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L161 O-1096
NEW CONSCIENCE
AND AN ANCIENT EVIL
JANE ADDAMS
HULL HOUSE. CHICAGO
Author of Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of Peace
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets
Twenty Years at Hull-House
gorft
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1912
AM rights reserved
116.5
Copyright, IQII and 1911
By the S. S. MCCLURE COMPANY and the McCLUKE PUBLICATIONS, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1912
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1912.
Reprinted June, 1912, three times.
To the Juvenile Protective Association of Chica-
go, whose superintendent and field officers have
collected much of the material for this book, and
whose president, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, has
so ably and sympathetically collaborated in its
writing.
04
f^~f~.> -i ~*j >-.' ^*-
CONTENTS
A NEW CONSCIENCE IN REGARD TO AN ANCIENT EVIL
CHAPTER I PAQE
As inferred from An Analogy 3
CHAPTER II
As indicated by Recent Legal Enactments ....<;
CHAPTER III
As indicated by the Amelioration of Economic Con-
ditions 55
CHAPTER IV
As indicated by the Moral Education and Legal Pro-
tection of Children 97"
CHAPTER V
As indicated by Philanthropic Rescue and Prevention 141
CHAPTER VI
As indicated by Increased Social Control .... 179
PREFACE
The following material, much of which has
been published in McClure's Magazine, was
written, not from the point of view of the expert,
but because of my own need for a counter-knowl-
edge to a bewildering mass of information which
came to me through the Juvenile Protective
Association of Chicago. The reports which its
twenty field officers daily brought to its main
office adjoining Hull House became to me a
revelation of the dangers implicit in city condi-
tions and of the allurements which are designedly
placed around many young girls in order to draw
them into an evil life.
As head of the Publication Committee, I read
the original documents in a series of special
investigations made by the Association on dance
halls, theatres, amusement parks, lake excursion
boats, petty gambling, the home surroundings of
one hundred Juvenile Court children and the
records of four thousand parents who clearly
contributed to the delinquency of their own fami-
ix
PREFACE
lies. The Association also collected the personal
histories of two hundred department-store girls,
of two hundred factory girls, of two hundred
immigrant girls, of two hundred office girls, and
of girls employed in one hundred hotels and
restaurants.
While this experience was most distressing, I
was, on the other hand, much impressed and at
times fairly startled by the large and diversi-
fied number of people to whom the very existence
of the white slave traffic had become unen-
durable and who promptly responded to any
appeal made on behalf of its victims. City offi-
cials, policemen, judges, attorneys, employers,
trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly ar-
rived immigrants, clergymen, railway officials,
and newspaper men, as under a profound sense of
compunction, were unsparing of time and effort
when given an opportunity to assist an individual
girl, to promote legislation designed for her pro-
tection, or to establish institutions for her rescue.
I therefore venture to hope that in serving my
own need I may also serve the need of a rapidly
growing public when I set down for rational
consideration the temptations surrounding multi-
x
PREFACE
tudes of young people and when I assemble, as
best I may, the many indications of a new con-
science, which in various directions is slowly
gathering strength and which we may soberly
hope will at last successfully array itself against
this incredible social wrong, ancient though it
may be.
HULL HOUSE,
Chicago.
XI
AN ANALOGY
CHAPTER I
AN ANALOGY
In every large city throughout the world
thousands of women are so set aside as outcasts
from decent society thai, it is considered an im-
propriety to speak the very word which designates
them. Lecky calls this type of woman "the
most mournful and the most awful figure in
history": he says that "she remains, while creeds
and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal sacri-
fice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the peo-
ple." But evils so old that they are imbedded
in man's earliest history have been known to
sway before an enlightened public opinion and in
the end to give way to a growing conscience,
which regards them first as a moral affront and
at length as an utter impossibility. Thus the
generation just before us, our own fathers, up-
rooted the enormous upas of slavery, "the tree
that was literally as old as the race of man,"
although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in
4 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
the captives of man's earliest warfare, even as
this existing evil thus originated.
Those of us who think we discern the beginnings
of a new conscience in regard to this twin of
slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself
and even more persistent, find a possible analogy
between certain civic, philanthropic and educa-
tional efforts directed against the very existence
of this social evil and similar organized efforts
which preceded the overthrow of slavery in Amer-
ica. Thus, long before slavery was finally de-
clared illegal, there were international regulations
of its traffic, state and federal legislation concern-
ing its extension, and many extra legal attempts
to control its abuses; quite as we have the inter-
national regulations concerning the white slave
traffic, the state and interstate legislation for
its repression, and an extra legal power in con-
nection with it so universally given to the munic-
ipal police that the possession of this power has
become one of the great sources of corruption
in every American city.
Before society was ready to proceed against
the institution of slavery as such, groups of men
and women by means of the underground rail-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 5
road cherished and educated individual slaves; it
is scarcely necessary to point out the similarity
to the rescue homes and preventive associations
which every great city contains.
It is always easy to overwork an analogy, and
yet the economist who for years insisted that
slave labor continually and arbitrarily limited
the wages of free labor and was therefore a detri-
ment to national wealth was a forerunner of the
economist of to-day who points out the economic
basis of the social evil, the connection between
low wages and despair, between over-fatigue and
the demand for reckless pleasure.
Before the American nation agreed to regard
slavery as unjustifiable from the standpoint of
public morality, an army of reformers, lecturers,
and writers set forth its enormity in a never-
ceasing flow of invective, of appeal, and of por-
trayal concerning the human cruelty to which
the system lent itself. We can discern the scouts
and outposts of a similar army advancing against
this existing evil: the physicians and sanitarians
who are committed to the task of ridding the
race from contagious diseases, the teachers and
lecturers who are appealing to the higher morality
6 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
of thousands of young people; the growing lit-
erature, not only biological and didactic, but of
a popular type more closely approaching "Uncle
Tom's Cabin."
Throughout the agitation for the abolition of
slavery in America, there were statesmen who
gradually became convinced of the political and
moral necessity of giving to the freedman the
protection of the ballot. In this current agita-
tion there are at least a few men and women who
would extend a greater social and political free-
dom to all women if only because domestic con-
trol has proved so ineffectual.
We may certainly take courage from the fact
that our contemporaries are fired by social com-
passions and enthusiasms, to which even our
immediate predecessors were indifferent. Such
compunctions have ever manifested themselves
in varying degrees of ardor through different
groups in the same community. Thus among
those who are newly aroused to action in regard
to the social evil are many who would endeavor
to regulate it and believe they can minimize its
dangers, still larger numbers who would eliminate
all trafficking of unwilling victims in connection
AN ANCIENT EVIL 7
with it, and yet others who believe that as a
quasi-legal institution it may be absolutely
abolished. Perhaps the analogy to the abolition
of slavery is most striking hi that these groups,
in their varying points of view, are like those
earlier associations which differed widely hi re-
gard to chattel slavery. Only the so-called ex-
tremists, in the first instance, stood for abolition
and they were continually told that what they
proposed was clearly impossible. The legal
and commercial obstacles, bulked large, were
placed before them and it was confidently as-
serted that the blame for the historic existence
of slavery lay deep within human nature itself.
Yet gradually all of these associations reached
the point of view of the abolitionist and before
the war was over even the most lukewarm union-
ist saw no other solution of the nation's difficulty.
Some such gradual conversion to the point of
view of abolition is the experience of every society
or group of people who seriously face the difficul-
ties and complications of the social evil. Certainly
all the national organizations the National
Vigilance Committee, the American Purity Fed-
eration, the Alliance for the Suppression and
8 A NEW 'CONSCIENCE AND
Prevention of the White Slave Traffic and many
others stand for the final abolition of commer-
cialized vice. Local vice commissions, such as the
able one recently appointed in Chicago, although
composed of members of varying beliefs in regard
to the possibility of control and regulation, united
in the end in recommending a law enforcement
looking towards final abolition. Even the most
sceptical of Chicago citizens, after reading the
fearless document, shared the hope of the com-
mission that "the city, when aroused to the
truth, would instantly rebel against the social
evil in all its phases." A similar recommenda-
tion of ultimate abolition was recently made
unanimous by the Minneapolis vice commission
after the conversion of many of its members.
Doubtless all of the national societies have before
them a task only less gigantic than that faced by
those earlier associations in America for the
suppression of slavery, although it may be legit-
imate to remind them that the best-known anti-
slavery society in America was organized by the
New England abolitionists in 1836, and only
thirty-six years later, in 1872, was formally dis-
banded because its object had been accomplished.
AN ANCIENT EVIL 9
The long struggle ahead of these newer associa-
tions will doubtless claim its martyrs and its
heroes, has indeed already claimed them during
the last thirty years. Few righteous causes have
escaped baptism with blood; nevertheless, to
paraphrase Lincoln's speech, if blood were ex-
acted drop by drop in measure to the tears of
anguished mothers and enslaved girls, the nation
would still be obliged to go into the struggle.
Throughout this volume the phrase "social
evil" is used to designate the sexual commerce
permitted to exist in every large city, usually
hi a segregated district, wherein the chastity of
women is bought and sold. Modifications of legal
codes regarding marriage and divorce, moral
judgments concerning the entire group of ques-
tions centring about illicit affection between
men and women, are quite other questions
which are not considered here. Such problems
must always remain distinct from those of com-
mercialized vice, as must the treatment of an
irreducible minimum of prostitution, which will
doubtless long exist, quite as society still retains
an irreducible minimum of murders. This vol-
ume does not deal with the probable future of
10 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
prostitution, and gives only such historical
background as is necessary to understand the
present situation. It endeavors to present the
contributory causes, as they have become regis-
tered in my consciousness through a long resi-
dence in a crowded city quarter, and to state the
indications, as I have seen them, of a new con-
science with its many and varied manifestations.
Nothing is gained by making the situation
better or worse than it is, nor in anywise different
from what it is. This ancient evil is indeed social
in the sense of community responsibility and can
only be understood and at length remedied when
we face the fact and measure the resources which
may at length be massed against it. Perhaps
the most striking indication that our generation
has become the bearer of a new moral conscious-
ness in regard to the existence of commercialized
vice is the fact that the mere contemplation of it
throws the more sensitive men and women among
our contemporaries into a state of indignant
revolt. It is doubtless an instinctive shrinking
from this emotion and an unconscious dread that
this modern sensitiveness will be outraged, which
justifies to themselves so many moral men and
AN ANCIENT EVIL H
women in their persistent ignorance of the subject.
Yet one of the most obvious resources at our
command, which might well be utilized at once,
if it is to be utilized at all, is the overwhelming
pity and sense of protection which the recent
revelations in the white slave traffic have aroused
for the thousands of young girls, many of them
still children, who are yearly sacrificed to the
"sins of the people." All of this emotion ought
to be made of value, for quite as a state of emotion
is invariably the organic preparation for action,
so it is certainly true that no profound spiritual
transformation can take place without it.
After all, human progress is deeply indebted
to a study of imperfections, and the counsels of
despair, if not full of seasoned wisdom, are at
least fertile in suggestion and a desperate spur to
action. Sympathetic knowledge is the only way
of approach to any human problem, and the line
of least resistance into the jungle of human wretch-
edness must always be through that region which
is most thoroughly explored, not only by the
information of the statistician, but by sympa-
thetic understanding. We are daily attaining the
latter through such authors as Sudermann and
12 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their readers
to comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman
through a skilful portrayal of the reaction of
experience upon personality. Their realism has
rescued her from the sentimentality surrounding
an impossible Camille quite as their fellow-crafts-
men in realism have replaced the weeping Amelias
of the Victorian period by reasonable women
transcribed from actual life.
The treatment of this subject in American
literature is at present in the pamphleteering
stage, although an ever-increasing number of
short stories and novels deal with it. On the
other hand, the plays through which Bernard
Shaw constantly places the truth before the
public in England as Brieux is doing for the pub-
lic in France, produce in the spectators a dis-
quieting sense that society is involved in com-
mercialized vice and must speedily find a way
out. Such writing is like the roll of the drum V
which announces the approach of the troops
ready for action.
Some of the writers who are performing this
valiant service are related to those great artists
who in every age enter into a long struggle with
existing social conditions, until after many years
AN ANCIENT EVIL 13
they change the outlook upon life for at least a
handful of their contemporaries. Their readers
find themselves no longer mere bewildered spec-
tators of a given social wrong, but have become
conscious of their own hypocrisy in regard to it,
and they realize that a veritable horror, simply
because it was hidden, had come to seem to them
inevitable and almost normal.
Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness
regarding the social evil are found in contempo-
rary literature, for while the business of literature
is revelation and not reformation, it may yet per-
form for the men and women now living that
purification of the imagination and intellect which
the Greeks believed to come through pity and
terror.
Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary pro-
cesses, we have learned to talk glibly of the obli-
gations of race progress and of the possibility of
racial degeneration. In this respect certainly
we have a wider outlook than that possessed by
our fathers, who so valiantly grappled with
chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May
the new conscience gather force until men and
women, acting under its sway, shall be constrained
to eradicate this ancient evil!
RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS
CHAPTER II
EECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS
At the present moment even the least con-
scientious citizens agree that, first and foremost, ,
the organized traffic in what has come to be
called white slaves must be suppressed and that
those traffickers who procure their victims for
purely commercial purposes must be arrested
and prosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue
girls fraudulently and illegally detained, save
through governmental agencies, it is naturally
through the line of legal action that the most
striking revelations of the white slave traffic
have come. For the sake of convenience, we
may divide this legal action into those cases
dealing with the international trade, those with
the state and interstate traffic, and the regulations
with which the municipality alone is concerned.
First in value to the white slave commerce is
the girl imported from abroad who from the
nature of the case is most completely in the power
18 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
of the trader. She is literally friendless and
unable to speak the language and at last dis-
couraged she makes no effort to escape. Many
cases of the international traffic were recently
tried in Chicago and the offenders convicted by
the federal authorities. One of these cases,
which attracted much attention throughout the
country, was of Marie, a French girl, the daughter
of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor that
he was obliged to take her from her convent
school at the age of twelve years. He sent her
to Paris, where she became a little household
drudge and nurse-maid, working from six in the
morning until eight at night, and for three years
sending her wages, which were about a franc a
day, directly to her parents in the Breton village.
One afternoon, as she was buying a bottle of
milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conver-
sation by a young man who invited her into a
little patisserie where, after giving her some
sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur
Paret, who was gathering together a theatrical
troupe to go to America. Paret showed her
pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed
and announcements of their coming tour, and
AN ANCIENT EVIL 19
Marie felt much flattered when it was intimated
that she might join this brilliant company.
After several clandestine meetings to perfect the
plan, she left the city with Paret and a pretty
French girl to sail for America with the rest of
the so-called actors. Paret escaped detection
by the immigration authorities in New York,
through his ruse of the "Kinsella troupe," and
took the girls directly to Chicago. Here they
were placed in a disreputable house belonging to
a man named Lair, who had advanced the money
for their importation. The two French girls
remained in this house for several months until
it was raided by the police, when they were sent
to separate houses. The records which were
later brought into court show that at this time
Marie was earning two hundred and fifty dollars
a week, all of which she gave to her employers.
In spite of this large monetary return she was
often cruelly beaten, was made to do the house-
hold scrubbing, and was, of course, never allowed
to leave the house. Furthermore, as one of the
methods of retaining a reluctant girl is to put
her hopelessly in debt and always to charge
against her the expenses incurred in securing
20 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
her, Marie as an imported girl had begun at once
with the huge debt of the ocean journey for
Paret and herself. In addition to this large
sum she was charged, according to universal
custom, with exorbitant prices for all the clothing
she received and with any money which Paret
chose to draw against her account. Later, when
Marie contracted typhoid fever, she was sent for
treatment to a public hospital and it was during
her illness there, when a general investigation
was made of the white slave traffic, that a federal
officer visited her. Marie, who thought she was
going to die, freely gave her testimony, which
proved to be most valuable.
The federal authorities following up her state-
ments at last located Paret in the city prison at
Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been convicted
on a similar charge. He was brought to Chicago
and on his testimony Lair was also convicted and
imprisoned.
Marie has since married a man who wishes to
protect her from the influence of her old life,
but although not yet twenty years olJ and making
an honest effort, what she has undergone has
apparently so far warped and weakened her will
AN ANCIENT EVIL 21
that she is only partially successful in keeping
her resolutions, and she sends each month to her
parents in France ten or twelve dollars, which
she confesses to have earned illicitly. It is as
if the shameful experiences to which this little
convent-bred Breton girl was forcibly subjected,
had finally become registered in every fibre of
her being until the forced demoralization has
become genuine. She is as powerless now to
save herself from her subjective temptations as
she was helpless five years ago to save herself
from her captors.
Such demoralization is, of course, most valu-
able to the white slave trader, for when a girl has
become thoroughly accustomed to the life and
testifies that she is in it of her own free will, she
puts herself beyond the protection of the law.
She belongs to a legally degraded class, without
redress in courts of justice for personal outrages.
Marie, herself, at the end of her third year in
America, wrote to the police appealing for help,
but the lieutentant who in response to her letter
visited the house, was convinced by Lair that
she was there of her own volition and that there-
fore he could do nothing for her. It is easy to
22 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
see why it thus becomes part of the business to
break down a girl's moral nature by all those
horrible devices which are constantly used by the
owner of a white slave. Because life is so often
shortened for these wretched girls, their owners
degrade them morally as quickly as possible,
lest death release them before their full profit
has been secured. In addition to the quantity
of sacrificed virtue, to the bulk of impotent suf-
fering, which these white slaves represent, our
civilization becomes permanently tainted with
the vicious practices designed to accelerate the
demoralization of unwilling victims in order to
make them commercially valuable. Moreover,
a girl thus rendered more useful to her owner,
will thereafter fail to touch either the chivalry
of men or the tenderness of women because good
men and women have become convinced of her
innate degeneracy, a word we have learned to
use with the unction formerly placed upon
original sin. The very revolt of society against
such girls is used by their owners as a protection
to the business.
The case against the captors of Marie, as well
as twenty-four other cases, was ably and vigor-
23
ously conducted by Edwin W. Sims, United
States District Attorney in Chicago. He prose-
cuted under a clause of the immigration act
of 1908, which was unfortunately declared un-
constitutional early the next year, when for the
moment federal authorities found themselves
unable to proceed directly against this inter-
national traffic. They could not act under the
international white slave treaty signed by the
contracting powers in Paris in 1904, and pro-
claimed by the President of the United States in
1908, because it was found impossible to carry
out its provisions without federal police. The
long consideration of this treaty by Congress
made clear to the nation that it is in matters of
this sort that navies are powerless and that as
our international problems become more social,
other agencies must be provided, a point which
arbitration committees have long urged. The
discussion of the international treaty brought the
subject before the entire country as a matter for
immediate legislation and for executive action,
and the White Slave Traffic Act was finally
passed by Congress in 1910, under which all
later prosecutions have since been conducted.
24 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
When the decision on the immigration clause
rendered in 1909 threw the burden of prosecu-
tion back upon the states, Mr. Clifford Roe,
then assistant State's Attorney, within one year
investigated 348 such cases, domestic and foreign,
and successfully prosecuted 91, carrying on the
vigorous policy inaugurated by United States
^ Attorney Sims. In 1908 Illinois passed the
first pandering law in this country, changing
the offence from disorderly conduct to a mis-
demeanor, and greatly increasing the penalty.
In many states pandering is still so little defined
as to make the crime merely a breach of man-
ners and to put it in the same class of offences
as selling a street-car transfer.
As a result of this vigorous action, Chicago
became the first city to look the situation squarely
in the face, and to make a determined business-
like fight against the procuring of girls. An
office was established by public-spirited citizens
where Mr. Roe '. was placed in charge and
empowered to follow up the clues of the traffic
wherever found and to bring the traffickers to
/ justice; in consequence the white slave traders
have become so frightened that the foreign im-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 25
portation of girls to Chicago has markedly de-
clined. It is estimated by Mr. Roe that since
1909 about one thousand white slave traders,
of whom thirty or forty were importers of foreign
girls, have been driven away from the city.
Throughout the Congressional discussions of
the white slave traffic, beginning with the Howell-
Bennett Act in 1907, it was evident that the
subject was closely allied to immigration, and
when the immigration commission made a partial
report to Congress in December, 1909, upon "the
importation and harboring of women for immoral
purposes," their finding only emphasized the
report of the Commissioner General of Immi-
gration made earlier in the year. His report
had traced the international traffic directly to
New York, Chicago, Boston, Buffalo, New Or-
leans, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City,
Ogden, and Butte. As the list of cities was com-
paratively small, it seemed not unreasonable to
hope that the international traffic might be
rigorously prosecuted, with the prospect of finally
doing away with it in spite of its subtle methods,
its multiplied ramifications, and its financial
resources. Only officials of vigorous conscience
26 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
can deal with this traffic; but certainly there
can be no nobler service for federal and state
officers to undertake than this protection of
immigrant girls.
It is obvious that a foreign girl who speaks
no English, who has not the remotest idea
in what part of the city her fellow-country-
men live, who does not know the police station
or any agency to which she may apply, is
almost as valuable to a white slave trafficker
as a girl imported directly for the trade. The
trafficker makes every effort to intercept such
a girl before she can communicate with her rela-
tions. Although great care is taken at Ellis
Island, the girl's destination carefully indicated
upon her ticket and her friends communicated
with, after she boards the train the governmental
protection is withdrawn and many untoward
experiences may befall a girl between New York
and her final destination. Only this year a
Polish mother of the Hull House neighborhood
failed to find her daughter on a New York train
upon which she had been notified to expect her,
because the girl had been induced to leave the
New York train at South Chicago, where she
AN ANCIENT EVIL 27
was met by two young men, one of them well
known to the police, and the other a young Pole,
purporting to have been sent by the girl's mother.
