manage the resorts. The unspeakable divekeeper—why do the American people tolerate such a viper as this?

COURTS ARE UNSTAINED.

The laws and the courts are uniformly against vice and against the men who exploit vice, for a lazy living or despicable gain.

The Supreme Court of California is representative of all courts when it said, in the case of Pon against Wittman in July, 1905:

"Under the Penal Code of this state, keeping or knowingly letting any tenement for the purposes of prostitution, keeping a house of ill-fame resorted to for the purposes of prostitution or lewdness, or residing therein, are criminal offenses, and every person who lives in or about such houses, and any common prostitute, is a vagrant. (Penal Code, sections 315, 316, 647.)

"Ordinance No. 1587 of the board of supervisors of the city and county of San Francisco also makes it a public offense to maintain such houses, or become an inmate thereof or visitor thereto, or in any manner contribute to their support.

"These laws have for their object the prohibition and suppression of prostitution, and that duty devolves, within the city and county of San Francisco, upon its police department.

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

"The suppression of such houses, as evidenced by the stringent laws concerning them, is a public policy of the state."—California Reports, volume 147, page 292.

California and New York have splendid modern laws against white slavery and the traffic in women in its various forms. Nine states have enacted new laws against these evils this year. We rejoice in these laws, but they will never fully accomplish their purpose while the executive officers of our cities illegally make void the law by proclaiming or recognizing red light districts, where traders are illegally exempted from the laws and their penalties.

Since the laws are good and the courts everywhere faithful, for the most part, to the laws, why are the executive officers of our cities so far from fulfilling the purpose of the laws as interpreted by the courts? Many of our officials clearly, from their conduct, consider it "one of the important duties of government" not to suppress but to protect, favor and encourage these hideous haunts of vice and crime. Why?

TONS OF GRAFT.

Doubtless tons of graft have been taken from the red light districts, and doubtless more tons will be taken by perjurers and traitors in public office. No one knows this better than honest officials—for there are many such, men who keep their oath of office and conscientiously guard the great public interests of which they are trustees and not traitors.

But the evil lies deeper than corrupt officials, and cannot be eradicated by the most faithful officials only—even if all were such. Under our form of government officials are the people's agents and must do what their masters, the sovereign people, require them to do.

The responsibility is therefore the people's. Why do the sovereign people of our American cities love to have it so? Why do they approve the red light districts, the white slave market, the traffic in women and girls? Or disapprove too mildly to abolish them?

THE LIE IN THE PEOPLE'S MINDS.

Lecky, the historian of European morals, lent his great name to a great delusion, when he attempted in a passage too well known, to garland the prostitute as the protectress of pure women. Edwin Arnold, the paganizing English poet, put Lecky's folly into verse, writing a sonnet in praise of the harlot as the purest of all women—a sort of devil's compliment to our wives and mothers.

This immoral and repulsive idea has a considerable place among educated men and among the plain people. I was grieved to hear a physician quote Lecky's false and immoral statement before the Physicians' Club of Chicago. The managing editor of one of our decent and moral morning papers quoted Lecky in a short talk I had with him.

When the educated and moral are so deceived, what can we expect of the ignorant and immoral? The devil's dogma, that prostitution is a protection to virtue, is thrust upon us continually by the vilest men and women, and by those who create, promote and exploit vice. This creed is assiduously preached by divekeepers and madams throughout the world. Thereby they have their wealth, for thereby honest people are deceived into tolerating these enemies of the human race—destroyers of youths and maidens, of innocent wives and guilty husbands, of cities, civilizations and nations.

SIN IS NOT A BLESSING.

The prostitute will be a blessing to good women when Satan is actually transformed into a holy angel—but not till then. While the hideous caricature of womanhood is responsible by her diseases for one-fourth or more of the surgical operations upon innocent wives—operations made necessary by disease which their husbands bought of the prostitute, perhaps years before marriage—we cannot regard her and her criminal male partners as anything less than the red-handed slayers of good women. While the eye doctors attribute one-fourth of blindness, particularly of helpless babies, to the same source, we cannot quote except to condemn, this sophistry that makes the worse appear the better cause and garlands the woman whose pursuit is death itself, suicide and murder in one.

While this perverted or enslaved creature that Lecky and Arnold would glorify drives herself and her criminal patrons to suffer locomotor ataxia, necrosis of bone and brain, or incurable insanity at public expense in our asylums, we will give her no garland, except apple blossoms—of the apples of Sodom.

