Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls Part 19

When the educated and moral are so deceived, what can we expect of the ignorant and immoral? The devil's dogma, that prost.i.tution 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 a.s.siduously 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 prost.i.tute 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 prost.i.tute, 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l a.s.sault. On the contrary, good women are a thousand times safer where no such h.e.l.ls 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociating 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 a.s.saulted. 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 a.s.saulting 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 const.i.tute 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d.

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 prost.i.tutes 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 G.o.d, 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 compa.s.sionate 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sure 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 Lah.o.r.e.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLOSED OUT AS ALL DENS OUGHT TO BE

Formerly a notorious resort containing many white slaves. Now closed, as a result of the fight against the traffic in young girls]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN MUST WALK DAILY THROUGH THIS INFERNAL REGION

One of the streets in the vice district showing the school children pa.s.sing the doors of these awful dens of sin and shame]

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.