The immigrant girl also encounters dangers
upon the very moment of her arrival. The cab-
men and expressmen are often unscrupulous.
One of the latter was recently indicted in Chicago
upon the charge of regularly procuring immi-
grant girls for a disreputable hotel. The non-
English speaking girl handing her written address
to a cabman has no means of knowing whither
he will drive her, but is obliged to place herself
implicitly in his hands. The Immigrants' Pro-
tective League has brought about many changes
in this respect, but has upon its records some
piteous tales of girls who were thus easily
deceived.
An immigrant girl is occasionally exploited by
her own lover whom she has come to America to
marry. I recall the case of a Russian girl thus
decoyed into a disreputable life by a man
deceiving her through a fake marriage ceremony.
Although not found until a year later, the girl
had never ceased to be distressed and rebellious.
Many Slovak and Polish girls, coming to America
28 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
without their relatives, board in houses already
filled with their countrymen who have also pre-
ceded their own families to the land of promise,
hoping to earn money enough to send for them
later. The immigrant girl is thus exposed to
dangers at the very moment when she is least
able to defend herself. Such a girl, already be-
wildered by the change from an old world village
to an American city, is unfortunately sometimes
convinced that the new country freedom does
away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony.
Many others are told that judgment for a moral
lapse is less severe in America than in the old
country. The last month's records of the Munic-
ipal Court in Chicago, set aside to hear domestic
relation cases, show sixteen unfortunate girls, of
whom eight were immigrant girls representing
eight different nationalities. These discouraged
and deserted girls become an easy prey for the
procurers who have sometimes been in league
with their lovers.
Even those girls who immigrate with their
families and sustain an affectionate relation with
them are yet often curiously free from chaperon-
age. The immigrant mothers do not know where
Atf ANCIENT EVIL 29
their daughters work, save that it is in a vague
"over there" or "down town." They them-
selves were guarded by careful mothers and they
would gladly give the same oversight to their
daughters, but the entire situation is so unlike
that of their own peasant girlhoods that, dis-
couraged by their inability to judge it, they make
no attempt to understand their daughters' lives.
The girls, realizing this inability on the part
of their mothers, elated by that sense of inde-
pendence which the first taste of self-support
always brings, sheltered from observation during
certain hours, are almost as free from social con-
trol as is the traditional young man who comes up
from the country to take care of himself in a
great city. These immigrant parents are, of
course, quite unable to foresee that while a girl
feels a certain restraint of public opinion from the
tenement house neighbors among whom she lives,
and while she also responds to the public opinion
of her associates in a factory where she works,
there is no public opinion at all operating as a
restraint upon her in the hours which lie be-
tween the two, occupied in the coming and going
to work through the streets of a city large enough
30 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
to offer every opportunity for concealment. So
much of the recreation which is provided by
commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because
it is under such excitement and that of alcohol
that money is most recklessly spent. The great
human dynamic, which it has been the long
effort of centuries to limit to family life, is
deliberately utilized for advertising purposes, and
it is inevitable that many girls yield to such
allurements.
On the other hand, one is filled with admira-
tion for the many immigrant girls who in the
midst of insuperable difficulties resist all tempta-
tions. Such admiration was certainly due Olga,
a tall, handsome girl, a little passive and slow,
yet with that touch of dignity which a continued
mood of introspection so often lends to the young.
Olga had been in Chicago for a year living with
an aunt who, when she returned to Sweden,
placed her niece in a boarding-house which she
knew to be thoroughly respectable. But a
friendless girl of such striking beauty could not
escape the machinations of those who profit by
the sale of girls. Almost immediately Olga
'AN ANCIENT EVIL 31
found herself beset by two young men who con-
tinually forced themselves upon her attention,
although she refused all their invitations to shows
and dances. In six months the frightened girl
had changed her boarding-place four times,
hoping that the men would not be able to follow
her. She was also obliged constantly to look
for a cheaper place, because the dull season in
the cloak-making trade came early that year.
In the fifth boarding-house she finally found her-
self so hopelessly in arrears that the landlady,
tired of waiting for the "new cloak making to
begin," at length fulfilled a long-promised threat,
and one summer evening at nine o'clock literally
put Olga into the street, retaining her trunk in
payment of the debt. The girl walked the street
for hours, until she fancied that she saw one of
her persecutors in the distance, when she hastily
took refuge in a sheltered doorway, crouching in
terror. Although no one approached her, she
sat there late into the night, apparently too
apathetic to move. With the curious inconse-
quence of moody youth, she was not aroused
to action by the situation in which she found
herself. The incident epitomized to her the
32 A NEW CONSCIENCE XWD
everlasting riddle of the universe to which she
could see no solution and she drearily decided to
throw herself into the lake. As she left the door-
way at daybreak for this pitiful purpose, she
attracted the attention of a passing policeman.
In response to his questions, kindly at first but
becoming exasperated as he was convinced that
she was either "touched in her wits" or "guy-
ing" him, he obtained a confused story of the
persecutions of the two young men, and in sheer
bewilderment he finally took her to the station
on the very charge against the thought of which
she had so long contended.
The girl was doubtless sullen in court the next
morning; she was resentful of the policeman's
talk, she was oppressed and discouraged and
therefore taciturn. She herself said afterwards
that she "often got still that way." She so
sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after her long
struggle for respectability, that she gave a false
name and became involved in a story to which
she could devote but half her attention, being
still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative
thought which continually broke through the
flimsy tale she was fabricating.
AN ANCIENT EVIL 33
With the evidence before him, the judge felt
obliged to sustain the policeman's charge, and
as Olga could not pay the fine imposed, he sen-
tenced her to the city prison. The girl, however,
had appeared so strangely that the judge was
uncomfortable and gave her in charge of a repre-
sentative of the Juvenile Protective Association
hi the hope that she could discover the whole
situation, meantime suspending the sentence. It
took hours of patient conversation with the girl
and the kindly services of a well-known alienist
to break into her dangerous state of mind and to
gain her confidence. Prolonged medical treat-
ment averted the threatened melancholia and she
was a last rescued from the meaningless despon-
dency so hostile to life itself, which has claimed
many young victims.
It is strange that we are so slow to learn that
no one can safely live without companionship
and affection, that the individual who tries the
hazardous experiment of going without at least
one of them is prone to be swamped by a black
mood from within. It is as if we had to build
little islands of affection in the vast sea of im-
personal forces lest we be overwhelmed by them.
34 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
Yet 4ve know that in every large city there are
hundreds of men whose business it is to discover
girls thus hard pressed by loneliness and despair,
to urge upon them the old excuse that "no one
cares what you do," to fill them with cheap
cynicism concerning the value of virtue, all to
the end that a business profit may be secured.
Had Olga yielded to the solicitations of bad
men and had the immigration authorities in the
federal building of Chicago discovered her in
the disreputable hotel in which her captors wanted
to place her, she would have been deported to
Sweden, sent home in disgrace from the country
which had failed to protect her. Certainly the
immigration laws might do better than t^ send
a girl back to her parents, diseased and dis-
graced because America has failed to safeguard
her virtue from the machinations of well-known
but unrestrained criminals. The possibility of
deportation on the charge of prostitution is
sometimes utilized by jealous husbands or re-
jected lovers. Only last year a Russian girl
came to Chicago to meet her lover and was de-
ceived by a fake marriage. Although the man
basely deserted her within a few weeks he be-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 35
came very jealous a year later when he discovered
that she was about to be married to a prosperous
fellow-countryman, and made charges against
her to the federal authorities concerning her
life in Russia. It was with the greatest difficulty
that the girl was saved from deportation to
Russia under circumstances which would have
compelled her to take out a red ticket in Odessa,
and to live forevermore the life with which he
lover had wantonly charged her.
May we not hope that in time the nation's policy
in regard to immigrants will become less negative
and that a measure of protection will be extended
to them during the three years when they are so
liable to prompt deportation if they become
criminals or paupers?
While it may be difficult for the federal author-
ities to accomplish this protection and will doubt-
less require an extension of the powers of the
Department of Immigration, certainly no one
will doubt that it is the business of the city itself
to extend much more protection to young girls
who so thoughtlessly walk upon its streets.
Yet, in spite of the grave consequences which
lack of proper supervision implies, the municipal
36 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
treatment of commercialized vice not only differs
in each city but varies greatly in the same city
under changing administrations.
The situation is enormously complicated by
the pharisaic attitude of the public which wishes
to have the comfort of declaring the social evil
to be illegal, while at the same time it expects
the police department to regulate it and to make
it as little obvious as possible. In reality the
police, as they themselves know, are not expected
to serve the public in this matter but to consult
the desires of the politicians; for, next to the fast
and loose police control of gambling, nothing
affords better political material than the regula-
tion of commercialized vice. First in line is the
ward politician who keeps a disorderly saloon
which serves both as a meeting-place for the
vicious young men engaged in the traffic and as
a market for their wares. Back of this the politi-
cian higher up receives his share of the toll which
this business pays that it may remain undis-
turbed. The very existence of a segregated dis-
trict under police regulation means, of course,
that the existing law must be nullified or at least
rendered totally inoperative. When police regu-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 37
lation takes the place of law enforcement a
species of municipal blackmail inevitably be-
comes intrenched. The police are forced to
regulate an illicit trade, but because the men
engaged in an unlawful business expect to pay
money for its protection, the corruption of the
police department is firmly established and, as
the Chicago vice commission report points out,
is merely called "protection to the business."
The practice of grafting thereafter becomes al-
most official. On the other hand, any man who
attempts to show mercy to the victims of that
business, or to regulate it from the victim's point
of view, is considered a traitor to the cause. Quite
recently a former inspector of police in Chicago
established a requirement that every young
girl who came to live in a disreputable house
within a prescribed district must be reported to
him within an hour after her arrival. Each one
was closely questioned as to her reasons for enter-
ing into the life. If she was very young, she was
warned of its inevitable consequences and urged
to abandon her project. Every assistance was
offered her to return to work and to live a normal
life. Occasionally a girl was desperate and
38 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
it was sometimes necessary that she be forciblj
detained in the police station until her friends
could be communicated with. More often she
was glad to avail herself of the chance of escape
practically always, unless she had already become
romantically entangled with a disreputable young
man, whom she firmly believed to be her genuine
lover and protector.
One day a telephone message came to Hull
House from the inspector asking us to take
charge of a young girl who had been brought into
the station by an older woman for registration.
The girl's youth and the innocence of her replies
to the usual questions convinced the inspector
that she was ignorant of the life she was about to
enter and that she probably believed she was
simply registering her choice of a boarding-house.
Her story which she told at Hull House was as
follows: She was a Milwaukee factory girl,
the daughter of a Bohemian carpenter. Ten
days before she had met a Chicago young man
at a Milwaukee dance hall and after a brief
courtship had promised to marry him, arranging
to meet him in Chicago the following week.
Fearing that her Bohemian mother would not
AN ANCIENT EVIL 39
approve of this plan, which she called "the Ameri-
can way of getting married," the girl had risen
one morning even earlier than factory work
necessitated and had taken the first tram to
Chicago. The young man met her at the station,
took her to a saloon where he introduced her to
a friend, an older woman, who, he said, would
take good care of her. After the young man dis-
appeared, ostensibly for the marriage license,
the woman professed to be much shocked that
the little bride had brought no luggage, and
persuaded her that she must work a few weeks
in order to earn money for her trousseau, and
that she, an older woman who knew the city,
would find a boarding-house and a place in a
factory for her. She further induced her to
write postal cards to six of her girl friends in
Milwaukee, telling them of the kind lady in
Chicago, of the good chances for work, and urging
them to come down to the address which she
sent. The woman told the unsuspecting girl
that, first of all, a newcomer must register her
place of residence with the police, as that was the
law hi Chicago. It was, of course, when the
woman took her to the police station that the
40 ^
situation was disclosed. It needed but little
investigation to make clear that the girl had
narrowly escaped a well-organized plot and that
the young man to whom she was engaged was
an agent for a disreputable house. Mr. Clifford
Roe took up the case with vigor, and although
all efforts failed to find the young man, the
woman who was his accomplice was fined one
hundred and fifty dollars and costs.
The one impression which the trial left upon
our minds was that all the men concerned in the
prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage against
the method employed to secure the girl, but took
for granted that the life she was about to lead
was in the established order of things, if she had
chosen it voluntarily. In other words, if the
efforts of the agent had gone far enough to in-
volve her moral nature, the girl, who although
unsophisticated, was twenty-one years old, could
have remained, quite unchallenged, in the hideous
life. The woman who was prosecuted was well
known to the police and was fined, not for her
daily occupation, but because she had become
involved in interstate white slave traffic. One
touch of nature redeemed the trial, for the girl
AN ANCIENT EVIL 41
suffered much more from the sense that she had
been deserted by her lover than from horror over
the fate she had escaped, and she was never
wholly convinced that he had not been genuine.
She asserted constantly, in order to account for
his absence, that some accident must have
befallen him. She felt that he was her natural
protector in this strange Chicago to which she
had come at his behest and continually resented
any imputation of his motives. The betrayal of
her confidence, the playing upon her natural desire
for a home of her own, was a ghastly revelation
that even when this hideous trade is managed
upon the most carefully calculated commercial
principles, it must still resort to the use of the old-
est of the social instincts as its basis of procedure.
This Chicago police inspector, whose desire
to protect young girls was so genuine and
so successful, was afterward indicted by the
grand jury and sent to the penitentiary on the
charge of accepting "graft" from saloon-keepers
and proprietors of the disreputable houses in his
district. His experience was a dramatic and
tragic portrayal of the position into which every
city forces its police. When a girl who has been
42 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
secured for the life is dissuaded from it, her
rescue represents a definite monetary loss to the
agency which has secured her and incurs the
enmity of those who expected to profit by her.
When this enmity has sufficiently accumulated,
the active official is either "called down" by
higher political authority, or brought to trial for
those illegal practices which he shares with his
fellow-officials. It is, therefore, easy to make
such an inspector as ours suffer for his virtues,
which are individual, by bringing charges against
his grafting, which is general and almost official.
So long as the customary prices for protection
are adhered to, no one feels aggrieved; but the
sentiment which prompts an inspector "to side
with the girls" and to destroy thousands of
dollars' worth of business is unjustifiable. He
has not stuck to the rules of the game and tha
pack of enraged gamesters, under full cry of
"morality," can very easily run him to ground,
the public meantime being gratified that police
corruption has been exposed and the offender
punished. Yet hundreds of girls, who could
have been discovered in no other way, were
rescued by this man in his capacity of police
'AN ANCIENT EVIL 43
inspector. On the other hand, he did little to
bring to justice those responsible for securing the
girls, and while he rescued the victim, he did not
interfere with the source of supply. Had he
been brought to trial for this indifference, it
would have been impossible to find a grand jury
to sustain the indictment. He was really brought
to trial because he had broken the implied con-
tract with the politicians; he had devised illicit
and damaging methods to express that instinct
for protecting youth and innocence, which every
man on the police force doubtless possesses.
Were this instinct freed from all political and
extra legal control, it would in and of itself be a
tremendous force against commercialized vice
which is so dependent upon the exploitation of
young girls. Yet the fortunes of the police are
so tied up to those who profit by this trade and
to their friends, the politicians, that the most
well-meaning man upon the force is constantly
handicapped. Several illustrations of this occur
to me. Two years ago, when very untoward
conditions were discovered in connection with a
certain five-cent theatre, a young policeman
arrested the proprietor, who was later brought
44 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
before the grand jury, indicted and released upon
bail for nine thousand dollars. The crime was
a heinous one, involving the ruin of fourteen
little girls; but so much political influence had
been exerted on 1 "..\lf of the proprietor, who was
a relative of the republican committeeman of
his ward, that although the license of the theatre
was immediately revoked, it was reissued to
his wife within a very few days and the man
continued to be a menace to the community.
When the young policeman who had made the
arrest saw him in the neighborhood of tne theatre
talking to little girls and reported him, the officer
was taken severely to task by the highest repub-
lican authority in the city. He was reprimanded
for his activity and ordered transferred to the
stockyards, eleven miles away. The policeman
well understood that this was but the first step
in the process called "breaking;" that after he
had moved his family to the stockyards, in a
few weeks he would be transferred elsewhere,
and that this change of beat would be continued
until he should at last be obliged to resign from
the force. His offence, as he was plainly told,
had been his ignorance of the fact that the theatre
AN ANCIENT EVIL 45
was under political protection. In short, the
young officer had naively undertaken to serve
the public without waiting for his instructions
from the political bosses.
A flagrant example of the collusion of the police
with vice is instanced by United States District
Attorney Sims, who recently called upon the
Chicago police to make twenty-four arrests
on behalf of the United States government for
violations of the white slave law, when all of the
men liable to arrest left town two hours after
the warrants were issued. To quote Mr. Sims:
"We sent the secret service men who had been
working in conjunction with the police back to
Washington and brought in a fresh supply.
These men did not work with the police, and
within two weeks after the first set of secret
service men had left Chicago, the men we wanted
were back in town, and without the aid of the
city police we arrested all of them."
When the legal control of commercialized vice
is thus tied up with city politics the functions
of the police become legislative, executive and
judicial in regard to street solicitation: in a sense
they also have power of license, for it lies with
46 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
them to determine the number of women who
are allowed to ply their trade upon the street.
Some of these women are young earthlings, as it
were, hoping to earn money for much-desired
clothing or pleasure. Others are desperate crea-
tures making one last effort before they enter a
public hospital to face a miserable end; but by
far the larger number are sent out under the
protection of the men who profit by their earnings,
or they are utilized to secure patronage for dis-
reputable houses. The police regard the latter
"as regular," and while no authoritative order is
ever given, the patrolman understands that they
are protected. On the other hand, "the strag-
gler" is liable to be arrested by any officer who
chooses, and she is subjected to a fine upon his
unsupported word. In either case the police
regard all such women as literally "abandoned,"
deprived of ordinary rights, obliged to live in
specified residences, and liable to have their
personal liberties invaded in a way that no other
class of citizens would tolerate.
The recent establishment of the Night Court in
New York registers an advance in regard to the
treatment of these wretched women. Not only
AN ANCIENT EVIL 47
does the public gradually become cognizant of
the treatment accorded them, but some attempt
at discrimination is made between the first offen-
ders and those hardened by long practice in that
most hideous of occupations. Furthermore, an
adult probation system is gradually being sub-
stituted for the system of fines which at present
are levied hi such wise as to virtually constitute
a license and a partnership with the police de-
partment.
While American cities cannot be said to have
adopted a policy either of suppression or one of
regulation, because the police consider the former
impracticable and the latter intolerable to public
opinion, we may perhaps claim for America a little
more humanity in its dealing with this class of
women, a little less ruthlessness than that exhib-
ited by the continental cities where reglementa-
tion is relentlessly assumed.
The suggestive presence of such women on the
streets is perhaps one of the most demoralizing
influences to be found in a large city, and such
vigorous efforts as were recently made by a former
chief of police in Chicago when he successfully
cleared the streets of their presence, demonstrates
48 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
that legal suppression is possible. At least this
obvious temptation to young men and boys who
are idly walking the streets might be avoided, for
in an old formula one such woman "has cast
down many wounded; yea, many strong men
have been slain by her." Were the streets kept
clear, many young girls would be spared familiar
knowledge that such a method of earning money
is open to them. I have personally known
several instances in which young girls have begun
street solicitation through sheer imitation. A
young Polish woman found herself in dire
straits after the death of her mother. Her only
friends in America had moved to New York,
she was in debt for her mother's funeral, and as
it was the slack season of the miserable sweat-
shop sewing she had been doing, she was unable to
find work. One evening when she was quite
desperate with hunger, she stopped several men
upon the street, as she had seen other girls do,
and in her broken English asked them for some-
thing to eat. Only after a young man had given
her a good meal at a restaurant did she realize
the price she was expected to pay and the horrible
things which the other girls were doing. Even
AN ANCIENT EVIL 49
in her shocked revolt she could not understand,
of course, that she herself epitomized that hideous
choice between starvation and vice which is
perhaps the crowning disgrace of civilization.
The legal suppression of street solicitation
would not only protect girls but would enor-
mously minimize the risk and temptation to boys.
The entire system of recruiting for commercial-
ized vice is largely dependent upon boys who are
scarcely less the victims of the system than are
the girls themselves. Certainly this aspect of
the situation must be seriously considered.
In 1908, when Mr. Clifford Roe conducted
successful prosecutions against one hundred and
fifty of these disreputable young men in Chicago,
nearly all of them were local boys who had
used their personal acquaintance to secure
their victims. The accident of a long ac-
quaintance with one of these boys, born
hi the Hull - House neighborhood, filled me
with questionings as to how far society may
be responsible for these wretched lads, many of
them beginning a vicious career when they are
but fifteen or sixteen years of age. Because the
trade constantly demands very young girls, the
50 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
procurers require the assistance of immature
boys, for in this game above all others "youth
calls to youth." Such a boy is often incited by
the professional procurer to ruin a young girl,
because the latter's position is much safer if the
character of the girl is blackened before he sells
her, and if he himself cannot be implicated in
her downfall. He thus keeps himself within the
letter of the law, and when he is even more cau-
tious, he induces the boy to go through the cere-
mony of a legal marriage by promising him a
percentage of his wife's first earnings.
Only yesterday I received a letter from a
young man whom I had known from his early
boyhood, written in the state penitentiary, where
he is serving a life sentence. His father was a
drunkard, but his mother was a fine woman, de-
voted to her children, and she had patiently sup-
ported her son Jim far beyond his school age. At
the time of his trial, she pawned all her personal
possessions and mortgaged her furniture in order
to get three hundred dollars for his lawyer.