GOOD WOMEN ARE NOT PROTECTED BY BAD.

Nor do hundreds of brothels illegally legalized in a city protect virtuous women, maidens and little girls from bestial assault. On the contrary, good women are a thousand times safer where no such hells exist to manufacture degenerates. The men who consort with vile women lose their respect for all women, and by their base fellowship inflame infernal fires which are the utmost menace to all good women.

We have had in Chicago numerous recent illustrations of the way in which police-protected houses of infamy save good women and girls.

A few weeks before the murder of Mrs. Gentry, Constantine applied at the rooming agency of the Young Men's Christian Association for a room. The secretary marked on his application "sporty" and did not send him to any good woman's home to room, but to a lodging house of men only. By some means he came to room at the Gentry home and repaid hospitality by murdering his hostess. The "sporty" man associating with harlots, loses his respect for good women, and may murder them if they resist his wicked will.

In September one block from our outrageous "levee," where one thousand and fifty ruined women are constantly at the service of ten thousands of vile men—one block from these protectresses of good women and young girls, more than a thousand protectresses!—a thirteen-year-old girl was lured to a room and brutally assaulted. The police officer, Lieut. White, who arrested the criminal, and was himself roughly handled in the discharge of his duty, confirmed this report when I inquired of him face to face. Captain McCann told me he arrested a divekeeper for assaulting his own stepdaughter.

Do the dives protect women and girls from crimes like these? Do they not rather manufacture the degenerates who commit these crimes?

WORST ENEMIES OF THE HUMAN RACE.

Harlots and their patrons are the worst enemies in every way that good women can have. If there were any virtue in vice, if black were white or even speckled, doubtless the supreme book of morals, the guide of the race, would have some word in praise of moral rottenness—some few lines in prose or verse in laudation of lewd women. But the whole Bible keeps the distinction sharp and clear between black and white, between virtue and sin.

Until the public intelligence and conscience are trained to abhor vice as a destroyer of families and nations—more insidious and more ruinous than even the liquor traffic—a soft, foolish, wicked indulgence will be granted to the red light districts, and the white slave markets which they constitute and are. We must call most urgently upon all guides and rulers of the people to make incessant war upon the loathsome criminals who prey upon young women and young men. They are the worst enemies of the human race. They drink the heart's blood of mothers and eat the flesh of their daughters. They people hospitals, alms-houses, lunatic asylums and dissecting rooms. They blast innocent wives and blind helpless babies. They enslave by force, threats or craft thousands of weak women and innocent young girls.

Their horrible flesh market and slave pen is the red light district, where they are illegally exempted from the criminal prosecutions that their crimes deserve. This favor to criminals is itself criminal. The men who have lifted up their hands to God, upon taking the oath of office, have an appalling responsibility when they exempt the most odious criminals from the laws which they are sworn and paid to enforce. The sovereign people, who indulge these officials in their palpable neglect of duty and malfeasance in office, have a fearful accountability.

Property owners and their agents, who rent buildings for immoral use, are perhaps guiltiest of all, having no motive but greed. In Los Angeles, the aroused citizens put the Italian millionaire, who owned the "crib" district and was exploiting girls therein, on the chain gang and abolished the "crib" district. On the other hand, in Chicago we have seen property of Yale University become the vilest of dives, to the grief of President Hadley and the shame of his agents in this city.

The old Roman Senator, who believed that Rome and Carthage could not both be great, kept crying "Delenda est Carthago" until Carthage was blotted out. So let us keep crying, "The Levee must go!" until the police-protected white slave market is destroyed. Above all, in our struggle against this most infamous slavery, let us never forget the very early flag of the Revolution, the Pine Tree Flag, now preserved in Independence Hall, with its deathless motto, WE APPEAL TO GOD.

E. A. B.



CHAPTER XXI.

THE FAILURE AND SHAME OF THE REGULATION OF VICE.

"When the Law fails to regulate sin, and not to take it utterly away, it necessarily confirms and establishes sin."—John Milton.

"The law ought to make virtue easy and vice difficult."—Wm. E. Gladstone.

"They enslave their children's children, Who make compromise with sin."—James Russell Lowell.

THE YOUNG MAN'S VIEW.

A ruined young man in one of Chicago's segregated districts for advertising and encouraging vice, asked this question, as he stood on the curbstone in one of our midnight gospel meetings: "If the wise men who are set up over us to rule us want it this way, what can you expect of us?"

