Little Lost Sister Part 49

"Progress comes through inculcation of these facts, by means of education. Schools and churches--and parents--must concentrate on the moral improvement of the rising generation, or we wrestle ineffectively."

"The kind of vice you have been specially fighting will be extinct within the next ten years," said Ambrose. "I don't mean that we shall have suppressed vice. That is a task for centuries. But our people in the United States will not stand for this trade in girls."

"I'd like to preach to men who have daughters to protect to take their wives and go out and see some of the shady places of the city for themselves. It would make any mother far more careful in future about the companions of their daughters."

"Yes, to whisper about 'wild oats' and to see a young man who wants to marry one's daughter in a dive are two very different things."

"We are going to have vice," said Miss Randall, "as long as economic conditions set the stage for it. A young girl housed in a poor tenement, ill-lighted, poorly heated, badly ventilated, fed and clothed insufficiently--see to it that she hears foul language, and witnesses drunkenness and quarrelling--then you have the condition that produces the delinquent city girl."

"We are attacking all those evils," said Ambrose. "The public conscience is rising against them. I predict the time when it will be regarded as great a disgrace for a city to possess a 'back of the yards,' a ghetto or a slum tenement district as it is now to have a district organized for the exploitation of women. It's coming. You and I shall see it."

Mary Randall had risen, deeply moved while he spoke. She leaned against the trellis and gazed far across the silver-shot lake at the sun sinking, a great ball of crimson fire among the dark trees.

"G.o.d speed the day!" she said.

Beyond the veranda in a darkened drawing-room Mary Randall's aunt had been resting and had heard this conversation. She rose and went softly away and out to a pergola where she found her husband smoking a cigar.

"Lucius," she said. "That young newspaper man who has been out here to see Mary is here again. They are talking in the veranda, settling all the problems of Chicago!"

Lucius Randall blew a cloud of smoke. "Well, my dear, that is the only way this old world gets ahead, for each generation to tackle its problems anew."

"I believe that young man likes Mary."

"Many young men do."

"But--I really believe Mary likes him. She talks to him with a sweet note in her voice, even when they are discussing the most impossible subjects."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Lucius Randall with much serenity.

AFTERWORD

In our modern crusade against that most ancient evil known as the white slave traffic we have made at least one serious advance. All over the world that conspiracy of silence which has fettered thought and prevented open action in the fight is ended.

Nowadays, as Havelock Ellis, author of the famous "Psychology of s.e.x,"

says in the _Metropolitan_ discussion of this subject, "churches, societies, journalist, legislators, have all joined the ranks of the agitators. Not only has there been no voice on the opposite side, which was scarcely to be expected--for there has never been any anxiety to cry aloud in defense of 'white slavery' from the housetops--but there has been a new and noteworthy conquest over indifference and over that sacred silence which was supposed to encompa.s.s all s.e.xual topics with suitable darkness. The banishment of that silence in the cause of social hygiene is, indeed, not the least significant feature of this agitation. * * *

"By insuring that our workers, and especially our women workers, are decently paid, so that they can live comfortably on their wages, we shall not, indeed, have abolished prost.i.tution, which is more than an economic phenomenon, but we shall more effectually check the white slave trader than by the most Draconic legislation the most imaginative vice crusader ever devised. And when we insure that these same workers have ample time and opportunity for free and joyous recreation we shall have done more to kill the fascination of the white slave traffic than by endless police regulations for the moral supervision of the young.

"No doubt the element of human nature in the manifestations we are concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting differently in each s.e.x, but tending to drive both into the same risks.

Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently with our dams. We can at least begin today a task of education which must slowly though surely undermine the white slave trader's stronghold. Such an education needs to be not merely instruction in the facts of s.e.x and wise guidance concerning all the dangers and risks of the s.e.xual life; it must also involve a training of the will, a development of the sense of responsibility, such as can never be secured by shutting our young people up in a hothouse, sheltered from every fortifying breath of the outside world."

It was in Illinois that Abraham Lincoln--a Southerner, Kentucky born--threw down the gage in his famous Bloomington speech in the matter of buying and selling human beings as slaves. It is in Illinois--in spite of much disgrace which the State's fair name has had forced upon it--that men and women have enlisted for life to fight in the battle against buying and selling white girls, to fight against that special dealing in "live stock" actually known to have gone on for years, which is Chicago's special shame as a distributing center.

There is eternal shouting and exhorting against the immorality and vice of the levee, but I wonder if it isn't society's hue and cry to divert attention from viciousness in what are called "the best circles," a condition that is a hundred times more important.

Will the churches be in some measure convinced that they must organize for a combined effort to save the children of today--that souls are more important than sectarianism, and that Sunday is not the only day in the week?

If every unmarried woman with money and time at her disposal were to devote part of her leisure to the care of one child there would be far less misery in the slums and many a little sister would be saved.

If there is to be any effective reform we must arouse society from its lethargic viewpoint too generally accepted that the devil is never so black as he is painted.

As long as mothers do not know who the young men are with whom their daughters spend evenings away from home so long will there be the troop of Little Lost Sisters tripping, stumbling down the trail that leads h.e.l.lward.

Let us make the war against commercialized vice a bigger thing than a presidential campaign, bigger than any war, bigger than anything that was ever known in a woman's movement before in the world!