Although Jim usually led the life of a loafer
and had never supported his mother, he was
affectionately devoted to her and always kindly
and good-natured. Perhaps it was because he
AN ANCIENT EVIL 51
had been so long dependent upon a self-sacrificing
woman that it became easy for him to be depend-
ent upon his wife, a girl whom he met when he
was temporarily acting as porter in a disreputable
hotel. Through his long familiarity with vice,
and the fact that many of his companions habitu-
ally lived upon the earnings of "their girls," he
easily consented that his wife should continue
her life, and he constantly accepted the money
which she willingly gave him. After his marriage
he still lived in his mother's house and refused to
take more money from her, but she had no idea
of the source of his income. One day he called
at the hotel, as usual, to ask for his wife's earnings,
and in a quarrel over the amount with the land-
lady of the house, he drew a revolver and killed
her. Although the plea of self- defense was
urged in the trial, his abominable manner of life
so outraged both judge and jury that he received
the maximum sentence. His mother still insists
that he sincerely loved the girl, whom he so
impulsively married and that he constantly tried
to dissuade her from her evil life. Certain it
is that Jim's wife and mother are both filled with
genuine sorrow for his fate and that in some wise
the educational and social resources in the city
52 A NEW CONSCIENCE
of his birth failed to protect him from his own
lower impulses and from the evil companionship
whose influence he could not withstand. He is
but one of thousands of weak boys, who are con-
stantly utilized to supply the white slave trafficker
with young girls, for it has been estimated that
at any given moment the majority of the girls
utilized by the trade are under twenty years of
age and that most of them were procured when
younger. We cannot assume that the youths who
are hired to entice and entrap these girls are all
young fiends, degenerate from birth; the majority
of them are merely out-of-work boys, idle upon
the streets, who readily lend themselves to these
base demands because nothing else is presented
to them.
All the recent investigations have certainly
made clear that the bulk of the entire traffic is
conducted with the youth of the community, and
that the social evil, ancient though it may be,
must be renewed in our generation through its
younger members. The knowledge of the youth
of its victims doubtless in a measure accounts
for the new sense Oi compunction which fills the
community.
AMELIORATION OF
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
CHAPTER III
AMELIORATION OF ECONOMIC
CONDITIONS
It may be possible to extract some small de-
gree of comfort from the recent revelations of the
white slave traffic when we reflect that at the
present moment, in the midst of a freedom such
as has never been accorded to young women in
the history of the world, under an economic
pressure grinding down upon the working girl
at the very age when she most wistfully desires
to be taken care of, it is necessary to organize a
widespread commercial enterprise in order to
procure a sufficient number of girls for the white
slave market.
Certainly the larger freedom accorded to woman
by our changing social customs and the phenome-
nal number of young girls who are utilized by
modern industry, taken in connection with this
lack of supply, would seem to show that the
chastity of women is holding its own in that
56 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
slow-growing civilization which ever demands
more self-control and conscious direction on the
part of the individuals sharing it.
Successive reports of the United States census
indicate that self-supporting girls are increasing
steadily in number each decade, until 59 per cent,
of all the young women in the nation between
the ages of sixteen and twenty, are engaged in
some gainful occupation. Year after year, as these
figures increase, the public views them with com-
placency, almost with pride, and confidently
depends upon the inner restraint and training of
this girlish multitude to protect it from dis-
aster. Nevertheless, the public is totally unable
to determine at what moment these safeguards,
evolved under former industrial conditions, may
reach a breaking point, not because of economic
freedom, but because of untoward economic
conditions.
For the first time in history multitudes of
women are laboring without the direct stimulus
of family interest or affection, and they are also
unable to proportion their hours of work and
intervals of rest according to their strength; in
addition to this for thousands of them the effort
AN ANCIENT EVIL 57
to obtain a livelihood fairly eclipses the very
meaning of life itself. At the present moment
no student of modern industrial conditions can
possibly assert how far the superior chastity of
woman, so rigidly maintained during the cen-
turies, has been the result of her domestic sur-
roundings, and certainly no one knows under what
degree of economic pressure the old restraints
may give way.
In addition to the monotony of work and the
long hours, the small wages these girls receive
have no relation to the standard of living which
they are endeavoring to maintain. Discouraged
and over-fatigued, they are often brought into
sharp juxtaposition with the women who are
obtaining much larger returns from their illicit
trade. Society also ventures to capitalize a
virtuous girl at much less than one who has
yielded to temptation, and it may well hold itself
responsible for the precarious position into which,
year after year, a multitude of frail girls is placed.
The very valuable report recently issued by
the vice commission of Chicago leaves no room
for doubt upon this point. The report estimates
the yearly profit of this nefarious business as
58 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
conducted in Chicago to be between fifteen and
sixteen millions of dollars. Although these enor-
mous profits largely accrue to the men who con-
duct the business side of prostitution, the re-
port emphasizes the fact that the average girl
earns very much more in such a life than she can
hope to earn by any honest work. It points
out that the capitalized value of the average
working girl is six thousand dollars, as she ordi-
narily earns six dollars a week, which is three
hundred dollars a year, or five per cent, on that
sum. A girl who sells drinks in a disreputable
saloon, earning in commissions for herself twenty-
one dollars a week, is capitalized at a value of
twenty-two thousand dollars. The report fur-
ther estimates that the average girl who enters
an illicit life under a ^protector or manager is
able to earn twenty-five dollars a week, repre-
senting a capital of twenty-six thousand dollars.
In other words, a girl in such a life "earns more
than four times as much as she is worth as a
factor in the social and industrial economy, where
brains, intelligence, virtue and womanly charm
should bring a premium." The argument is
specious in that it does not record the economic
AN ANCIENT EVIL 59
value of the many later years in which the honest
girl will live as wife and mother, in contrast to
the premature death of the woman in the illicit
trade, but the girl herself sees only the difference
in the immediate earning possibilities in the two
situations.
Nevertheless the supply of girls for the white
slave traffic so far falls below the demand that
large business enterprises have been de\ eloped
throughout the world in order to secure a suffi-
cient number of victims for this modern market.
Over and over again in the criminal proceedings
against the men engaged in this traffic, when
questioned as to their motives, they have given
the simple reply "that more girls are needed",
and that they were "promised big money for
them". Although economic pressure as a reason
for entering an illicit life has thus been brought
out in court by the evidence in a surprising num-
ber of cases, there is no doubt that it is often
exaggerated; a girl always prefers to think that
economic pressure is the reason for her downfall,
even when the immediate causes have been her
love of pleasure, her desire for finery, or
the influence of evil companions. It is easy
60 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
for her, as for all of us, to be deceived as to
real motives. In addition to this the wretched
girl who has entered upon an illicit life finds the
experience so terrible that, day by day, she en-
deavors to justify herself with the excuse that
the money she earns is needed for the support of
some one dependent upon her, thus following
habits established by generations of virtuous
women who cared for feeble folk. I know one
such girl living in a disreputable house in Chicago
who has adopted a delicate child afflicted with
curvature of the spine, whom she boards with
respectable people and keeps for many weeks out
of each year in an expensive sanitarium that it
may receive medical treatment. The mother of
the child, an inmate of the house in which the
ardent foster-mother herself lives, is quite
indifferent to the child's welfare and also rather
amused at such solicitude. The girl has per-
severed in her course for five years, never however
allowing the little invalid to come to the house in
which she and the mother live. The same sort
of devotion and self-sacrifice is often poured
out upon the miserable man who in the beginning
was responsible for the girl's entrance into the
AN ANCIENT EVIL 61
life and who constantly receives her earnings.
She supports him in the luxurious lite he may be
living in another part of the town, takes an
almost maternal pride in his good clothes and
general prosperity, and regards him as the one
person in all the world who understands her
plight.
Most of the cases of economic responsibility,
however, are not due to chivalric devotion, but
arise from a desire to fulfill family obligations
such as would be accepted by any conscientious
girl. This was clearly revealed in conversations
which were recently held with thirty-four girls,
who were living at the same time hi a rescue
home, when twenty-two of them gave economic
pressure as the reason for choosing the life which
they had so recently abandoned. One piteous
little widow of seventeen had been supporting
her child and had been able to leave the life she
had been leading only because her married sister
offered to take care of the baby without the money
formerly paid her. Another had been supporting
her mother and only since her recent death was
the girl sure that she could live honestly because
she had only herself to care for.
62 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
The following story, fairly typical of the
twenty-two involving economic reasons, is of a
girl who had come to Chicago at the age of
fifteen, from a small town in Indiana. Her
father was too old to work and her mother was
a dependent invalid. The brother who cared
for the parents, with the help of the girl's own
slender wages earned in the country store of the
little town, became ill with rheumatism. In her
desire to earn more money the country girl came
to the nearest large city, Chicago, to work in a
department store. The highest wage she could
earn, even though she wore long dresses and called
herself "experienced," was five dollars a week.
This sum was of course inadequate even for
her own needs and she was constantly filled with
a corroding worry for "the folks at home." In
a moment of panic, a fellow clerk who was "wise"
showed her that it was possible to add to her
wages by making appointments for money in
the noon hour at down-town hotels. Having
earned money in this way for a few months,
the young girl made an arrangement with an
older woman to be on call in the evenings when-
ever she was summoned by telephone, thus join-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 63
ing that large clandestine group of apparently
respectable girls, most of whom yield to tempta-
tion only when hard pressed by debt incurred
during illness or non-employment, or when they
are facing some immediate necessity. This
practice has become so general in the larger Amer-
ican cities as to be systematically conducted.
It is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the
economic pressure, unless one cites its corollary
the condition of thousands of young men whose
low salaries so cruelly and unjustifiably postpone
their marriages. For a long time the young
saleswoman kept her position in the department
store, retaining her honest wages for herself,
but sending everything else to her family. At
length however, she changed from her clandes-
tine life to an openly professional one when she
needed enough money to send her brother to
Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she maintained
him for a year. She explained that because he
was now restored to health and able to support
the family once more, she had left the life "for-
ever and ever", expecting to return to her home
in Indiana. She suspected that her brother
knew of her experience, although she was sure
64 A NtfW CONSCIENCE AND
that her parents did not, and she hoped that as
she was not yet seventeen, she might be able to
make a fresh start. Fortunately the poor child
did not know how difficult that would be.
It is perhaps in the department store more than
anywhere else that every possible weakness in
a girl is detected and traded upon. For while
it is true that "wherever many girls are gathered
together more or less unprotected and embroiled
in the struggle for a livelihood, near by will be
hovering the procurers and evil-minded", no
other place of employment is so easy of access
as the department store. No visitor is received
in a factory or office unless he has definite busi-
ness there, whereas every purchaser is welcome
at a department store, even a notorious woman
well known to represent the demi-monde trade
is treated with marked courtesy if she spends
large sums of money. The primary danger lies
in the fact that the comely saleswomen are thus
easy of access. The disreputable young man con-
stantly passes in and out, making small purchases
from every pretty girl, opening an acquaint-
ance with complimentary remarks; or the pro-
curess, a fashionably-dressed woman, buys cloth-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 65
ing in large amounts, sometimes for a young
girl by her side, ostensibly her daughter. She
condoles with the saleswoman upon her hard lot
and lack of pleasure, and in the role of a kindly,
prosperous matron invites her to come to her
own home for a good time. The girl is sometimes
subjected to temptation through the men and
women in her own department, who tell her how
invitations to dinners and theatres may be pro-
cured. It is not surprising that so many of these
young, inexperienced girls are either deceived or
yield to temptation in spite of the efforts made to
protect them by the management and by the
older women in the establishment.
The department store has brought together,
as has never been done before in history, a be-
wildering mass of delicate and beautiful fabrics,
jewelry and household decorations such as
women covet, gathered skilfully from all parts
of the world, and in the midst of this bulk of de-
sirable possessions is placed an untrained girl
with careful instructions as to her conduct for
making sales, but with no guidance in regard to
herself. Such a girl may be bitterly lonely,
but she is expected to smile affably all day long
66 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
upon a throng of changing customers. She may
be without adequate clothing, although she
stands in an emporium where it is piled about
her, literally as high as her head. She may be
faint for want of food but she may not sit down
lest she assume "an attitude of inertia and
indifference," which is against the rules. She
may have a great desire for pretty things, but
she must sell to other people at least twenty-
five times the amount of her own salary, or she
will not be retained. Because she is of the first
generation of girls which has stood alone in the
midst of trade, she is clinging and timid, and yet
the only person, man or woman, in this commer-
cial atmosphere who speaks to her of the care
and protection which she craves, is seeking to
betray her. Because she is young and feminine,
her mind secretly dwells upon a future lover,
upon a home, adorned with the most enticing
of the household goods about her, upon a child
dressed in the filmy fabrics she tenderly touches,
and yet the only man who approaches her there
acting upon the knowledge of this inner life of
hers, does it with the direct intention of playing
upon it in order to despoil her. Is it surprising
AN ANCIENT EVIL 67
that the average human nature of these young
girls cannot, in many instances, endure this
strain? Of fifteen thousand women employed in
the down-town department stores of Chicago, the
majority are Americans. We all know that the
American girl has grown up in the belief that
the world is hers from which to choose, that
there is ordinarily no limit to her ambition or to
her definition of success. She realizes that she
is well mannered and well dressed and does not
appear unlike most of her customers. She sees
only one aspect of her countrywomen who come
shopping, and she may well believe that the
chief concern of life is fashionable clothing. Her
interest and ambition almost inevitably become
thoroughly worldly, and from the very fact that
she is employed down town, she obtains an ex-
aggerated idea of the luxury of the illicit life all
about her, which is barely concealed.
The fifth volume of the report of "Women and
Child Wage Earners" in the United States gives
the result of a careful inquiry into "the relation
of wages to the moral condition of department
store women." In connection with this, the
investigators secured "the personal histories of
68 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
one hundred immoral women," of whom ten
were or had been employed in a department
store. They found that while only one of the
ten had been directly induced to leave the store
for a disreputable life, six of them said that they
had found "it was easier to earn money that
way." The report states that the average em-
ployee in a department store earns about seven
dollars a week, and that the average income of
the one hundred immoral women covered by the
personal histories, ranged from fifty dollars a
week to one hundred dollars a week in exceptional
cases. It is of these exceptional cases that the
department store girl hears, and the knowledge
becomes part of the unreality and glittering life
that is all about her.
Another class of young women which is es-
pecially exposed to this alluring knowledge is
the waitress in down-town cafe's and restaur-
ants. A recent investigation of girls in the seg-
regated district of a neighboring city places
waiting in restaurants and hotels as highest on
the list of "previous occupations." Many wait-
resses are paid so little that they gratefully accept
any fee which men may offer them. It is also
AN ANCIENT EVIL 69
the universal habit for customers to enter into
easy conversation while being served. Some of
them are lonely young men who have few oppor-
tunities 'to speak to women. The girl often
quite innocently accepts an invitation for an
evening, spent either in a theatre or dance hall,
with no evil results, but this very lack of social
convention exposes her to danger. Even when the
proprietor means to protect the girls, a certain
amount of familiarity must be borne, lest their
resentment should dimmish the patronage of
the cafe*. In certain restaurants, moreover, the
waitresses doubtless suffer because the patrons
compare them with the girls who ply their trade
in disreputable saloons under the guise of serving
drinks.
The following story would show that mere
friendly propinquity may constitute a danger.
Last summer an honest, straightforward girl from
a small lake town in northern Michigan was
working in a Chicago cafe*, sending every week
more than half of her wages of seven dollars to
her mother and little sister, ill with tuberculosis,
at home. The mother owned the little house in
which she lived, but except for the vegetables
70 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
she raised in her own garden and an occasional
payment for plain sewing, she and her younger
daughter were dependent upon the hard-working
girl in Chicago. The girl's heart grew heavier
week by week as the mother's letters reported
that the sister was daily growing weaker. One hot
day in August she received a letter from her
mother telling her to come at once if she "would
see sister before she died." At noon that day
when sickened by the hot air of the cafe", and when
the clatter of dishes, the buzz of conversation,
the orders shouted through the slide seemed but
a hideous accompaniment to her tormented
thoughts, she was suddenly startled by hearing
the name of her native town, and realized that
one of her regular patrons was saying to her
that he meant to take a night boat to M. at 8
o'clock and get out of this "infernal heat."
Almost involuntarily she asked him if he would
take her with him. Although the very next
moment she became conscious what his consent
implied, she did not reveal her fright, but merely
stipulated that if she went with him he must
agree to buy her a return ticket. She reached
home twelve hours before her sister died, but
AN ANCIENT HVIL 71
when she returned to Chicago a week later bur-
dened with the debt of an undertaker's bill, she
realized that she had discovered a means of
payment.
All girls who work down town are at a dis-
advantage as compared to factory girls, who are
much less open to direct inducement and to the
temptations which come through sheer imitation.
Factory girls also have the protection of working
among plain people who frankly designate an
irregular life in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If
a factory girl catches sight of the vicious life at
all, she sees its miserable victims in all the wretch-
edness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer
parts of the city. As she passes the opening
doors of a disreputable saloon she may see for
an instant three or four listless girls urging liquor
upon men tired out with the long day's work
and already sodden with drink. As she hurries
along the street on a rainy night she may hear
a sharp cry of pain from a sick-looking girl whose
arm is being brutally wrenched by a rough man,
and if she stops for a moment she catches his
muttered threats in response to the girl's pleading
"that it is too bad a night for street work."
72 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
She sees a passing policeman shrug his shoulders
as he crosses the street, and she vaguely knows
that the sick girl has put herself beyond the pro-
tection of the law, and that the rough man has
an understanding with the officer on the beat.
She has been told that certain streets are "not
respectable," but a furtive look down the length
of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking
houses, from which all suggestion of homely
domesticity has long since gone; a slovenly woman
with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding
up the lurching bulk of a drunken man is all
she sees of its "denizens," although she may have
known a neighbor's daughter who came home to
die of a mysterious disease said to be the result
of a "fast Me," and whose disgraced mother
"never again held up her head."
Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge,
the increasing nervous energy to which industrial
processes daily accommodate themselves, and
the speeding up constantly required of the oper-
ators, may at any moment so register their results
upon the nervous system of a factory girl as to
overcome her powers of resistance. Many a
working girl at the end of a day is so hysterical
AN ANCIENT EVIL 73
and overwrought that her mental balance is
plainly disturbed. Hundreds of working girls
go directly to bed as soon as they have eaten their
suppers. They are too tired to go from home
for recreation, too tired to read and often too
tired to sleep. A humane forewoman recently
said to me as she glanced down the long room in
which hundreds of young women, many of them
with their shoes beside them, were standing: "I
hate to think of all the aching feet on this floor;
these girls all have trouble with their feet, some
of them spend the entire evening bathing them
in hot water." But aching feet are no more
usual than aching backs and aching heads. _The
study of .industrial diseases has only this year
been -begun by the federal autHorities, and doubt-
less as more is known of the nervous and mental
effect of over-fatigue, many moral breakdowns
will be traced to this source. It is already easy
to make the connection hi definite cases: "I
was too tired to care," "I was too tired to know
what I was doing," "I was dead tired and sick
of it all," "I was dog tired and just went
with him," are phrases taken from the lips
of reckless girls who are endeavoring to
74 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
explain the situation in which they find them-
selves.
Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the
hours of working women, yet the able brief pre-
sented to the United States supreme court on
the constitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law
for women, based its plea upon the results of
overwork as affecting women's health, the
grave medical statement constantly broken into
by a portrayal of the disastrous effects of over-
fatigue upon character. It is as yet difficult u o
distinguish between the results of long hours
and the results of overstrain. Certainly the
constant sense of haste is one of the most nerve-
racking and exhausting tests to which the human
system can be subjected. Those girls in the
sewing industry whose mothers thread needles
for them far into the night that they may sew
without a moment's interruption during the
next day; those girls who insert eyelets into
shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case,
each case containing twenty-four pairs of shoes,
are striking victims of the over-speeding which is
so characteristic of our entire factory system.
Girls working in factories and laundries are
AN ANCIENT EVIL 75
also open to the possibilities of accidents. The
loss of only two fingers upon the right hand, or
a broken wrist, may disqualify an operator from
continuing in the only work in which she is
skilled and make her struggle for respecta-
bility even more difficult. Varicose veins and
broken arches in the feet are found in every occu-
pation in which women are obliged to stand for
hours, but at any moment either one may develop
beyond purely painful symptoms into crippling
incapacity. One such girl recently returning
home after a long day's work deliberately sat
down upon the floor of a crowded street car,
explaining defiantly to the conductor and the
bewildered passengers that "her feet would not
hold out another minute. " A young woman who
only last summer broke her hand in a mangle was
found in a rescue home in January, explaining her
recent experience by the phrase that she was "up
against it when leaving the hospital in October."
In spite of many such heart-breaking instances
the movement for safeguarding machinery and
securing indemnity for industrial accidents pro-
ceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in
Boston the knife of a miniature guillotine fell
76 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
every ten seconds to indicate the rate of industrial
accidents in the United States. Grisly as was
the device, its hideousness might well have been
increased had it been able to demonstrate the
connection between certain of these accidents
and the complete moral disaster which overtook
their victims.
Yet factory girls who are subjected to this
overstrain and overtime often find their greatest
discouragement in the fact that after all their
efforts they earn too little to support themselves.
One girl said that she had first yielded to tempta-
tion when she had become utterly discouraged
because she had tried in vain for seven months
to save enough money for a pair of shoes. She
habitually spent two dollars a week for her room,
three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a
week for carfare, and she had found the forty
cents remaining from her weekly wage of six
dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her
old shoes twice. When the shoes became too
worn to endure a third soling and she possessed
but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave
up her struggle; to use her own contemptuous
phrase, she "sold out for a pair of shoes."