Such is the inevitable reasoning of young men. They commonly believe that the city licenses the criminal resorts which its police protect, and they are not conscious of bad citizenship in supporting resorts which are in such favor with the city government.

Long ago Archdeacon Paley wrote in his Moral Philosophy "The avowed toleration, and in some countries, the licensing, taxing, and regulating of public brothels, has appeared to the people an authorizing of fornication. The Legislators ought to have foreseen this effect."

LAWGIVERS ARE INEXORABLE.

The greatest of lawgivers, Moses, made no compromise with vice. He is inexorable. "There shall not be a harlot of the daughters of Israel." The daughter of a priest who profaned herself was to be burnt to death. The Old Testament is hot with warnings against patronizing "strange women," that is, foreign prostitutes who had invaded the Holy Land, like the imported white slaves of the French traders here today. Manu, the ancient lawgiver of India, provided that the adulterer should be burnt to death on an iron bed, and the adulteress devoured by dogs in a public place. Buddha speaks with loathing of immoral conduct.

The Son of God, that his mercy towards repentant women who washed his feet with their tears might not be taken as softness towards sin, came back from heaven to say in the Book of Revelation, that he will "cast into great tribulation" and "kill with death" wanton women and the men who visit them. Of these iniquities the compassionate Redeemer says, "Which things I also hate." Rulers cannot claim any consent or condonement of their regulation of vice from the Head of all human government, the King of kings, to whom they must answer for their rule or misrule.

FALLEN GOVERNMENTS AND A FALLEN CHURCH.

So scandalously far can a fallen government and a fallen church depart from the Head of the church and the Head of human government, that we have seen kings, even the pious king of France, Saint Louis, giving a royal permit to harlots; and the Mayor of London, William Walworth, in 1381, managing the brothels at Southwark for the Bishop of Winchester, who owned, licensed and regulated those abominable places. The Reformation party prevailed upon Henry VIII, in the thirty-seventh year of his reign to end this infamy, and "this row of stews in Southwark was put down by the king's commandment, which was proclaimed by sound of trumpet." Thus as Dr. Fuller wrote, "This regiment of sinners was totally and finally routed"—a warning to other vice districts, and an example of how to deal with them.

From that date, 1545 to 1864, England gave no official endorsement to vice. Then a wicked government, after calling the medical head of the system of regulation in Paris to visit London, and getting the Parisian chief of police to write a book for their information, thrust upon the unsuspecting English nation the odious French system of legalized vice—restricting its application at first to certain garrison towns, but cunningly extending it to the whole country, the Crown colonies, and Canada and India. After a heroic crusade of twenty-two years, led by Mrs. Josephine Butler, the aroused conscience of Great Britain compelled Parliament in 1886 to repeal the loathsome Contagious Diseases Acts.

ILLINOIS REJECTS THE PARISIAN SYSTEM.

The Statutes of Illinois show that in the year 1874, certain city officials in this State were about to license houses of ill-fame and to provide for enforced medical inspection of their inmates, according to the detestable methods established a century ago in Paris—a system which made the blood of Frances Willard turn to flame, when she saw its workings in Paris, and made her resolve that American womanhood should never be subjected to it. The outrageous French system of giving legal standing to vice, and attempting to assure men that they can violate the moral law and escape the physical penalty, is utterly repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon conscience. As President Roosevelt cabled to the Philippines, when he was urged to take measures for reducing disease in the army, "The way to reduce the disease is to reduce the vice." Lord Herbert, when Minister of War, by improving the habits of the men, reduced the disease in the British army 40 per cent in six years, 1860-66. Under Lord Kitchener's command in India today every soldier finds a tract in his knapsack telling him plainly the consequences of vice, and urging him to lead a manly and honorable life. The tract was prepared jointly by Lord Kitchener and the Bishop of Lahore.



The attempt to license infamy in cities of Illinois was thwarted by an Emergency Act, approved and in force March 27th, 1874. (See Revised Statutes, Chapter 24, Sec. 245, p. 352.)

Article V of the Cities and Villages Act provides in Section 62, item 45, that the city council shall have power not to regulate, but to suppress houses of ill-fame, within the limits of the city and within three miles of the outer boundaries of the city. p. 318.

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

AN UNPARDONABLE SIN.

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

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

SUPREME COURTS ARE UNSTAINED.

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

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

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