AN ANCIENT EVIL 77
Usually the phrases are less graphic, but after
all they contain the same dreary meaning:
"Couldn't make both ends meet," "I had always
been used to having nice things," "Couldn't
make enough money to live on," "I got sick and
ran behind," "Needed more money," "Impos-
sible to feed and clothe myself," "Out of work,
hadn't been able to save." Of course a girl in
such a strait does not go out deliberately to find
illicit methods of earning money, she simply
yields in a moment of utter weariness and dis-
couragement to the temptations she has been
able to withstand up to that moment. The
long hours, the lack of comforts, the low pay,
the absence of recreation, the sense of "good
times" all about her which she cannot share, the
conviction that she is rapidly losing health and
charm, rouse the molten forces within her. A
swelling tide of self-pity suddenly storms the
banks which have hitherto held her and finally
overcomes her instincts for decency and right-
eousness, as well as the habit of clean living,
established by generations of her forebears.
The aphorism that "morals fluctuate with
trade "was long considered cynical, but it has been
78 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
demonstrated in Berlin, in London, in Japan,
as well as in several American cities, that there
is a distinct increase in the number of registered
prostitutes during periods of financial depression
and even during the dull season of leading local
industries. Out of my own experience I am ready
to assert that very often all that is necessary
to effectively help the girl who is on the edge of
wrong-doing is to lend her money for her board
until she finds work, provide the necessary cloth-
ing for which she is in such desperate need, per-
suade her relatives that she should have more
money for her own expenditures, or find her
another place at higher wages. Upon such simple
economic needs does the tried virtue of a good
girl sometimes depend.
Here again the immigrant girl is at a disad-
vantage. The average wage of two hundred
newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles,
Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Gala-
tians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Roumanians, Ger-
mans, and Swedes, who were interviewed by the
Immigrants' Protective League, was four dollars
and a half a week for the first position which
they had toen able to secure in Chicago. It
AN ANCIENT EVIL 79
often takes a girl several weeks to find her first
place. During this period of looking for work
the immigrant girl is subjected to great dangers.
It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit
symptoms of that type of disordered mind which
alienists pronounce "due to conflict through
poor adaptation." I have known several immi-
grant young men as well as girls who became
deranged during the first year of life in America.
A young Russian who came to Chicago
in the hope of obtaining the freedom and
self-development denied him at home, after
three months of bitter disillusionment, with
no work and insufficient food, was sent to the
hospital for the insane. He only recovered
after a group of his young countrymen devotedly
went to see him each week with promises of
work, the companionship at last establishing a
sense of unbroken association. I also recall a
Polish girl who became utterly distraught after
weeks of sleeplessness and anxiety because she
could not repay fifty dollars which she had bor-
rowed from a countryman in Chicago for the
purpose of bringing her sister to America. Her
case was declared hopeless, but when the creditor
80 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
made reassuring visits to the patient she began
to mend and now, five years later, is not only
free from debt, but has brought over the rest of
the family, whose united earnings are slowly
paying for a house and lot. Psychiatry is de-
monstrating the after-effects of fear upon the
minds of children, but little has yet been done to
show how far that fear of the future, arising from
economic insecurity in the midst of new sur-
roundings, has superinduced insanity among
newly arrived immigrants. Such a state of
nervous bewilderment and fright, added to that
sense of expectation which youth always carries
into new surroundings, often makes it easy to
exploit the virtue of an immigrant girl. It goes
without saying that she is almost always exploited
industrially. A Russian girl recently took a
place in a Chicago clothing factory at twenty
cents a day, without in the least knowing that
she was undercutting the wages of even that
ill-paid industry. This girl rented a room for a
dollar a week and all that she had to eat was
given her by a friend in the same lodging house,
who shared her own scanty fare with the newcomer.
In the clothing industry trade unionism has
AN ANCIENT EVIL 81
already established a minimum wage limit for
thousands of women who are receiving the pro-
tection and discipline of trade organization and
responding to the tonic of self-help. Low
wages will doubtless in time be modified
by Minimum Wage Boards representing the
government's stake in industry, such as have
been in successful operation for many years in
certain British colonies and are now being insti-
tuted in England itself. As yet Massachusetts
is the only state which has appointed a special
commission to consider this establishment for
America, although the Industrial Commission
of Wisconsin is empowered to investigate wages
and their effect upon the standard of living.
Anyone who has lived among working people
has been surprised at the docility with which
grown-up children give all of their earnings
to their parents. This is, of course, especially
true of the daughters. The fifth volume of the
governmental report upon "Women and Child
Wage Earners in the United States," quoted
earlier, gives eighty-four per cent, as the propor-
tion of working girls who turn in all of their
wages to the family fund. In most cases this
82 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
is done voluntarily and cheerfully, but in many
instances it is as if the tradition of woman's
dependence upon her family for support held
long after the\actual fact had changed, or as if
the tyranny established through generations
when daughters could be starved into submission
to a father's will, continued even after the roles
had changed, and the wages of the girl child
supported a broken and dissolute father.
An over-restrained girl, from whom so much is
exacted, will sometimes begin to deceive her
family by failing to tell them when she has had
a raise in her wages. She will habitually keep
the extra amount for herself, as she will any
overtime pay which she may receive. All such
money is invariably spent upon her own clothing,
which she, of course, cannot wear at home, but
which gives her great satisfaction upon the
streets.
The girl of the crowded tenements has no room
in which to receive her friends or to read the
books through which she shares the lives of as-
sorted heroines, or, better still, dreams of them as
of herself. Even if the living-room is not full
of boarders or children or washing, it is comfort-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 33
able neither for receiving friends nor for reading,
and she finds upon the street her entire social
field; the shop windows with their desirable gar-
ments hastily clothe her heroines as they travel
the old roads of romance, the street cars rumbling
noisily by suggest a delectable somewhere far
away, and the young men who pass offer possi-
bilities of the most delightful acquaintance. It ,
is not astonishing that she insists upon cloth-
ing which conforms to the ideals of this all-
absorbing street and that she will unhesitatingly
deceive an uncomprehending family which does
not recognize its importance.
One such girl had for two years earned money
for clothing by filling regular appointments in a
disreputable saloon between the hours of six
and half-past seven in the evening. With this
money earned almost daily she bought the
clothes of her heart's desire, keeping them with
the saloon-keeper's wife. She demurely returned
to her family for supper in her shabby working
clothes and presented her mother with her un-
opened pay envelope every Saturday night.
She began this life at the age of fourteen after
her Polish mother had beaten her because she
84 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
had "elbowed" the sleeves and "cut out" the
neck of her ungainly calico gown in a vain at-
tempt to make it look "American." Her
mother, who had so conscientiously punished a
daughter who was "too crazy for clothes," could
never of course comprehend how dangerous a
combination is the girl with an unsatisfied love
for finery and the opportunities for illicit earning
afforded on the street. Yet many sad cases
may be traced to such lack of comprehension.
Charles Booth states that in England a large
proportion of parents belonging to the working
and even lower middle classes, are unacquainted
with the nature of the lives led by their own
daughters, a result doubtless of the early freedom
of the street accorded city children. Too often
the mothers themselves are totally ignorant of
covert dangers. A few days ago I held in my
hand a pathetic little pile of letters written by
a desperate young girl of fifteen before she at-
tempted to commit suicide. These letters were
addressed to her lover, her girl friends, and to
the head of the rescue home, but none to her
mother towards whom she felt a bitter resentment
"because she did not warn me." The poor
AN ANCIENT EVIL 85
mother after the death of her husband had gone
to live with a married daughter, but as the
son-in-law would not "take hi two" she had told
the youngest daughter, who had already worked
for a year as an apprentice in a dressmaking
establishment, that she must find a place to live
with one of her girl friends. The poor child had
found this impossible, and three days after the
breaking up of her home she had fallen a victim
to a white slave trafficker, who had treated her
most cruelly and subjected her to unspeakable
indignities. It was only when her "protector"
left the city, frightened by the unwonted activity
of the police, due to a wave of reform, that she
found her way to the rescue home, and in less
than five months after the death of her father
she had purchased carbolic acid and deliberately
"courted death for the nameless child" and
herself.
Another experience during which a girl faces
a peculiar danger is when she has lost one "job"
and is looking fo* another. Naturally she loses
her place in the slack season and pursues her
search at the very moment when positions are
hardest to find, and her un-employment is there-
86 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
fore most prolonged. Perhaps nothing in our
social order is so unorganized and inchoate as
our method, or rather lack of method, of plac-
ing young people in industry. This is obvious
from the point of view of their first positions
when they leave school at the unstable age of
fourteen, or from the innumerable places they
hold later, often as high as ten a year, when they
are dismissed or change voluntarily through sheer
restlessness. Here again a girl's difficulty is often
increased by the lack of sympathy and under-
standing on the part of her parents. A girl
is often afraid to say that she has lost her place
and pretends to go to work each morning while
she is looking for a new one; she postpones telling
them at home day by day, growing more frantic
as the usual pay-day approaches. Some girls
borrow from loan sharks in order to take the cus-
tomary wages to their parents, others fall vic-
tims to unscrupulous employment agencies in
their eagerness to take the first thing offered.
The majority of these girls answer the adver-
tisements in the daily papers as affording the
cheapest and safest way to secure a position.
These out-of-work girls are found, sometimes as
AN ANCIENT EVIL 87
many as forty or fifty at a time, in the rest rooms
of the department stores, waiting for the new
edition of the newspapers after they have been
the rounds of the morning advertisements and
have found nothing.
Of course such a possible field as these rest
rooms is not overlooked by the procurer, who
finds it very easy to establish friendly relations
through the offer of the latest edition of the
newspaper. Even pennies are precious to a girl
out of work and she is also easily grateful to any-
one who expresses an interest in her plight and
tells her of a position. Two representatives of
the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago,
during a period of three weeks, arrested and con-
victed seventeen men and three women who
were plying their trades in the rest rooms of nine
department stores. The managers were greatly
concerned over this exposure and immediately
arranged both for more intelligent matrons and
greater vigilance. One of the less scrupulous
stores voluntarily gave up a method of adver-
tising carried on in the rest room itself where a
demonstrator from "the beauty counter" made
up the faces of the patrons of the rest room with
88 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
the powder and paint procurable in her depart-
ment below. The out-of-work girls especially
availed themselves of this privilege and hoped
that their search would be easier when their
pale, woe-begone faces were "made beautiful."
The poor girls could not know that a face thus
made up enormously increased their risks.
A number of girls also came early in the morn-
ing as soon as the rest rooms were open. They
washed their faces and arranged their hair and
then settled to sleep in the largest and easiest
chairs the room afforded. Some of these were
out-of-work girls also determined to take home
their wages at the end of the week, each pre-
tending to her mother that she had spent the
night with a girl friend and was working all day
as usual. How much of this deception is due to
parental tyranny and how much to a sense of
responsibility for younger children or invalids,
it is impossible to estimate until the number of
such recorded cases is much larger. Certain it
is that the long habit of obedience, as well as the
feeling of family obligation established from
childhood, is often utilized by the white slave
trafficker.
'AN ANCIENT EVIL 89
Difficult as is the position of the girl out of
work when her family is exigent and uncompre-
hending, she has incomparably more protection
than the girl who is living hi the city without home
ties. Such girls form sixteen per cent, of the
working women of Chicago. With absolutely
every penny of their meagre wages consumed in
their inadequate living, they are totally unable
to save money. That loneliness and detachment
which the city tends to breed in its inhabitants
is easily intensified hi such a girl into isolation
and a desolating feeling of belonging nowhere.
All youth resents the sense of the enormity of
the universe in relation to the insignificance of
the individual life, and youth, with that intense
self-consciousness which makes each young per-
son the very centre of all emotional experience,
broods over this as no older person can possibly
do. At such moments a black oppression, the
instinctive fear of solitude, will send a lonely
girl restlessly to walk the streets even when she
is "too tired to stand," and when her desire for
companionship in itself constitutes a grave dan-
ger. Such a girl living in a rented room is usu-
ally without any place hi which to properly
90 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
receive callers. An investigation was recently
made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses in
which young girls were living; less than 30 per
cent, were found with a parlor in which guests
might be received. Many girls quite innocently
permit young men to call upon them in their bed-
rooms, pitifully disguised as "sitting-rooms,"
but the danger is obvious, and the standards of
the girl gradually become lowered.
Certainly during the trying times when a girl
is out of work she should have much more
intelligent help than is at present extended to
her; she should be able to avail herself of the
state employment agencies much more than is
now possible, and the work of the newly estab-
lished vocational bureaus should be enormously
extended.
When once we are in earnest about the abolition
of the social evil, society will find that it must
study industry from the point of view of the pro-
ducer in a sense which has never been done before.
Such a study with reference to industrial legisla-
tion will ally itself on one hand with the trades-
union movement, which insists upon a liv-
ing wage and shorter hours for the workers,
AN ANCIENT EVIL 91
and also upon an opportunity for self-direction,
and on the other hand with the efficiency move-
ment, which would refrain from over-fatiguing
an operator as it would from over-speeding a
machine. In addition to legislative enactment
and the historic trade-union effort, the feebler
and newer movement on the part of the employers
is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who
is not only devising recreational and educational
plans, but is placing before the employer much
disturbing information upon the cost of living in
relation to the pitiful wages of working girls.
Certainly employers are growing ashamed to
use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence of em-
ploying only the girl "protected by home in-
fluences" as a device for reducing wages. Help
may also come from the consumers, for an in-
creasing number of them, with compunctions hi
regard to tempted young employees, are not only
unwilling to purchase from the employer who
underpays his girls and thus to share his guilt,
but are striving in divers ways to modify existing
conditions.
As working women enter fresh fields of
labor which ever open up anew as the old fields
92 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
are submerged behind them, society must endea-
vor to speedily protect them by an amelioration
of the economic conditions which are now so
unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health
and morals. The world-wide movement for es-
tablishing governmental control of industrial
conditions is especially concerned for working
women. Fourteen of the European countries
prohibit all night work for women and almost
every civilized country in the world is considering
the number of hours and the character of work
in which women may be permitted to safely
engage.
Although amelioration comes about so slowly
that many young girls are sacrificed each year
under conditions which could so easily and
reasonably be changed, nevertheless it is appar-
ently better to overcome the dangers in this
new and freer life, which modern industry has
opened to women, than it is to attempt to retreat
into the domestic industry of the past; for all
statistics of prostitution give the largest number
of recruits for this life as coming from domestic
service and the second largest number from girls
who live at home with no definite occupation
AN ANCIENT EVIL 93
whatever. Therefore, although in the economic as-
pect of the social evil more than in any other, do
we find ground for despair, at the same time we
discern, as nowhere else, the young girl's stub-
born power of resistance. Nevertheless, the
most superficial survey of her surroundings
shows the necessity for ameliorating, as rapidly
as possible, the harsh economic conditions which
now environ her.
That steadily increasing function of the state
by which it seeks to protect its workers from
their own weakness and degradation, and insists
that the livelihood of the manual laborer shall
not be beaten down below the level of efficient
citizenship, assumes new forms almost daily,
From the human as well as the economic stand-
point there is an obligation resting upon the
state to discover how many victims of the white
slave traffic are the result of social neglect,
remedial incapacity, and the lack of industrial
safeguards, and how far discontinuous employ-
ment and non-employment are factors in the
breeding of discouragement and despair.
Is it because our modern industrialism is so
new that we have been slow to connect it with the
94 A NEW CONSCIENCE
poverty and vice all about us? The socialists
talk constantly of the relation of economic law
to destitution and point out the connection be-
tween industrial maladjustment and individual
wrongdoing, but certainly the study of social
conditions, the obligation to eradicate vice, can-
not belong to one political party or to one eco-
nomic school. It must be recognized as a solemn
obligation of existing governments, and society
must realize that economic conditions can only
be made more righteous and more human by
the unceasing devotion of generations of men.
MORAL EDUCATION
AND LEGAL PROTECTION
OF CHILDREN
CHAPTER IV
MORAL EDUCATION AND LEGAL
PROTECTION OF CHILDREN
No great wrong has ever arisen more clearly '
to the social consciousness of a generation than
has that of commercialized vice in the conscious-
ness of ours, and that we are so slow to act is
simply another evidence that human nature has
a curious power of callous indifference towards
evils which have been so entrenched that they
seem part of that which has always been.
Educators of course share this attitude; at
moments they seem to intensify it, although at
last an educational movement in the direction
of sex hygiene is beginning in the schools and
colleges. Primary schools strive to satisfy the
child's first questionings regarding the beginnings
of human life and approach the subject through
simple biological instruction which at least
places this knowledge on a par with other natural
facts. Such teaching is an enormous advance
98 & NEW CONSCIENCE AND
for the children whose curiosity would otherwise
have been satisfied from poisonous sources and
who would have learned of simple physiological
matters from such secret undercurrents of cor-
rupt knowledge as to have forever perverted
their minds. Yet this first direct step towards
an adequate educational approach to this sub-
ject has been surprisingly difficult owing to the
self-consciousness of grown-up people; for while
the children receive the teaching quite simply,
their parents often take alarm. Doubtless co-
operation with parents will be necessary before
the subject can fall into its proper place hi the
schools. In Chicago, the largest women's club
in the city has established normal courses in
sex hygiene attended both by teachers and
mothers, the National and State Federations of
Women's Clubs are gradually preparing thou-
sands of women throughout America for fuller
co-operation with the schools in this difficult
matter. In this, as in so many other educational
movements, Germany has led the way. Two
publications are issued monthly in Berlin, which
promote not only more effective legislation but
more adequate instruction in the schools on this
AN ANCIENT EVIL 99
basic subject. These journals are supported
by men and women anxious for light for the
sake of their children. Some of them were first
stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama
"The Awakening of Spring," which, with Teu-
tonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the
lesson that death and degradation may be the
fate of a group of gifted school-children, because
of the cowardly reticence of their parents.
A year ago the Bishop of London gathered
together a number of influential people and
laid before them his convictions that the root
of the social evil lay hi so-called "parental
modesty," and that in the quickening of the
parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting
up of England's moral tone which has for so long
been the despair of England's foremost men."
In America the eighth year-book of the National
Society for the Scientific Study of Education
treats of this important subject with great
ability, massing the agencies and methods in
impressive array. Many other educational jour-
nals and organized societies could be cited as
expressing a new conscience in regard to this
world-old evil. The expert educational opinion
100 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
which they represent is practically agreed that
for older children the instruction should not be
confined to biology and hygiene, but may come
quite naturally in history and literature, which
record and portray the havoc wrought by the
sexual instinct when uncontrolled, and also
show that, when directed and spiritualized, it
has become an inspiration to the loftiest devo-
tions and sacrifices. The youth thus taught
sees this primal instinct not only as an essential
to the continuance of the race, but also, when
it is transmuted to the highest ends, as a funda-
mental factor in social progress. The entire
subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns
that his own struggle is a common experience.
He is able to make his own interpretations and
to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing
companions. After all, no young person will be
able to control his impulses and to save himself
from the grosser temptations, unless he has been
put under the sway of nobler influences. Per-
haps we have yet to learn that the inhibitions of
character as well as its reinforcements come most
readily through idealistic motives.
Certainly all the great religions of the world
AN ANCIENT EVIL 101
have recognized youth's need of spiritual help
during the trying years of adolescence. The
ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this
instinct almost to the exclusion of others, and all
later religions attempt to provide the youth with
shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies
ahead of him, for the wise men in every age have
I known that only the power of the spirit can
\ overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this
educational advance, courses of study in many
public and private schools are still prepared
exactly as if educators had never known that at
fifteen or sixteen years of age, the will power
being still weak, the bodily desires are keen and
insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyt-
tleton, who has given much thought to this
gap in the education of youth says, "The certain
result of leaving an enormous majority of boys
unguided and uninstructed in a matter where
their strongest passions are concerned, is that they
grow up to judge of all questions connected with
it, from a purely selfish point of view." He con-
tends that this selfishness is due to the fact that
any single suggestion or hint which boys receive
on the subject comes from other boys or young
102 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
men who are under the same potent influences of
ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No
wholesome counter-balance of knowledge is given,
no attempt is made to invest the subject with
dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare
of others and to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton
contends that this alone can explain the pecul-
iarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women
which is a sustained cruelty to be discerned in
no other relation of English life. To quote him
again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty
are not birds or beasts but our own country-
women, doomed by the hundred thousand to a
life of unutterable shame and hopeless misery,
then and then only the general average tone of
young men becomes hard and brutally callous or
frivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not ex-
hibited in relation to any other form of human
suffering." At the present moment thousands of
young people in our great cities possess no other
knowledge of this grave social evil which may at
any moment become a dangerous personal men-
ace, save what is imparted to them in this
brutal flippant spirit. It has been said that the
child growing up in the midst of civilization
AN ANCIENT EVIL 103
receives from its parents and teachers something
of the accumulated experience of the world on
all other subjects save upon that of sex. On this
one subject alone each generation learns little
from its predecessors.
An educator has lately pointed out that it is
an old lure of vice to pretend that it alone deals
with manliness and reality, and he complains
that it is always difficult to convince youth that
the higher planes of life contain anything but
chilly sentiments. He contends that young peo-
ple are therefore prone to receive moralizing
and admonitions with polite attention, but when
it comes to action, they carefully observe the life
about them in order to conduct themselves in such
wise as to be part of the really desirable world
inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to this
attitude, many young people living in our cities
at the present moment have failed to appre-
hend the admonitions of religion and have never
responded to its inner control. It is as if the
impact of the world had stunned their spiritual
natures, and as if this had occurred at the very
time that a most dangerous experiment is being
tried. The public gaieties formerly allowed in
104 A NEW 'CONSCIENCE AND
Catholic countries where young people were
restrained by the confessional, are now permitted
in cities where this restraint is altogether un-
known to thousands of young people, and only
faintly and traditionally operative upon thou-
sands of others. The puritanical history of
American cities assumes that these gaieties are
forbidden, and that the streets are sober and
decorous for conscientious young men and women
who need no external protection. This un-
grounded assumption, united to the fact that no
adult has the confidence of these young people,
who are constantly subjected to a multitude of
imaginative impressions, is almost certain to
result disastrously.
The social relationships in a modern city are
so hastily made and often so superficial, that the
old human restraints of public opinion, long sus-
tained in smaller communities, have also broken
down. Thousands of young men and women in
every great city have received none of the lessons
in self-control which even savage tribes imparted
to their children when they taught them to master
their appetites as well as their emotions. These
young people are perhaps further from all com-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 105
munity restraint and genuine social control than
the youth of the community have ever been in
the long history of civilization. Certainly only
the modern city has offered at one and the same
time every possible stimulation for the lower
nature and every opportunity for secret vice.
Educators apparently forget that this unre-
strained stimulation of young people, so charac-
teristic of our cities, although developing very
rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not
yet seen the outcome. The present education of
the average young man has given him only the
most unreal protection against the tempta-
tions of the city. Schoolboys are subjected to
many lures from without just at the moment
when they are filled with an inner tumult which
utterly bewilders them and concerning which
no one has instructed them save in terms of
empty precept and unintelligible warning.
We are authoritatively told that the physical
difficulties are enormously increased by uncon-
trolled or perverted imaginations, and all sound
advice to young men in regard to this subject
emphasizes a clean mind, exhorts an imagination
kept free from sensuality and insists upon days
106 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
filled with wholesome athletic interests. We
allow this regime to be exactly reversed for thou-
sands of young people living in the most crowded
and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not
only does the stage in its advertisements exhibit
all the allurements of sex to such an extent that
a play without a "love interest" is considered
foredoomed to failure, but the novels which form
the sole reading of thousands of young men and
girls deal only with the course of true or simulated
love, resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in
variegated misfortunes.
Often the only recreation possible for young
men and young women together is dancing, in
which it is always easy to transgress the pro-
prieties. In many public dance halls, however,
improprieties are deliberately fostered. The
waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, the
couples leaning heavily on each other barely
move across the floor, all the jollity and bracing
exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as is
all the careful decorum of the formal dance.
The efforts to obtain pleasure or to feed the imagi-
nation are thus converged upon the senses which
it is already difficult for young people to under-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 107
stand and to control. It is therefore not remark-
able that in certain parts of the city groups of
idle young men are found whose evil imagina-
tions have actually inhibited their power for
normal living. On the streets or in the pool-
rooms where they congregate their conversa-
tion, their tales of adventure, their remarks upon
women who pass by, all reveal that they have been
caught in the toils of an instinct so powerful and
primal that when left without direction it can
easily overwhelm its possessor and swamp his
faculties. These young men, who do no regular
work, who expect to be supported by their
mothers and sisters and to get money for the
shows and theatres by any sort of disreputable
undertaking, are in excellent training for the life
of the procurer, and it is from such groups that
they are recruited. There is almost a system
of apprenticeship, for boys when very small act
as "look-outs" and are later utilized to make
acquaintances with girls in order to introduce
them to professionals. From this they gradually
learn the method of procuring girls and at last
do an independent business. If one boy is suc-
cessful in such a life, throughout his acquaintance
108 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
runs the rumor that a girl is an asset that will
bring a larger return than can possibly be earned
in hard-working ways. Could the imaginations
of these young men have been controlled and
cultivated, could the desire for adventure have
been directed into wholesome channels, could
these idle boys have been taught that, so far from
being manly they were losing all virility, could
higher interests have been aroused and standards
given them in relation to this one aspect of life,
the entire situation of commercialized vice would
be a different thing.
The girls with a desire for adventure seem con-
fined to this one dubious outlet even more than
the boys, although there are only one-eighth as
many delinquent girls as boys brought into the
juvenile court in Chicago, the charge against
the girls in almost every instance involves a loss
of chastity. One of them who was vainly en-
deavoring to formulate the causes of her downfall,
concentrated them all in the single statement
that she wanted the other girls to know that she
too was a "good Indian." Such a girl, while
she is not an actual member of a gang of boys,
is often attached to one by so many loyalties and
AN ANCIENT EVIL 109
friendships that she will seldom testify against
a member, even when she has been injured by
him. She also depends upon the gang when she
requires bail in the police court or the protection
that comes from political influence, and she is
often very proud of her quasi-membership. The
little girls brought into the juvenile court are
usually daughters of those poorest immigrant fam-
ilies living in the worst type of city tenements,
who are frequently forced to take boarders in
order to pay the rent. A surprising number of
little girls have first become involved in wrong-
doing through the men of their own households.
A recent inquiry among 130 girls living in a sor-
did red light district disclosed the fact that a
majority of them had thus been victimized and
the wrong had come to them so early that
they had been despoiled at an average age of
eight years. Looking upon the forlorn little crea-
tures, who are often brought into the Chicago
juvenile court to testify against their own rela-
tives, one is seized with that curious compunc-
tion Goethe expressed in the now hackneyed
line from "Mignon:"
" Was hat Man dir, du armes Kind, gethan? "
HO 'A NEW 'CONSCIENCE AND
One is also inclined to reproach educators for
neglecting to give children instruction in play
when one sees the unregulated amusement parks
which are apparently so dangerous to little girls
twelve or fourteen years old. Because they
are childishly eager for amusement and totally
unable to pay for a ride on the scenic railway
or for a ticket to an entertainment, these
disappointed children easily accept many favors
from the young men who are standing near the
entrances for the express purpose of ruining them.
The hideous reward which is demanded from
them later in the evening, after they have enjoyed
the many "treats" which the amusement park
offers, apparently seems of little moment. Their
childish minds are filled with the memory of the
lurid pleasures to the oblivion of the later expe-
rience, and they eagerly tell their companions of
this possibility "of getting in to all the shows."
These poor little girls pass unnoticed amidst a
crowd of honest people seeking recreation after a
long day's work, groups of older girls walking and
talking gaily with young men of their acquaint-
ance, and happy children holding their parents'
hands. This cruel exploitation of the childish
AN ANCIENT EVIL HI
eagerness for pleasure is, of course, possible only
among a certain type of forlorn city children who
are totally without standards and into whose
colorless lives a visit to the amusement park
brings the acme of delirious excitement. It is
possible that these children are the inevitable
product of city life ; in Paris, little girls at local
fetes wishing to ride on the hobby horse fre-
quently buy the privilege at a fearful price from
the man directing the machinery, and a physician
connected with the New York Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children writes: "It
is horribly pathetic to learn how far a nickel or a
quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of
these children."
The home environment of such children has
been similar to that of many others who come to
grief through the five - cent theatres. These
eager little people, to whom life has offered few
pleasures, crowd around the door hoping to be
taken in by some kind soul and, when they have
been disappointed over and over again and the
last performance is about to begin, a little girl
may be induced unthinkingly to barter her chas-
tity for an entrance fee.
112 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
Many children are also found who have been
decoyed into their first wrong-doing through the
temptation of the saloon, in spite of the fact that
one of the earliest regulations in American cities
for the protection of children was the pro-
hibition of the sale of liquor to minors. That
children may be easily demoralized by the
influence of a disorderly saloon was demonstrated
recently in Chicago; one of these saloons was so
situtated that the pupils of a public school were
obliged to pass it and from the windows of the
schoolhouse itself could see much of what was
passing within the place. An effort was made by
the Juvenile Protective Association to have it
closed by the chief of police, but although he
did so, it was opened again the following day.
The Association then took up the matter with
the mayor, who refused to interfere, insisting
that the objectionable features had been elimi-
nated. Through months of effort, during which
time the practices of the place remained quite
unchanged, one group after another of public-
spirited citizens endeavored to suppress what
had become a public scandal, only to find that
the place was protected by brewery interests
AN ANCIENT EVIL 113
which were more powerful, both financially and
politically, than themselves. At last, after a
peculiarly flagrant case involving a little girl,
the mothers of the neighborhood arranged a
mass meeting in the schoolhouse itself, inviting
local officials to be present. The mothers then
produced a mass of testimony which demon-
strated that dozens and hundreds of children
had been directly or indirectly affected by the
place whose removal they demanded. A meet-
ing so full of genuine anxiety and righteous indig-
nation could not well be disregarded, and the
compulsory education department was at last
able to obtain a revocation of the license. The
many people who had so long tried to do away
with this avowedly disreputable saloon received
a fresh impression of the menace to children
who became sophisticated by daily familiarity
with vice. Yet many mothers, hard pressed by
poverty, are obliged to rent houses next to vicious
neighborhoods and their children very early
become familiar with all the outer aspects of
vice. Among them are the children of widows
who make friends with their dubious neigh-
bors during the long days while their mothers
114 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
are at work. I recall two sisters in one
family whose mother had moved her household
to the borders of a Chicago segregated district,
apparently without knowing the character of
the neighborhood. The little sisters, twelve and
eight years old, accepted many invitations from
a kind neighbor to come into her house to see
her pretty things. The older girl was delighted
to be "made up" with powder and paint and to
try on long dresses, while the little one who sang
very prettily was taught some new songs, happily
without understanding their import. The tired
mother knew nothing of what the children did
during her absence, until an honest neighbor who
had seen the little girls going in and out of the
district, interfered on their behalf. The fright-
ened mother moved back to her old neighborhood
which she had left in search of cheaper rent, her
pious soul stirred to its depths that the children
for whom she patiently worked day by day had
so narrowly escaped destruction.
Who cannot recall at least one of these des-
perate mothers, overworked and harried through
a long day, prolonged by the family washing and
cooking into the evening, followed by a night of
AN ANCIENT EVIL 115
foreboding and misgiving because the very
children for whom her life is sacrificed are slowly
slipping away from her control and affection?
Such a spectacle forces one into an agreement
with Wells, that it is a "monstrous absurdity"
that women who are "discharging their supreme
social function, that of rearing children, should
do it in their spare time, as it were, while they
'earn their living' by contributing some half-
mechanical element to some trivial industrial
product." Nevertheless, such a woman whose
wages are fixed on the basis of individual subsist-
ence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage,
is still held by a legal obligation to support her
children with the desperate penalty of forfeiture
if she fail.
I can recall a very intelligent woman who long
brought her children to the Hull House day
nursery with this result at the end of ten years
of devotion: the little girl is almost totally
deaf owing to neglect following a case of measles,
because her mother could not stop work in order
to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg
flipping cars; the oldest boy has twice been
arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys, in
116 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school,
have been such habitual truants that their
natural intelligence has secured little aid from
education. Of the five children three are now
in semi-penal institutions, supported by the
state. It would not therefore have been so un-
economical to have boarded them with their
own mother, requiring a standard of nutrition
and school attendance at least up to that national
standard of nurture which the more advanced
European governments are establishing.
The recent Illinois law, providing that the
children of widows may be supported by public
funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile
court, will eventually restore a mother's care to
these poor children; but in the meantime, even
the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in her
forced search for cheap rent may be continually led
nearer to the notoriously evil districts. Many
appeals made to landlords of disreputable houses
in Chicago on behalf of the children living adja-
cent to such property have never secured a
favorable response. It is apparently difficult
for the average property owner to resist the high
rents which houses in certain districts of the
AN ANCIENT EVIL 117
city can command if rented for purposes of vice.
I recall two small frame houses identical in
type and value standing side by aide. One
which belonged to a citizen without scruples was
rented for $30.00 a month, the other belonging to
a conscientious man was rented for $9.00 a month.
The supposedly respectable landlords defend
themselves behind the old sophistry: "If I did
not rent my house for such a purpose, someone
else would," and the more hardened ones say
that "It is all in the line of business." Both of
them are enormously helped by the secrecy sur-
rounding the ownership of such houses, although
it is hoped that the laws requiring the name of
the owner and the agent of every multiple house
to be posted in the public hallway will at length
break through this protection, and the discovered
landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to
which the law specifically states they have made
themselves liable. In the meantime, women
forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one
more handicap in addition to the many others
poverty places upon them. Such experiences
may explain the fact that English figures show
a very large proportion of widows
118 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
women among the prostitutes in those large
towns which maintain segregated districts.
The deprivation of a mother's care is most
frequently experienced by the children of the
poorest colored families who are often forced to
live in disreputable neighborhoods because they
literally cannot rent houses anywhere else.
Both because rents are always high for colored
people and because the colored mothers are
obliged to support their children, seven times
as many of them, in proportion to their entire
number, as of the white mothers, the actual
number of colored children neglected in the midst
of temptation is abnormally large. So closely
is child life founded upon the imitation of what
it sees that the child who knows all evil is almost
sure in the end to share it. Colored children
seldom roam far from their own neighborhoods:
in the public playgrounds, which are theoretically
open to them, they are made so uncomfortable
by the slights of other children that they learn
to stay away, and, shut out from legitimate rec-
reation, are all the more tempted by the careless,
luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addi-
tion to the colored girls who have thus from
AN ANCIENT EVIL H9
childhood grown familiar with the outer aspects
of vice, are others who are sent into the district
in the capacity of domestic servants by unscru-
pulous employment agencies who would not
venture to thus treat a white girl. The com-
munity forces the very people who have con-
fessedly the shortest history of social restraint,
into a dangerous proximity with the vice districts
of the city. This results, as might easily be
predicted, in a very large number of colored
girls entering a disreputable life. The negroes
themselves believe that the basic cause for the
high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recent
enslavement of their race with its attendant
unstable marriage and parental status, and point
to thousands of slave sales that but two genera-
tions ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at
family life. Knowing this as we do, it seems all
the more unjustifiable that the nation which is re-
sponsible for the broken foundations of this family
life should carelessly permit the Negroes, making
their first struggle towards a higher standard of
domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagrant
temptations which our civilization tolerates.
The imaginations of even very young children
120 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
may easily be forced into sensual channels.
A little girl, twelve years old, was one day
brought to the psychopathic clinic connected
with the Chicago juvenile court. She had been
detained under police surveillance for more than
a week, while baffled detectives had in vain tried
to verify the statements she had made to her
Sunday-school teacher in great detail of certain
horrible experiences which had befallen her.
For at least a week no one concerned had the
remotest idea that the child was fabricating.
The police thought that she had merely grown
confused as to the places to which she had been
"carried unconscious." The mother gave the
first clue when she insisted that the child had
never been away from her long enough to have
had these experiences, but came directly home
from school every afternoon for her tea, of which
she habitually drank ten or twelve cups. The
skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly
establishing the fact of a disordered mind, dis-
closed an astonishing knowledge of the habits of
the underworld.
Even children who live in respectable neigh-
borhoods and are guarded by careful parents so
121
that their imaginations are not perverted, but
only starved, constantly conduct a search for
the magical and impossible which leads them
into moral dangers. An astonishing number of
them consult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune
tellers. These dealers hi futurity, who sell only
love and riches, the latter often dependent upon
the first, are sometimes in collusion with dis-
reputable houses, and at the best make the path
of normal living more difficult for their eager
young patrons. There is something very pathetic
in the sheepish, yet radiant, faces of the boy
and girl, often together, who come out on the
street from a dingy doorway which bears the
palmist's sign of the spread-out hand. This
remnant of primitive magic is all they can find
with which to feed their eager imaginations,
although the city offers libraries and galleries,
crowned with man's later imaginative achieve-
ments. One hard-working girl of my acquaint-
ance, told by a palmist that "diamonds were
coming to her soon," afterwards accepted with-
out a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond
ring from a man whose improper attentions she
had hitherto withstood.
122 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
In addition to these heedless young people,
pulled into a sordid and vicious life through
their very search for romance, are many little
children ensnared by means of the most innocent
playthings and pleasures of childhood. Perhaps
one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as it
exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring
of little girls who are too young to have received
adequate instruction of any sort and whose
natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has
been broken down by the overcrowding of tene-
ment house life. Any educator who has made a
careful study of the children from the crowded
districts is impressed with the numbers of them
whose moral natures are apparently unawakened.
While there are comparatively few of these non-
moral children in any one neighborhood, in the
entire city their number is far from negligible.
Such children are used by disreputable people
to invite their more normal playmates to house
parties, which they attend again and again,
lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually
learn to trust the vicious hostess. The head of
one such house, recently sent to the penitentiary
upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile
AN ANCIENT EVIL 123
Protective Association, founded her large and
successful business upon the activities of three
or four little girls who, although they had gradu-
ally come to understand her purpose, were appar-
ently so chained to her by the goodies and favors
which they received, that they were quite indif-
ferent to the fate of their little friends. Such
children, when brought to the psychopathic clinic
attached to the Chicago juvenile court, are
sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or
other physical disabilities from which their
conduct may be at least partially accounted for.
Sometimes they come from respectable families,
but more often from families where they have
been mistreated and where dissolute parents
have given them neither affection nor protection.
Many of these children whose relatives have
obviously contributed to their delinquency are
helped by the enforcement of the adult delin-
quency law.
One looks upon these hardened little people
with a sense of apology that educational forces
have not been able to break into their first igno-
rance of life before it becomes toughened into
insensibility, and one knows that, whatever may
124 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
be done for them later, because of this early
neglect, they will probably always remain im-
pervious to the gentler aspects of life, as if vice
seared their tender minds with red-hot irons.
Our public-school education is so nearly uni-
versal, that if the entire body of the teachers
seriously undertook to instruct all American
youth in regard to this most important aspect
of life, why should they not in time train their
pupils to continence and self-direction, as they
already discipline their minds with knowledge
in regard to many other matters? Certainly
the extreme youth of the victims of the white
slave traffic, both boys and girls, places a great
responsibility upon the educational forces of the
community.
The state which supports the public school ia
also coming to the rescue of children through
protective legislation. This is another illustration
that the beginnings of social advance have often
resulted from the efforts to defend the weakest
and least-sheltered members of the community.
The widespread movement which would protect
children from premature labor, also prohibits
them from engaging in occupations in which
AN ANCIENT EVIL 125
they are subjected to moral dangers. Several
American cities have of late become much con-
cerned over the temptations to which messenger
boys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly
subjected when their business takes them into
vicious districts. The Chicago vice commission
makes a plea for these "children of the night"
that they shall be protected by law from those
temptations which they are too young and too
untrained to withstand. New York and Wis-
consin are the only states which have raised the
legal age of messenger boys employed late at
night to twentyrone^years. Under the inadequate
sixteen-year limit, which regulates night work
for children in Illinois, boys constantly come to
grief through their familiarity with the social
evil. One of these, a delicate boy of seventeen,
had been put into the messenger service by his
parents when their family doctor had recom-
mended out-of-door work. Because he was well-
bred and good-looking, he became especially
popular with the inmates of disreputable houses.
They gave him tips of a dollar and more when he
returned from the errands which he had executed
for them, such as buying candy, cocaine or
126 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
morphine. He was inevitably flattered by their
attentions and pleased with his own popularity.
Although his mother knew that his duties as a
messenger boy occasionally took him to dis-
reputable houses, she fervently hoped his early
training might keep him straight, but in the end
realized the foolhardiness of subjecting an im-
mature youth to these temptations. The vice
commission report gives various detailed in-
stances of similar experiences on the part of
other lads, one of them being a high-school boy
who was merely earning extra money as a messen-
ger boy during the rush of Christmas week.
The regulations in Boston, New York, Cin-
cinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis for the safe-
guarding of these children may be but a forecast
of the care which the city will at last learn to
devise for youth under special temptations.
Because the various efforts made in Chicago to
obtain adequate legislation for the protection
of street-trading children have not succeeded,
incidents like the following have not only occurred
once, but are constantly repeated: a pretty little
girl, the only child of a widowed mother, sold
newspapers after school hours from the time she
AN ANCIENT EVIL 127
was seven years old. Because her home was
near a vicious neighborhood and because the
people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked
for change when they bought a paper and good-
naturedly gave her many little presents, her
mother permitted her to gain a clientele within
the district on the ground that she was too young
to understand what she might see. This con-
tinued familiarity, in spite of her mother's ad-
monitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably
resulted in so vitiating the standard of the growing
girl, that at the age of fourteen she became an
inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance
concerns three little girls who habitually sold
gum in one of the segregated districts. Because
they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-*
hearted policemen who felt that they ought not
to be in such a neighborhood, each one of these
children had obtained a special permit from the
mayor of the city in order to protect herself from
"police interference." While the mayor had
no actual authority to issue such permits, natu-
rally the piece of paper bearing his name, when
displayed by a child, checked the activity of
the police officer. The incident was but one more
128 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
example of the old conflict between mistaken
kindness to the individual child in need of money,
and the enforcement of those regulations which
may seem to work a temporary hardship upon one
child, but save a hundred others from entering
occupations which can only lead into blind alleys.
Because such occupations inevitably result in
increasing the number of unemployables, the
educational system itself must be challenged.
A royal commission has recently recommended
to the English Parliament that "the legally per-
missible hours for the employment of boys be
shortened, that they be required to spend the
hours so set free, in physical and technological
training, that the manufacturing of the unem-
ployable may cease." Certainly we are justified
in demanding from our educational system, that
the interest and capacity of each child leaving
school to enter industry, shall have been studied
with reference to the type of work he is about to
undertake. When vocational bureaus are prop-
erly connected with all the public schools, a
girl will have an intelligent point of departure
into her working life, and a place to which she
may turn in time of need, for help and advice
AN ANCIENT EVIL 129
through those long and dangerous periods of
unemployment which are now so inimical to her
character.
This same British commission divided all of
the unemployed, the under-employed, and the
unemployable as the results of three types of
trades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein
women and children are paid wages insufficient
to maintain them at the required standard of
health and industrial efficiency, so that their
wages must be supplemented by relatives or
charity; second, labor deteriorating trades,
which have sapped the energy, the capacity,
the character, of workers; third, bare subsistence
trades, where the worker is forced to such a low
level in his standard of life that he continually
falls below self-support. We have many trades
of these three types in America, all of them
demanding the work of young and untrained girls.
Yet, in spite of the obvious dangers surrounding
every girl who enters one of them, little is done
to guide the multitude of children who leave
school prematurely each year into reasonable
occupations.
Unquestionably the average American child
130 A NEW 'CONSCIENCE AND
has received a more expensive education than
has yet been accorded to the child of any other
nation. The girls working in department stores
have been in the public schools on an average
of eight years, while even the factory girls,
who so often leave school from the lower grades,
have yet averaged six and two-tenths years of
education at the public expense, before they
enter industrial life. Certainly the community
that has accomplished so much could afford
them help and oversight for six and a half years
longer, which is the average length of time that
a working girl is employed. The state might
well undertake this, if only to secure its former
investment and to save that investment from
utter loss.
Our generation, said to have developed a
new enthusiasm for the possibilities of child
life, and to have put fresh meaning into the
phrase "children's rights," may at last have the
courage to insist upon a child's right to be well
born and to start in life with its tiny body free
from disease. Certainly allied to this new un-
derstanding of child life and a part of the same
movement is the new science of eugenics with its
AN ANCIENT EVIL 131
recently appointed university professors. Its
organized societies publish an ever-increasing
mass of information as to that which constitutes
the inheritance of well-born children. When
this new science makes clear to the public that
those diseases which are a direct outcome of the
social evil are clearly responsible for race dete-
rioration, effective indignation may at last be
aroused, both against the preventable infant
mortality for which these diseases are responsible,
and against the ghastly fact that the survivors
among these afflicted children infect their con-
temporaries and hand on the evil heritage to
another generation. Public societies for the
prevention of blindness are continually distrib-
uting information on the care of new-born
children and may at length answer that old,
confusing question "Did this man sin or his
parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowl-
edge is becoming more widespread every day
and the rising interest in infant welfare must in
time re-act upon the very existence of the social
evil itself.
This new public concern for the welfare of little
children in certain American cities has resulted
132 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
in a municipal milk supply; in many German
cities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York,
Chicago, Boston and other large towns, employ
hundreds of nurses each summer to instruct
tenement-house mothers upon the care of little
children. Doubtless all of this enthusiasm for
the nurture of children will at last arouse public
opinion in regard to the transmission of that one
type of disease which thousands of them annu-
ally inherit, and which is directly traceable to
the vicious living of their parents or grand-
parents. This slaughter of the innocents, this
infliction of suffering upon the new-born, is so
gratuitous and so unfair, that it is only a question
of time until an outraged sense of justice shall
be aroused on behalf of these children. But
even before help comes through chivalric senti-
ments, governmental and municipal agencies will
decline to spend the tax-payers' money for the
relief of suffering infants, when by the exertion
of the same authority they could easily provide
against the possibility of the birth of a child so
afflicted. It is obvious that the average tax-
payer would be moved to demand the exter-
mination of that form of vice which has been
AN ANCIENT EVIL 133
declared illegal, although it still flourishes by
official connivance, did he once clearly apprehend
that it is responsible for the existence of these
diseases which cost him so dear. It is only his
ignorance which makes him remain inert until
each victim of the white slave traffic shall be
avenged unto the third and fourth generation
of them that bought her. It is quite possible
that the tax-payer will himself contend that,
as the state does not legalize a marriage without
a license officially recorded, that the status of
children may be clearly defined, so the state
would need to go but one step further in the same
direction, to insist upon health certificates from
the applicant for a marriage license, that the
health of future children might in a certain meas-
ure, be guaranteed. Whether or not this step
may be predicted, the mere discussion of this
matter in itself, is an indication of the changing
public opinion, as is the fact that such legislation
has already been enacted in two states, which
are only now putting into action the recommenda-
tion made centuries ago by such social philoso-
phers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense
of justice outraged by the wanton destruction of
134 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
new-born children, may in time unite with that
ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture
of the young, until the old barriers of silence and
inaction, behind which the social evil has so long
intrenched itself, shall at last give way.
Certainly it will soon be found that the senti-
ment of pity, so recently aroused throughout the
country on behalf of the victims of the white
slave traffic, will be totally unable to afford them
protection unless it becomes incorporated in
government. It is possible that we are on the
eve of a series of legislative enactments similar
to those which resulted from the attempts to
regulate child labor. Through the entire course
of the last century, in that anticipation of coming
changes which does so much to bring changes
about, the friends of the children were steadily
engaged in making a new state, from the first
child labor law passed in the English parlia-
ment in 1803 to the final passage of the so-called
children's charter in 1909. During the long
century of transforming pity into political action
there was created that social sympathy which
has become one of the greatest forces in modern
legislation, and to which we may confidently
AN ANCIENT EVIL 135
appeal in this new crusade against the social
evil.
Another point of similarity to the child labor
movement is obvious, for the friends of the
children early found that they needed much
statistical information and that the great problem
of the would-be reformer is not so much over-
coming actual opposition the passing of time
gradually does that for him as obtaining and
formulating accurate knowledge and fitting
that knowledge into the trend of his time.
From this point of view and upon the basis of
what has already been accomplished for "the
protection of minors," the many recent investi-
gations which have revealed the extreme youth
of the victims of the white slave traffic, should
make legislation on their behalf all the more
feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever
more legitimately make an emotional appeal to
the higher sensibility of the public.
In the rescue homes recently opened in Chicago
by the White Slave Traffic Committee of the
League of Cook County Clubs, the tender ages
of the little girls who were brought there horrified
the good clubwomen more than any other aspect
136 'A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
of the situation. A number of the little inmates
in the home wanted to play with dolls and several
of them brought dolls of their own, which they
had kept with them through all their vicissitudes.
There is something literally heart-breaking in
the thought of these little children who are en-
snared and debauched when they are still young
enough to have every right to protection and
care. Quite recently I visited a home for semi-
delinquent girls against each one of whom stood
a grave charge involving the loss of her chastity.
Upon each of the little white beds or on one of
the stiff chairs standing by its side was a doll
belonging to a delinquent owner still young
enough to love and cherish this supreme toy of
childhood. I had come to the home prepared
to "lecture to the inmates." I remained to dress
dolls with a handful of little girls who eagerly
asked questions about the dolls I had once
possessed in a childhood which seemed to them
so remote. Looking at the little victims who
supply the white slave trade, one is reminded of
the burning words of Dr. Howard Kelly uttered
in response to the demand that the social evil
be legalized and its victims licensed. He says:
'AN ANCIENT EVIL
"Where shall we look to recruit the ever-failing
ranks of these poor creatures as they die yearly
by the tens of thousands? Which of the little
girls of our land shall we designate for this traffic?
Mark their sweet innocence to-day as they run
about in our streets and parks prattling and
playing, ever busy about nothing; which of them
shall we snatch as they approach maturity, to
supply this foul mart?"
It is incomprehensible that a nation whose
chief boast is its free public education, that a
people always ready to respond to any moral or
financial appeal made in the name of children,
should permit this infamy against childhood to
continue! Only the protection of all children
from the menacing temptations which their
youth is unable to withstand, will prevent some
of them from falling victims to the white slave
traffic; only when moral education is made
effective and universal will there be hope for the
actual abolition of commercialized vice. These
are illustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity
of which society is so rapidly becoming conscious.
CHAPTER V
PHILANTHROPIC RESCUE AND
PREVENTION
There is no doubt that philanthropy often
reflects and dramatizes the modern sensitiveness
of the community in relation to a social wrong,
because those engaged in the rescue of the victims
are able to apprehend, through their daily experi-
ences, many aspects of a recognized evil concern-
ing which the public are ignorant and therefore
indifferent. However ancient a wrong may be,
in each generation it must become newly em-
bodied in living people and the social custom into
which it has hardened through the years, must be
continued in individual lives. Unless the con-
temporaries of such unhappy individuals are
touched to tenderness or stirred to indignation
by the actual embodiments of the old wrong in
their own generation, effective action cannot be
secured.
The social evil has, on the whole, received less
142 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
philanthropic effort than any other well-recog-
nized menace to the community, largely because
there is something peculiarly distasteful and
distressing in personal acquaintance with its
victims; a distaste and distress that sometimes
leads to actual nervous collapse. A distinguished
Englishman has recently written "that sober-
minded people who, from motives of pity, have
looked the hideous evil full in the face, have
often asserted that nothing in their experience
has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a
loss of reason."
Nevertheless, this comparative lack of philan-
thropic effort is the more remarkable because the
average age of the recruits to prostitution is
between sixteen and eighteen years, the age at
which girls are still minors under the law in
respect to all matters of property. We allow a
minor to determine for herself whether or not
she will live this most abominable life, although
if she resolve to be a thief she will, if possible, be
apprehended and imprisoned; if she become a
vagrant she will be restrained; even if she
become a professional beggar, she will be inter-
fered with; but the decision to lead this evil life,
AN ANCIENT EVIL 143
disastrous alike to herself and the community,
although well known to the police, is openly
permitted. If a man has seized upon a moment
of weakness in a girl and obtained her consent,
although she may thereafter be in dire need of
help she is put outside all protection of the law.
The courts assume that such a girl has deliberately
decided for herself and that because she is not
"of previous chaste life and character/" she is
lost to all decency. Yet every human being
knows deep down in his heart that his own moral
energy ebbs and flows, that he could not be
judged fairly by his hours of defeat, and that after
revealing moments of weakness, although shocked
and frightened, he is the same human being,
struggling as he did before. Nevertheless in
some states, a little girl as young as ten years of
age may make this irrevocable decision for
herself.
Modern philanthropy, continually discovering
new aspects of prostitution through the aid of
economics, sanitary science, statistical research,
and many other agencies, finds that this increase
of knowledge inevitably leads it from the attempt
to rescue the victims of white slavery to a con-
144 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
sideration of the abolition of the monstrous
wrong itself. At the present moment philan-
thropy is gradually impelled to a consideration of
prostitution in relation to the welfare and the
orderly existence of society itself. If the moral
fire seems at times to be dying out of certain good
old words, such as charity, it is filling with new
warmth such words as social justice, which
belong distinctively to our own time. It is also
true that those for whom these words contain
most of hope and warmth are those who have
been long mindful of the old tasks and obligations,
as if the great basic emotion of human compas-
sion had more than held its own. Certainly the
youth of many of the victims of the white slave
traffic, and the helplessness of the older girls who
find themselves caught in the grip of an enor-
mous force which they cannot comprehend,
make a most pitiful appeal. Philanthropy more-
over discovers many young girls, who if they had
not been rescued by protective agencies would
have become permanent outcasts, although they
would have entered a disreputable life through*
no fault of their own.
The illustrations in this chapter are all taken
AN ANCIENT EVIL 145
from the Juvenile Protective Association of
Chicago in connection with its efforts to save
girls from overwhelming temptation. Doubtless
many other associations could offer equally
convincing testimony, for in recent years the
number of people to whom the very existence
of the white slave traffic has become unendurable
and who are determinedly working against it,
has enormously increased.
A surprising number of country girls have been
either brought to Chicago under false pretences,
or have been decoyed into an evil life very soon
after their arrival in the city. Mr. Clifford Roe
estimates that more than half of the girls who
have been recruited into a disreputable life in
Chicago have come from the farms and smaller
towns in Illinois and from neighboring states.
This estimate is borne out by the records of
Paris and other metropolitan cities in which it
is universally estimated that a little less than
one-third of the prostitutes found in them, at any
given moment, are city born.
The experience of a pretty girl who came to
the office of the Juvenile Protective Association,
a year ago, is fairly typical of the argument many
146 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
of these country girls offer in their own defense.
This girl had been a hotel chambermaid in an
Iowa town where many of the traveling patrons
of the hotel had made love to her, one of them
occasionally offering her protection if she would
leave with him. At first she indignantly refused,
but was at length convinced that the acceptance
of such offers must be a very general practice
and that, whatever might be the custom in the
country, no one in a city made personal inquiries.
She finally consented to accompany a young
man to Seattle, both because she wanted to
travel and because she was discouraged in her
attempts to "be good." A few weeks later,
when in Chicago, she had left the young man,
acting from what she considered a point of honor,
as his invitation had been limited to the journey
which was now completed. Feeling too dis-
graced to go home and under the glamour of the
life of idleness she had been leading, she had gone
voluntarily into a disreputable house, in which
the police had found her and sent her to the
Association. She could not be persuaded to
give up her plan, but consented to wait for a few
days to "think it over." As she was leaving
AN ANCIENT EVIL 147
he office in company with a representative of
he Association, they met the young man, who
iad been distractedly searching for her and had
ust discovered her whereabouts. She was mar-
ied the very same day and of course the Associa-
ion never saw her again.
From the point of view of the traffickers in
fhite slaves, it is much cheaper and safer to
Tocure country girls after they have reached
he city. Such girls are in constant danger
Because they are much more easily secreted than
iris procured from the city. A country girl
ntering a vicious life quickly feels the disgrace
,nd soon becomes too broken-spirited and dis-
ouraged to make any effort to escape into the
nknown city which she believes tc be full of
errors similar to those she has already encoun-
ered. She desires above all things to deceive
er family at home, often sending money to them
egularly and writing letters describing a fictitious
fe of hard work. Perhaps the most flagrant
ase with which the Association ever dealt, was
hat of two young girls who had come to Chicago
rom a village in West Virginia, hoping to earn
irge wages in order to help their families. They
148 A- NEW CONSCIENCE AND
arrived in the city penniless, having been robbed
en route of their one slender purse. As they
stood in the railway station, utterly bewildered,
they were accosted by a young man who presented
the advertising card of a boarding-house and
offered to take them there. They quite in-
nocently accepted his invitation, but an hour
later, finding themselves in a locked room, they
became frightened and realized they had been
duped. Fortunately the two agile country girls
had no difficulty in jumping from a second-story
window, but upon the street they were of course
much too frightened to speak to anyone again
and wandered about for hours. The house
from which they had escaped bore the sign
"rooms to rent," and they therefore carefully
avoided all houses whose placards offered shelter.
Finally, when they were desperate with hunger,
they went into a saloon for a "free lunch," not
in the least realizing that they were expected to
take a drink in order to receive it. A police-
man, seeing two young girls in a saloon "with-
out escort," arrested them and took them to the
nearest station where they spent the night in a
wretched cell.
AN ANCIENT EVIL 149
At the hearing the next morning, where, much
frightened, they gave a very incoherent account
of their adventures, the judge fined them each
fifteen dollars and costs, and as they were unable
to pay the fine, they were ordered sent to the
city prison. When they were escorted from the
court room, another man approached them and
offered to pay their fines if they would go
with him. Frightened by their former experience,
they stoutly declined his help, but were over-
persuaded by his graphic portrayal of prison
horrors and the disgrace that their imprison-
ment would bring upon "the folks at home." He
also made clear that when they came out of
prison, thirty days later, they would be no better
off than they were now, save that they would
have the added stigma of being jail-birds. The
girls at last reluctantly consented to go with
him, when a representative of the Juvenile Pro-
tective Association, who had followed them from
the court room and had listened to the conversa-
tion, insisted upon the prompt arrest of the
white slave trader. When the entire story,
finally secured from the girls, was related to the
judge, he reversed his decision, fined the man
150 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
$100.00, which he was abundantly able to pay,
and insisted that the girls be sent back to their
mothers in Virginia. They were farmers' daughters,
strong and capable of taking care of themselves in
an environment that they understood, but in con-
stant danger because of their ignorance of city life.
The methods employed to secure city girls
must be much more subtle and complicated than
those employed with the less sophisticated coun-
try girl. Although the city girl, once procured,
is later allowed more freedom than is accorded
either to a country girl or to an immigrant girl,
every effort is made to demoralize her completely
before she enters the life. Because she may,
at any moment, escape into the city which she
knows so well, it is necessary to obtain her inner
consent. Those whose profession it is to procure
girls for the white slave trade apparently find
it possible to decoy and demoralize most easily
that city girl whose need for recreation has led
her to the disreputable public dance hall or other
questionable places of amusement.
Gradually those philanthropic agencies that
are endeavoring to be of service to the girls
learn to know the dangers in these places. Many
AN ANCIENT EVIL 151
parents are utterly indifferent or ignorant of the
pleasures that their children find for themselves.
From the time these children were five years old,
such parents were accustomed to see them take
care of themselves on the street and at school,
and it seems but natural that when the children
are old enough to earn money, they should be
able to find their own amusements.
The girls are attracted to the unregulated
dance halls not only by a love of pleasure but
by a sense of adventure, and it is in these places
that they are most easily recruited for a vicious
life. Unfortunately there are three hundred and
twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago, one
hundred and ninety of them connect directly
with saloons, while liquor is openly sold in most
of the others. This consumption of liquor enor-
mously increases the danger to young people.
A girl after a long day's work is easily induced
to believe that a drink will dispel her lassitude.
There is plenty of time between the dances to
persuade her, as the intermissions are long,
fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dances short,
occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the
halls are hot and dusty and it is almost impossible
152 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
to obtain a drink of water. Often the entire
purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully
arranged intermissions, is the selling of liquor
to the people it has brought together. After
the girl has begun to drink, the way of the pro-
curer, who is often in league with the "spieler"
who frequents the dance hall, is comparatively
easy. He assumes one of two roles, that of the
sympathetic older man or that of the eager young
lover. In the character of the former, he tells
"the down-trodden working girl" that her wages
are a mere pittance and that he can procure a
better place for her with higher wages if she will
trust him. He often makes allusions to the
shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and con-
siders it "a shame that such a pretty girl cannot
dress better." In the second role he apparently
falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents,
complaining that they want him to marry, "a
society swell," but that he really prefers a working
girl like herself. In either case he establishes
friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind,
through the excitement of the liquor and the
dance, into a new sense of intimate understanding
and protection.
AN ANCIENT EVIL 153
Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with
him for a restaurant because, as he truthfully
says, she is exhausted and in need of food. At
the supper, however, she drinks much more, and
it is not surprising that she is at last persuaded
that it is too late to go home and in the end con-
sents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby
lodging house. Six young girls, each accom-
panied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, were
recently followed to a chop suey restaurant and
then to a lodging-house, which the police were
instigated to raid and where the six girls, more or
less intoxicated, were found. If no one rescues
the girl after such an experience, she sometimes
does not return home at all, or if she does, feels
herself initiated into a new world where it is
possible to obtain money at will, to easily
secure the pleasures it brings, and she comes at
length to consider herself superior to her less
sophisticated companions. Of course this latter
state of mind is untenable for any length of time
and the girl is soon found openly leading a dis-
reputable life.
The girls attending the cheap theatres and the
vaudeville shows are most commonly approached
154 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
through their vanity. They readily listen to the
triumphs of a stage career, sure to be attained
by such a "good looker," and a large number of
them follow a young man to the woman with
whom he is in partnership, under the promise of
being introduced to a theatrical manager. There
are also theatrical agencies in league with dis-
reputable places, who advertise for pretty girls,
promising large salaries. Such an agency oper-
ating with a well-known "near theatre" in the
state capital was recently prosecuted in Chicago
and its license revoked. In this connection
the experience of two young English girls is
not unusual. They were sisters possessed of
an extraordinary skill in juggling, who were
brought to this country by a relative acting as
their manager. Although he exploited them for
his own benefit for three years, paying them the
most meager salaries and supplying them with
the simplest living in the towns which they
"toured," he had protected them from all immor-
ality, and they had preserved the clean living of
the family of acrobats to which they belonged.
Last October, when appearing in San Francisco,
the girls, then sixteen and seventeen years of
AN ANCIENT EVIL 155
age, demanded more pay than the dollar and
twenty cents a week each had been receiving,
representing the five shillings with which they
had started from home. The manager, who had
become discouraged with his American experience,
refused to accede to their demands, gave them
each a ticket for Chicago, and heartlessly turned
them adrift. Arriving in the city, they quite
naturally at once applied to a theatrical agency,
through which they were sent to a disreputable
house where a vaudeville program was given
each night. Delighted that they had found
work so quickly, they took the position in good
faith. During the very first performance, how-
ever, they became frightened by the conduct of
the girls who preceded them on the program and
by the hilarity of the audience. They managed
to escape from the dressing-room, where they
were waiting their turn, and on the street appealed
to the first policeman, who brought them to the
Juvenile Protective Association. They were de-
tained for several days as witnesses against the
theatrical agency, entering into the legal prosecu-
tion with that characteristic British spirit which
is ever ready to protest against an imposition,
156 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
before they left the city with a travelling com-
pany, each on a weekly salary of twenty dollars.
The methods pursued on excursion boats are
similar to those of the dance halls, in that decent
girls are induced to drink quantities of liquor to
which they are unaccustomed. On the high
seas, liquor is sold usually in original packages,
which enormously increases the amount con-
sumed. It is not unusual to see a boy and girl
drinking between them an entire bottle of whis-
key. Some of these excursion boats carry five
thousand people and in the easy breakdown of
propriety which holiday-making often implies,
and the absence of police, to which city young
people are unaccustomed, the utmost freedom
and license is often indulged in. Thus the lake
excursions, one of the most delightful possibilities
for recreation in Chicago, through lack of proper
policing and through the sale of liquor, are made
a menace to thousands of young people to
whom they should be a great resource.
When a philanthropic association, with a
knowledge of the commercial exploitation of
youth's natural response to gay surroundings,
attempts to substitute innocent recreation, it
AN ANCIENT EVIL 157
finds the undertaking most difficult. In Chicago
the Juvenile Protective Association, after a
thorough investigation of public dance halls,
amusement parks, five-cent theatres, and excur-
sion boats, is insisting upon more vigorous en-
forcement of the existing legislation, and is also
urging further legal regulation; Kansas City
has instituted a Department of Public Welfare
with power to regulate places of amusement; a
New York committee has established model
dance halls; Milwaukee is urging the appoint-
ment of commissions on public recreation, while
New York and Columbus have already created
them.
Perhaps nothing in actual operation is more
valuable than the small parks of Chicago in
which the large halls are used every evening for
y ,
dancing and where outdoor sports, swimming
pools and gymnasiums daily attract thousands
of young people. Unless cities make some such
provision for their youth, those who sell the
facilities for amusement in order to make a profit
will continue to exploit the normal desire of all
young people for recreation and pleasure. The
city of Chicago contains at present eight hundred
158 'A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
and fourteen thousand minors, all eager for
pleasure. It is not surprising that commercial
enterprise undertakes to supply this demand and
that penny arcades, slot machines, candy stores,
ice-cream parlors, moving-picture shows, skating
rinks, cheap theatres and dance halls are trying
to attract young people with every device known
to modern advertising. Their promoters are, of
course, careless of the moral effect upon their
young customers if they can but secure their
money. Until municipal provisions adequately
meet this need, philanthropic and social organi-
zations must be committed to the establishment
of more adequate recreational facilities.
Although many dangers are encountered by
the pleasure-loving girl who demands that each
evening shall bring her some measure of recrea-
tion, a large number of girls meet with difficulties
and temptations while soberly at work. Many
of these tempted girls are newly-arrived immi-
grant girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty,
who find their first work in hotels. Polish girls
especially are utilized in hotel kitchens and laun-
dries, and for the interminable scrubbing of halls
and lobbies where a knowledge of the English
AN ANCIENT EVIL 159
language is not necessary, but where their peas-
ant strength is in demand. The work is very
heavy and fatiguing and until the Illinois law
limited the work of women to ten hours a day,
it often lasted late into the night. Even now
the girls report themselves so tired that at the
end of the day, they crowd into the dormitories
and fall upon their beds undressed. When food
and shelter is given them, their wages are from
$14.00 to $18.00 a month, most of which is
usually sent back to the old country, that the
remaining members of the family may be brought
to America. Such positions are surrounded by
temptations of every sort. Even the hotel
housekeepers, who are honestly trying to pro-
tect the girls, admit that it is impossible to
do it adequately. One of these housekeepers
recently said "that it takes a girl who knows the
world to work in any hotel," and regretted
that the sophisticated English-speaking girl who
might protect herself, was unable to endure the
hard work. She added that as soon as a girl
learned English she promoted her from the
laundry to the halls and from there to the posi-
tion of chambermaid, but that the latter position
160 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
was the most dangerous of all, as the girls were
constantly exposed to insults from the guests.
In the less respectable hotels these newly-arrived
immigrant girls, inevitably seeing a great deal of
the life of the underworld and the apparent ease
with which money may be earned in illicit ways,
find their first impression of the moral standards
of life in America most bewildering. One young
Polish girl had worked for two years in a down-
town hotel, and had steadfastly resisted all
improper advances even sometimes by the
aid of her own powerful fist. She yielded at last
to the suggestions of the life about her when
she received a telegram from Ellis Island stating
that her mother had arrived in New York, but
was too ill to be sent on to Chicago. All of her
money had gone for the steamer ticket and as
the thought of her old country mother, ill and
alone among strangers, was too much for her
long fortitude, she made the best bargain possible
with the head waiter whose importunities she
had hitherto resisted, accepted the little purse
the other Polish girls in the hotel collected for
her and arrived in New York only to find that
her mother had died the night before.
AN ANCIENT EVIL 161
The simple obedience to parents on the part
of these immigrant girls, working in hotels and
restaurants, often miscarries pathetically. Their
unspoiled human nature, not yet immune to
the poisons of city life, when thrust into the
midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies
at the foundation of all complex luxury,
often results in the most fatal reactions. A
young German woman, the proprietor of what
is considered a successful "house" in the
most notorious district in Chicago, traces her
career directly to a desperate attempt to con-
form to the standard of "bringing home good
wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and
sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid:
all money earned by a child must be paid into
the family income until "legal age" was attained.
The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen
heart' y detested the dish-washing in a restaurant,
which constituted her first place in America, and
quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting
was beyond her strength. Such insubordination
was not tolerated at home, and every Saturday
night when her meager wages, reduced by sick
days "off," were compared with what the others
162 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
brought ill, she was regularly scolded, "some-
times slapped," by her parents, jeered at by her
more vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers.
She tried to shorten her hours by doing "rush-
work" as a waitress at noon, but she found this
still beyond her strength, and worst of all, the
pay of two dollars and a half insufficient to satisfy
her mother. Confiding her troubles to the other
waitresses, one of them good-naturedly told her
how she could make money through appoint-
ments in a nearby disreputable hotel, and so
take home an increased amount of money easily
called "a raise in wages." So strong was the
habit of obedience, that the girl continued to
take money home every Saturday night until
her eighteenth birthday, in spite of the fact that
she gave up the restaurant in less than six weeks
after her first experience. Although all of this
happened ten years ago and the German _aother
is long since dead, the daughter bitterly ended
the story with the infamous hope that "the old
lady was now suffering the torments of the lost,
for making me what I am." Such a girl was
subjected to temptations to which society has
no right to expose her.
AN ANCIENT EVIL 163
A dangerous cynicism regarding the value
of virtue, a cynicism never so unlovely as in
the young, sometimes seizes a girl who, because
of long hours and overwork, has been unable
to preserve either her health or spirits and
has lost all measure of joy in life. That this
premature cynicism may be traced to an un-
happy and narrow childhood is suggested by
the fact that a large number of these girls come
from families in which there has been little
affection and the poor substitute of parental
tyranny.
A young Italian girl who earned four dollars
a week in a tailor shop pulling out bastings,
when asked why she wore a heavy woolen gown
on one of the hottest days of last summer, re-
plied that she was obliged to earn money for her
clothes by scrubbing for the neighbors after
hours; that she had found no such work lately
and that her father would not allow her anything
from her wages for clothes or for carfare, because
he was buying a house.
This parental control sometimes exercised in
order to secure all of a daughter's wages, is often
established with the best intentions in the world.
164 A NEW'CONSCIENCE AND
I recall a French dressmaker who had frugally
supported her two daughters until they were of
working age, when she quite naturally expected
them to conform to the careful habits of living
necessary during her narrow years. In order to
save carfare, she required her daughters to walk a
long distance to the department store in which
one was a bundle wrapper and the other a clerk
at the ribbon counter. They dressed in black as
being the most economical color and a penny
spent in pleasure was never permitted. One
day a young man who was buying ribbon from
the older girl gave her a yard with the remark
that she was much too young and pretty to be
so somberly dressed. She wore the ribbon at
work, never of course at home, but it opened a
vista of delightful possibilities and she eagerly
accepted a pair of gloves the following week
from the same young man, who afterwards asked
her to dine with him. This was the beginning of
a winter of surreptitious pleasures on the part
of the two sisters. They were shrewd enough
never to be out later than ten o'clock and always
brought home so-called overtime pay to their
mother. In the spring the older girl, finding
AN ANCIENT EVIL 165
herself worn out by her dissipation and having
resolved to cut loose from her home, came to the
office of the Juvenile Protective Association
to ask help for her younger sister. It was dis-
covered that the mother was totally ignorant of
the semi-professional life her daughters had been
leading. She reiterated over and over again
that she had always guarded them carefully
and had given them no money to spend. It
took months of constant visiting on the part of
a representative of the Association before she
was finally persuaded to treat the younger girl
more generously.
While this family is fairly typical of those
in which over-restraint is due to the lack of
understanding, it is true that in most cases the
family tyranny is exercised by an old-country
father in an honest attempt to guard his
daughter against the dangers of a new world.
The worst instances, however, are those in which
the father has fallen into the evil ways of drink,
and not only demands all of his daughter's wages,
but treats her with great brutality when those
wages fall below his expectations. Many such
daughters have come to grief because they have
166 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
been afraid to go home at night when their wage
envelopes contained less than usual, either be-
cause a new system of piece work had reduced
the amount or because, in a moment of weakness,
they had taken out five cents with which to
attend a show, or ten cents for the much-desired
pleasure of riding back and forth the full length
of an elevated railroad, or because they had in
a thirsty moment taken out a nickel for a drink
of soda water, or worst of all, had fallen a victim
to the installment plan of buying a new hat or
a pair of shoes. These girls, in their fear of
beatings and scoldings, although they are sure
of shelter and food and often have a mother who
is trying to protect them from domestic storms,
have almost no money for clothing, and are
inevitably subject to moments of sheer revolt,
their rebellion intensified by the fact that after
a girl earns her own money and is accustomed to
come and go upon the streets as an independent
wage earner, she finds unsympathetic control
much harder to bear than do schoolgirls of the
same age who have never broken the habits of
their childhood and are still economically de-
pendent upon their parents,
AN ANCIENT EVIL 167
In spite of the fact that domestic service is
always suggested by the average woman as an
alternative for the working girl whose life is
beset with danger, the federal report on "Women
and Child Wage Earners in the United States"
gives the occupation of the majority of girls who
go wrong as that of domestic service, and in this
it confirms the experience of every matron in a
rescue home and the statistics in the maternity
wards of the public hospitals. The report sug-
gests that the danger comes from the general
conditions of work: "These general conditions
are the loneliness of the life, the lack of opportuni-
ties for making friends and securing recreation
and amusement in safe surroundings, the monoto-
nous and uninteresting nature of the work done
as these untrained girls do it, the lack of external
stimulus to pride and self-respect, and the abso-
lutely unguarded state of the girl, except when
directly under the eye of her mistress."
In addition to these reasons, the girls realize
that the opportunities for marriage are less in
domestic service than in other occupations, and
after all, the great business of youth is securing
a mate, as the young instinctively understand.
168 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
Unlike the working girl who lives at home and
constantly meets young men of her own neighbor-
hood and factory life, the girl in domestic service
is brought into contact with very few possible
lovers. Even the men of her former acquaint-
ance, however slightly Americanized, do not
like to call on a girl in someone else's kitchen,
and find the entire situation embarrassing. The
girl's mistress knows that for her own daughters
mutual interests and recreation are the natural
foundations for friendship with young men,
which may or may not lead to marriage, but
which is the prerogative of every young girl.
The mistress does not, however, apply this
worldly wisdom to the maid in her service, only
eighteen or nineteen years old, utterly dependent
upon her for social life save during one afternoon
and evening a week.
The majority of domestics are employed in
families where there is only one, and the tired
and dispirited girl, often without a taste for
reading, spends many lonely hours. That most
fundamental and powerful of all instincts has
therefore no chance for diffusion or social expres-
sion and like all confined forces, tends to degen-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 169
erate. The girl is equipped with no weapon with
which to contend with those poisonous images
which arise from the senses, and these images,
bred of fatigue and loneliness, make a girl an
easy victim. This is especially true of the colored
girl, who because of her traditions, is often
treated with so little respect by white men, that
she is constantly subjected to insult. Even the
colored servants in the New York apartment
houses, who live at home and thus avoid this
loneliness, because their hours extend until nine
hi the evening, are obliged to seek their pleasures
late into the night. American cities offer occu-
pation to more colored women than colored men
and this surplus of women, in some cities as
large as one hundred and thirty or forty women
to one hundred men, affords an opportunity to
the procurer which he quickly seizes. He is
often in league with certain employment bureaus,
who make a business of advancing the railroad
or boat fare to colored girls coming from the
South to enter into domestic service. The girl,
in debt and unused to the city, is often put into a
questionable house and kept there until her
debt is paid many times over. In some respects
170 'A HEW CONSCIENCE AND))
her position is not unlike that of the imported
white slave, for although she has the inestimable
advantage of speaking the language, she finds
it even more difficult to have her story cred-
ited. This contemptuous attitude places her
at a disadvantage, for so universally are
colored girls in domestic service suspected of
blackmail that the average court is slow to
credit their testimony when it is given against
white men. The field of employment for colored
girls is extremely limited. They are seldom
found in factories and workshops. They are
not wanted in department stores nor even as
waitresses in hotels. The majority of them
therefore are engaged in domestic service and
often find the position of maid in a house of
prostitution or of chambermaid in a disreput-
able hotel, the best-paying position open to them.
When a girl who has been in domestic service
loses her health, or for any other reason is unable
to carry on her occupation, she is often curiously
detached and isolated, because she has had so
little opportunity for normal social relationships
and friendships. One of the saddest cases ever
brought to my personal knowledge was that of
j Irf ANCIENT EVIL 171
an orphan Norwegian girl who, coming to
America at the age of seventeen, had been for
three years hi one position as general housemaid,
during which time she had drawn only such part
of her wages as was necessary for her simple
clothing. At the end of three years, when she
was sent to a public hospital with nervous prostra-
tion, her employer refused to pay her accumulated
wages, on the ground that owing to her ill health
she had been of little use during the last year.
When she left che hospital, practically penniless,
advised by the physician to find some outdoor
work, she sold a patented egg-beater for six
months, scarcely earning enough for her barest
necessities and in constant dread lest she could
not "keep respectable." When she was found
wandering upon the street she not only had no
capital with which to renew her stock, but had
been without food for two days and had resolved
to drown herself. Every effort was made to
restore the half-crazed girl, but unfortunately
hospital restraint was not considered necessary,
and a month later, in spite of the vigilance of
her new employer, her body was taken from the
lake. One more of those gentle spirits who had
172 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
found the problem of life insoluble, had sought
refuge in death.
A surprising number of suicides occur among
girls who have been in domestic service, when they
discover that they have been betrayed by their
lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing
than the attitude of the mistress when the situa-
tion of such a forlorn girl is discovered, and it
would be interesting to know how far this attitude
has influenced these girls either to suicide or to
their reckless choice of a disreputable life, which
statistics show so many of their number have
elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly
dismisses such a girl, assuring her that she is
disgraced forever and too polluted to remain
for another hour in a good home. In full com-
mand of the situation, she usually succeeds in
convincing the wretched girl that she is ir-
reparably ruined. Her very phraseology, al-
though unknown to herself, is a remnant of that
earlier historic period when every woman was
obliged in her own person to protect her home
and to secure the status of her children. The
indignant woman is trying to exercise alone that
social restraint which should have been exercised
AN ANCIENT EVIL 173
by the community and which would have natu-
rally protected the girl, if she had not been so
withdrawn from it, in order to serve exclusively
the interests of her mistress's family. Such a
woman seldom follows the ruined girl through
the dreary weeks after her dismissal; her difficulty
in finding any sort of work, the ostracism of her
former friends added to her own self-accusation,
the poverty and loneliness, the final ten days hi
the hospital, and the great temptation which
comes after that, to give away her child. The
baby farmer who haunts the public hospitals for
such cases tells her that upon the payment of
forty or fifty dollars, he will take care of the
child for a year and that "maybe it won't live
any longer than that," and unless the hospital
is equipped with a social service department,
such as the one at the Massachusetts General,
the girl leaves it weak and low-spirited and too
broken to care what becomes of her. It is in
moments such as these that many a poor girl,
convinced that all the world is against her, decides
to enter a disreputable house. Here at least
she will find food and shelter, she will not be
despised by the other inmates and she can earn
174 & NEW CONSCIENCE AND
money for the support of her child. Often she
has received the address of such a house from one
of her companions in the maternity ward where,
among the fifty per cent, of the unmarried moth-
ers, at least two or three sophisticated girls are
always to be found, eager to "put wise" the girls
who are merely unfortunate. Occasionally a girl
who follows such baneful advice still insists upon
keeping her child. I recall a pathetic case in
the juvenile court of Chicago when such a
mother of a five-year-old child was pronounced
by the judge to be an "improper guardian."
The agonized woman was told that she might
retain her child if she would completely change
her way of life; but she insisted that such a
requirement was impossible, that she had no
other means of earning her living, and that she
had become too idle and broken for regular work.
The child clung piteously to the mother, and,
having gathered from the evidence that she was
considered "bad," assured the judge over and
over again that she was "the bestest mother in
the world." The poor mother, who had begun
her wretched mode of life for her child's sake,
found herself so demoralized by her hideous
AN ANCIENT EVIL 175
experiences that she could not leave the life,
even for the sake of the same child, still her most
precious possession. Only six years before, this
mother had been an honest girl cheerfully working
in the household of a good woman, whose sense
of duty had expressed itself hi dismissing "the
outcast."
These discouraged girls, who so often come from
domestic service to supply the vice demands of
the city, are really the last representatives of
those thousands of betrayed girls who for many
years met the entire demand of the trade; for,
while a procurer of some sort has performed his
office for centuries, only in the last fifty years
has the white slave market required the services
of extended business enterprises hi order to keep
up the supply. Previously the demand had been
largely met by the girls who had voluntarily
entered a disreputable life because they had
been betrayed. While the white slave traffic was
organized primarily for profit it could of course
never have flourished unless there had been a
dearth of these discouraged girls. Is it not also
significant that the surviving representatives of
the girls who formerly supplied the demand are
176 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
drawn most largely from the one occupation which
is farthest from the modern ideal of social freedom
and self-direction ? Domestic service represents,
in the modern world, more nearly than any other
of the gainful occupations open to women, the
ancient labor conditions under which woman's
standard of chastity was developed and for so
long maintained. It would seem obvious that
both the girl over-restrained at home, as well as
the girl in domestic service, had been too much
withdrawn from the healthy influence of public
opinion, and it is at least significant that domestic
control has so broken down that the girls most
completely under its rule are shown to be those
hi the greatest danger. Such a statement un-
doubtedly needs the modification that the girls
in domestic service are frequently those who are
unadapted to skilled labor and are least capable
of taking care of themselves, yet the fact remains
that they are belated morally as well as industri-
ally. As they have missed the industrial disci-
pline that comes, from regular hours of systema-
tized work, so they have missed the moral
training of group solidarity, the ideals and re-
straints which the friendships and companionships
AN ANCIENT EVIL 177
of other working girls would have brought them.
When the judgment of her peers becomes not
less firm but more kindly, the self-supporting
girl will have a safeguard and restraint many
times more effective than the individual control
which has become so inadequate, or the family
discipline that, with the best intentions in the
world, cannot cope with existing social conditions.
The most perplexing case that comes before
the philanthropic organizations trying to aid
and rescue the victims of the white slave traffic,
is of the type which involves a girl who has been
secured by the trafficker when so lonely, detached
and discouraged that she greedily seized what-
ever friendship was offered her. Such a girl
has been so eager for affection that she clings to
even the wretched simulacrum of it, afforded by
the man who calls himself her "protector,"
and she can only be permanently detached from
the life to which he holds her, when she is put
under the influence of more genuine affections
and interests. That is doubtless one reason it
is always more possible to help the girl who has
become the mother of a child. Although she un-
justly faces a public opinion much more severe
178 A NEW CONSCIENCE
than that encountered by the childless woman
who also endeavors to "reform," the mother's
sheer affection and maternal absorption enables
her to overcome the greater difficulties more
easily than the other woman, without the new
warmth of motive, overcomes the lesser ones.
The Salvation Army in their rescue homes have
long recognized this need for an absorbing interest,
which should involve the Magdalen's deepest
affections and emotions, and therefore often
utilize the rescued girl to save others.
Certainly no philanthropic association, how-
ever rationalistic and suspicious of emotional
appeal, can hope to help a girl once overwhelmed
by desperate temptation, unless it is able to pull
her back into the stream of kindly human fellow-
ship and into a life involving normal human
relations. Such an association must needs re-
member those wise words of Count Tolstoy:
"We constantly think that there are circum-
stances in which a human being can be treated
without affection, and there are no such cir-
cumstances."
INCREASED SOCIAL CONTROL
CHAPTER VI
INCREASED SOCIAL CONTEOL
When certain groups in a community, to whom
a social wrong has become intolerable, prepare
for definite action against it, they almost invari-
ably discover unexpected help from contempo-
raneous social movements with which they later
find themselves allied. The most immediate
help in this new campaign against the social
evil will probably come thus indirectly from
those streams of humanitarian effort which
are ever widening and which will hi time slowly
engulf into their rising tide of enthusiasm for
human betterment, even the victims of the white
slave traffic.
Foremost among them is the world-wide move-
ment to preserve and prolong the term of human
life, coupled with the determination on the part
of the medical profession to eliminate all forms
of germ diseases. The same physicians and
sanitarians who have practically rid the modern
182 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
city of small-pox and cholera and are eliminating
tuberculosis, well know that the social evil is
directly responsible for germ diseases more preva-
lent than any of the others, and also communi-
cable. Over and over again in the history of
large cities, Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, the medi-
cal profession has been urged to control the
diseases resulting from the commercialized vice
which the municipal authorities themselves per-
mitted. But the experiments in segregation, in
licensed systems, and certification have not
been considered successful. The medical profes-
sion, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasi-
bility of such undertakings, is virtually united
in the conclusion that so long as commercial-
ized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee
a city against the spread of the contagious poison
generated by it, which is fatal alike to the individ-
ual and to his offspring. The medical profession
agrees that, as the victims of the social evil
inevitably become the purveyors of germ diseases
of a very persistent and incurable type, safety
in this regard lies only in the extinction of com-
mercialized vice. They point out the indirect
ways in which this contagion can spread exactly
AN ANCIENT EVIL 183
as any other can, but insist that its control is
enormously complicated by the fact that the
victims of these diseases are most unwilling to
be designated and quarantined. The medical
profession is at last taking the position that
the community wishing to protect itself against
this contagion will hi the end be driven to the
extermination of the very source itself. A well-
known authority states the one breeding-place
of these disease germs, without exception, is the
social institution designated as prostitution,
but, once bred and cultivated there, they then
spread through the community, attacking alike
both the innocent and the guilty.
We can imagine, after a do/en years of vigorous
and able propaganda of this opinion on the part
of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians,
that a city might well appeal to the medical
profession to exterminate prostitution on the
very ground that it is a source of constant dan-
ger to the health and future of the community.
Such a city might readily give to the board oi
health ordered to undertake this extermination
more absolute authority than is now accorded
to it in a small-pox epidemic. Of course, no
184 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
city could reach such a view unless the education
of the public proceeded much more rapidly than
at present, although the newly-established custom
of careful medical examination of school-children
and of employees in factories and commercial
establishments must result in the discovery of
many such cases, and in the end adequate provi-
sion must be made for their isolation. A child
was recently discovered in a Chicago school with
an open sore upon her lip, which made her a
most dangerous source of infection. She was just
fourteen years of age, too old to be admitted
into that most pathetic and most unlovely of
all children's wards, where children must suffer
for "the sins of their fathers," and too young
and innocent to be put into the women's ward in
which the public takes care of those wrecks of
dissolute living who are no longer valuable to
the commerce which once secured them, and
have become merely worthless stock which pays
no dividend. The disease of the little girl was
in too virulent a stage to admit her to that
convalescent home lately established in Chicago
for those infected children who are dismissed
from the county hospital, but whom it is impos-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 185
sible to return to their old surroundings. A
philanthropic association was finally obliged to
pay her board for weeks to a woman who care-
fully followed instructions as to her treatment.
This is but one example of a child who was dis-
covered and provided for, but it is evident that
the public cannot long remain indifferent to the
care of such cases when it has already established
the means for detecting them. In twenty-seven
months over six hundred children passed through
this most piteous children's ward in Chicago's
public hospital. All but twenty-nine of these
children were under ten years of age, and doubt-
less a number of them had been victims of that
wretched tradition that a man afflicted with
this incurable disease might cure himself at the
expense of innocence.
Crusades against other infectious diseases,
such as small-pox and cholera, imply well-con-
sidered sanitary precautions, dependent upon
widespread education and an aroused public
opinion. To establish such education and to
arouse the public in regard to this present men-
ace apparently presents insuperable difficulties.
Many newspapers, so ready to deal with all
186 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
other forms of vice and misery, never allow
these evils to be mentioned in their columns
except in the advertisements of quack remedies;
the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian
religion and the early apostles, seldom preach
against the sin of which these contagions are an
inevitable consequence: the physicians, bound
by a rigorous medical etiquette, tell nothing of
the prevalence of these maladies, use a confusing
nomenclature in the hospitals, and write only
contributory causes upon the very death certi-
ficates of the victims.
Yet it is easy to predict that a society com-
mitted to the abolition of infectious germs, to a
higher degree of public health, and to a better
standard of sanitation will not forever permit
these highly communicable diseases to spread
unchecked in its midst, and that a public, con-
vinced that sanitary science, properly supported,
might rid our cities of this type of disease, will
at length insist upon its accomplishment. When
we consider the many things undertaken hi the
name of health and sanitation it becomes easy
to make the prediction, for public health is a
magic word which ever grows more potent, as
AN ANCIENT EVIL 187
society realizes that the very existence of the
modern city would be an impossibility had it
not been discovered that the health of the individ-
ual is largely controlled by the hygienic condition
of his surroundings. Since the first commission
to inquire into the conditions of great cities was
appointed in Manchester in 1844, sanitary sci-
ence, both in knowledge and municipal authority,
has progressed until advocates of the most ad-
vanced measures in city hygiene and preventive
sanitary science boldly state that neglected child-
hood and neglected disease are the most potent
causes of social insufficiency.
Certainly a plea could be made for the women
and children who are often the innocent victims
of these diseases. Quite recently in Chicago
there was brought to my attention the incredibly
pathetic plight of a widow with four children
who was in such constant fear of spreading the
infection for which her husband had been re-
sponsible, that she touchingly offered to leave
her children forevermore, if there was no other
way to save them from the horrible suffering
she herself was enduring. In spite of thousands
of such cases Utah is the pioneer and only state
188 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
with a law which requires that this infection shall
be reported and controlled, as are other contagious
maladies, and which also authorizes boards of
health to take adequate measures in order to
secure protection.
Another humanitarian movement from which
assistance will doubtless come to the crusade
against the social evil, is the great movement
/against alcoholism with its recent revival hi
'every civilized country of the world. A careful
scientist has called alcohol the indispensable
vehicle of the business transacted by the white
slave traders, and has asserted that without its
use this trade could not long continue. Whoever
has tried to help a girl making an effort to leave
the irregular life she has been leading, must have
been discouraged by the victim's attempts to
overcome the habit of using alcohol and drugs.
Such a girl has commonly been drawn into the
life in the first place when under the influence of
liquor and has continued to drink that she might
be able to live through each day. Furthermore,
the drinking habit grows upon her because she
is constantly required to sell liquor and to be
"treated."
AN ANCIENT EVIL 189
It is estimated that the liquor sold by such
girls nets a profit to the trade of two hundred
and fifty per cent, over and above the girl's own
commission. Chicago made at least one honest
effort to divorce the sale of liquor from prostitu-
tion, when the superintendent of police last year
ruled that no liquor should be sold in any dis-
reputable house. The difficulty of enforcing
such an order is greatly increased because such
houses, as well as the questionable dance halls,
commonly obtain a special permit to sell
liquor under a federal license, which is not only
cheaper than the saloon license obtained from the
city, but has the added advantage to the holder
that he can sell after one o'clock in the morn-
ing, at which time the city closes all saloons.
The aggregate annual profit of the two hundred
and thirty-six disorderly saloons recently investi-
gated in Chicago by the Vice Commission was
$4,307,000. This profit on the sale of liquor
can be traced all along the line hi connection
with the white slave traffic and is no less dis-
astrous from the point of view of young men than
of the girls. Even a slight exhilaration from
alcohol relaxes the moral sense and throws a
190 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
sentimental or adventurous glamor over an
aspect of life from which a decent young man
would ordinarily recoil, and its continued use
stimulates the senses at the very moment when
the intellectual and moral inhibitions are lessened.
May we not conclude that both chastity and
self-restraint are more firmly established in the
modern city than we realize, when the white
slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to
detain their victims and to ply young men with
alcohol that they may profit thereby? General
Bingham, who as Police Commissioner of New
JYbrk certainly knew whereof he spoke, says:
"There is not enough depravity in human nature
to keep alive this very large business. The
immorality of women and the brutishness of men
have to be persuaded, coaxed and constantly
stimulated in order to keep the social evil in
its present state of business prosperity."
We may soberly hope that some of the experi-
ments made by governmental and municipal au-
thorities to control and regulate the sale of liquor
will at last meet with such a measure of success
that the existence of public prostitution, deprived
of its artificial stimulus of alcohol, will in the end
AN ANCIENT EVIL 191
be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission
has made a series of valuable suggestions for the
regulation of saloons and for the separation of
the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all
other places known as recruiting grounds for
the white slave traffic. There is still need for
a much wider and more thorough education of
the public in regard to the historic connection
between commercialized vice and alcoholism,
of the close relation between politics and the
liquor interests, behind which the social evil so
often entrenches itself.
In addition to the movements against germ
diseases and the suppression of alcoholism, both
of which are mitigating the hard fate of the vic-
tims of the white slave traffic, other public move-
ments mysteriously affecting all parts of the social
order will in time threaten the very existence of
commercialized vice. First among these, per-
haps, is the equal suffrage movement. On the
horizon everywhere are signs that woman will
soon receive the right to exercise political power,
and it is believed that she will show her efficiency
most conspicuously in finding means for en-
hancing and preserving human life, if only as
192 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
the result of her age-long experiences. That
primitive maternal instinct, which has always
been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture,
will doubtless promptly grapple with certain
crimes connected with the white slave traffic;
women with political power would not brook
that men should live upon the wages of captured
victims, should openly hire youths to ruin and
debase young girls, should be permitted to trans-
mit poison to unborn children. Life is full of
hidden remedial powers which society has not
yet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste
more flagrant than in the matured deductions
and judgments of the women, who are constantly
forced to share the social injustices which they
have no recognized power to alter. If political
rights were once given to women, if the situation
were theirs to deal with as a matter of civic
responsibility, one cannot imagine that the exist-
ence of the social evil would remain unchal-
lenged in its semi-legal protection. Those women
who are already possessed of political power have
in many ways registered their conscience in
regard to it. The Norwegian women, for instance,
have guaranteed to every illegitimate child the
AN ANCIENT EVIL 193
right of inheritance to its father's name
property by a law which also provides for the
care of its mother. This is in marked contrast
to the usual treatment of the mother of an illegiti-
mate child, who even when the paternity of her
child is acknowledged receives from the father
but a pitiful sum for its support; moreover^ if
the child dies before birth and the mother con-
ceals this fact, although perfectly guiltless of
its death, she can be sent to jail for a year.
The age of consent is eighteen years in all
of the states in which women have had the
ballot, although in only eight of the others
1: it so high. In the majority of the latter
the age of consent is between fourteen and six-
teen, and in some of them it is as low as ten.
These legal regulations persist hi spite of the
well-known fact that the mass of girls enter a
disreputable life below the age of eighteen. In
equal suffrage states important issues regarding
women and children, whether of the sweat-shop
or the brothel, have always brought out the
women voters hi great numbers.
Certainly enfranchised women would offer
some protection to the white slaves themselves
194 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
who are tolerated and segregated, but who,
because their very existence is illegal, may be
arrested whenever any police captain chooses,
may be brought before a magistrate, fined and
imprisoned. A woman so arrested may be
obliged to answer the most harassing questions
put to her by a city attorney with no other
woman near to protect her from insult. She
may be subjected to the most trying examinations
in the presence of policemen with no matron to
whom to appeal. These things constantly hap-
pen everywhere save in Scandinavian countries,
where juries of women sit upon such cases and
offer the protection of their presence to the
prisoners. Without such protection even an
innocent woman, made to appear a member of
this despised class, receives no consideration. A
girl of fifteen recently acting in a South Chicago
theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who
gradually convinced her that he was respectable.
Walking with him one evening to the door of
her lodging-house, the girl told him of her diffi-
culties and quite innocently accepted money for
the payment of her room rent. The following
morning as she was leaving the house the milkman
AN ANCIENT EVIL 195
net her at the door and asked her for the five
lollars he had given her the night before. When
she said she had used it to pay her debt to the
.andlady, he angrily replied that unless she
"eturned the money at once he would call a
policeman and arrest her on a charge of theft.
Ihe girl, helpless because she had already dis-
posed of the money, was tsJken to court, where,
Tightened and confused, she was unable to give
i convincing account of the interview the night
Before; except for the prompt intervention on
the part of a woman, she would either have been
obliged to put herself in the power of the milkman,
tvho offered to pay her fine, or she would have
aeen sent to the city prison, not because the
proof of her guilt was conclusive, but because her
connection with a cheap theatre and the hour of
the so-called offence had convinced the court
that she belonged to a class of women who are
regarded as no longer entitled to legal protection.
Several years ago in Colorado the disreputable
women of Denver appealed to a large political
club of women against the action of the police
who were forcing them to register under the
threat of arrest in order later to secure their
196 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
votes for a corrupt politician. The disreputable
women, wishing to conceal their real names and
addresses, did not want to be registered, in this
respect at least differing from the lodging-house
men whose venal votes play such an important
part in every municipal election. The women's
political club responded to this appeal, and not
only stopped the coercion, but finally turned out
of office the chief of police responsible for it.
The very fact that the conditions and results
of the social evil lie so far away from the knowl-
edge of good women is largely responsible for
the secrecy and hypocrisy upon which it thrives.
Most good women will probably never consent
to break through their ignorance save under a
sense of duty which has ever been the incentive
to action to which even timid women have
responded. At least a promising beginning
would be made toward a more effective social
control, if the mass of conscientious women were
once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of
local vice conditions was a matter of civic obliga-
tion, if the entire body of conventional women,
simply because they held the franchise, felt con-
strained to inform themselves concerning the
'AN ANCIENT EVIL 197
social evil throughout the cities of America.
Perhaps the most immediate result would be
a change in the attitude toward prostitution
on the part of elected officials, responding to
that of their constituency. Although good and
bad men alike prize chastity in women, and
although good men require it of themselves,
almost all men are convinced that it is impossible
to require it of thousands of their fellow-citizens,
and hence connive at the policy of the officials
who permit commercialized vice to flourish.
As the first organized Women's Rights move-
ment was inaugurated by the women who were
refused seats in the world's Anti-Slavery conven-
tion held hi London in 1840, although they had
been the very pioneers in the organization of the
American Abolitionists, so it is quite possible
that an equally energetic attempt to abolish
white slavery will bring many women into the
Equal Suffrage movement, simply because they
too will discover that without the use of the
ballot they are unable to work effectively for
the eradication of a social wrong.
Women are said to have been historically
indifferent to social injustices, but it may be
198 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
possible that, if they once really comprehend the
actual position of prostitutes the world over,
their sense of justice will at last be freed, and
become forevermore a new force hi the long strug-
gle for social righteousness. The wind of moral
aspiration now dies down and now blows with
unexpected force, urging on the movements of
social destiny; but never do the sails of the ship
of state push forward with such assured progress
as when filled by the mighty hopes of a newly
enfranchised class. Those already responsible
for existing conditions have come to acquiesce
in them, and feel obliged to adduce reasons
explaining the permanence and so-called necessity
of the most evil conditions. On the other hand,
the newly enfranchised view existing conditions
more critically, more as human beings and less
as politicians.
After all, why should the woman voter concur
in the assumption that every large city must
either set aside well-known districts for the ac-
commodation of prostitution, as Chicago does,
or continually permit it to flourish in tenement
and apartment houses, as is done in New York?
Smaller communities and towns throughout the
AN ANCIENT EVIL 199
land are free from at least this semi-legal organi-
zation of it, and why should it be accepted as a
permanent aspect of city life? The valuable
report of the Chicago Vice Commission estimates
that twenty thousand of the men daily respons-
ible for this evil hi Chicago live outside of the
city. They are the men who come from other
towns to Chicago in order to see the sights.
They are supposedly moral at home, where they
are well known and subjected to the constant
control of public opinion. The report goes on
to state that during conventions or "show"
occasions the business of commercialized vice
is enormously increased. The village gossip
with her vituperative tongue after all performs
a valuable function both of castigation and
retribution; but her fellow-townsman, although
quite unconscious of her restraint, coming into
a city hotel often experiences a great sense of
relief which easily rises to a mood of exhilaration.
In addition to this he holds an exaggerated notion
of the wickedness of the city. A visiting country-
man is often shown museums and questionable
sights reserved largely for his patronage, just as
tourists are conducted to lurid Parisian revels
200 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
and indecencies sustained primarily for their
horrified contemplation. Such a situation would
indicate that, because control is much more
difficult in a large city than in a small town,
the city deliberately provides for its own inability
in this direction.
During a recent military encampment in
Chicago large numbers of young girls were
attracted to it by that glamour which always
surrounds the soldier. On the complaint of
several mothers, investigators discovered that
the girls were there without the knowledge of
their parents, some of them having literally
climbed out of windows after their parents had
supposed them asleep. A thorough investigation
disclosed not only an enormous increase of
business in the restricted districts, but the down-
fall of many young girls who had hitherto been
thoroughly respectable and able to resist the
ordinary temptations of city life, but who had
completely lost their heads over the glitter of a
military camp. One young girl was seen by an
investigator in the late evening hurrying away
from the camp. She was so absorbed in her
trouble and so blinded by her tears that she fairly
AN ANCIENT EVIL 201
ran against him and he heard her praying, as
she frantically clutched the beads around her
neck, "Oh, Mother of God, what have I done!
What have I done!" The Chicago encampment
was finally brought under control through the
combined efforts of the park commissioners,
the city police, and the military authorities,
but not without a certain resentment from the
last toward "civilian interference." Such an en-
campment may be regarded as an historic sur-
vival representing the standing armies sustained
hi Europe since the days of the Roman Empire.
These large bodies of men, deprived of domestic
life, have always afforded centres in which con-
tempt for the chastity of women has been fostered.
The older centres of militarism have established
prophylactic measures designed to protect the
health of the soldiers, but evince no concern for
the fate of the ruined women. It is a matter of
recent history that Josephine Butler and the
men and women associated with her, subjected
themselves to unspeakable insult for eight years
before they finally induced the English Parlia-
ment to repeal the infamous Contagious Disease
Acts relating to the garrison towns of Great
202 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
Britain, through which the government itself
not only permitted vice, but legally provided
for it within certain specified limits.
The primary difficulty of military life lies in
the withdrawal of large numbers of men from
normal family life, and hence from the domestic
restraints and social checks which are operative
upon the mass of human beings. The great
peace propagandas have emphasized the unjusti-
fiable expense involved in the maintenance of
the standing armies of Europe, the social waste
in the withdrawal of thousands of young men
from industrial, commercial and professional pur-
suits into the barren negative life of the bar-
racks. They might go further and lay stress upon
the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction
of romantic love, the perversion of the longing
for wife and child. The very stability and re-
finement of the social order depend upon the
preservation of these basic emotions.
Social customs are instituted so slowly and
even imperceptibly, so far as the conforming
individual is concerned, that the mass of men
submit to control in spite of themselves, and it
is therefore always difficult to determine how
203
far the average upright living is the result of
external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn.
This is especially true of domestic life. Even
the sordid marriages in which the senses have
forestalled the heart almost always end in some
form of family affection. The young couple who
may have been brought together in marriage
upon the most primitive plane, after twenty
years of hard work in meagre, unlovely surround-
ings, in spite of stupidity and many mistakes,
in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will
have unfolded lives of unassuming affection
and family devotion to a group of children.
They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation
which falls to the lot of the majority of men
and women, with its high rewards and painful
sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints
of family life are denied to the soldier. A some-
what similar situation is found in every large
construction camp, and in the crowded city
tenements occupied by thousands of immi-
grant men who have preceded their families to
America.
In the light of the history of prostitution in
relation to militarism, nothing could be more
204 A NE W CONSCIENCE AND
absurd than the familiar statement that virtuous
women could not safely walk the streets unless
opportunity for secret vice were offered to the
men of the city. It is precisely the men who have
not submitted to self-control who are dangerous
and they only, as the court records themselves
make clear.
In addition to the large social movements for the
betterment of Public Health, for the establishment
of Temperance, for the promotion of Equal Suf-
frage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitra-
tion is the world-wide organization and active prop-
aganda of International Socialism. It has always
included the abolition of this ancient evil hi its
program of social reconstruction, and since the
publication of Bebel's great book, nearly thirty
years ago, the leaders of the Socialist party have
never ceased to discuss the economics of prosti-
tution with its psychological and moral resultants.
The Socialists contend that commercialized vice
is fundamentally a question of poverty, a by-
product of despair, which will disappear only
with the abolition of poverty itself; that it
persists not primarily from inherent weakness
in human nature, but is a vice arising from a
AN ANCIENT EVI 205
defective organization of social life; that with a
reorganization of society, at least all of prosti-
tution which is founded upon the hunger of the
victims and upon the profits of the traffickers,
will disappear.
Whether we are Socialists or not, we will all
admit that every level of culture breeds its own
particular brand of vice and uncovers new
weaknesses as well as new nobilities in human
nature; that a given social development such,
for instance as the conditions of life for thousands
of young people in crowded city quarters may
produce such temptations and present such
snares to virtue, that average human nature
cannot withstand them.
The very fact that the existence of the social
evil is semi-legal in large cities is an admission
that our individual morality is so uncertain
that it breaks down when social control is with-
drawn and the opportunity for secrecy is offered.
The situation indicates either that the best con-
science of the community fails to translate itself
into civic action or that our cities are too large
to be civilized in a social sense. These difficulties
have been enormously augmented during the
206 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
past century so marked by the rapid growth of
cities, because the great principle of liberty has
been translated not only into the unlovely doc-
trine of commercial competition, but also has
fostered in many men the belief that personal
development necessitates a rebellion against
existing social laws. To the opportunity for
secrecy which the modern city offers, such men
are able to add a high-sounding justification
for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for
our moral progress, the specious and illegitimate
theories of freedom are constantly being chal-
lenged, and a new form of social control is slowly
establishing itself on the principle, so widespread
in contemporary government, that the state
has a responsibility for conditions which deter-
mine the health and welfare of its own members;
that it is in the interest of social progress itself
that hard-won liberties must be restrained by
the demonstrable needs of society.
This new and more vigorous development of
social control, while reflecting something of that
wholesome fear of public opinion which the
intimacies of a small community maintain, is
much more closely allied to the old communal
AN ANCIENT EVIL 207
restraints and mutual protections to which the
human will first yielded. Although this new
control is based upon the voluntary co-operation
of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the
forced submission that characterized the older
forms of social restraint, nevertheless in predict-
ing the establishment of adequate social control
over the instinct which the modern novelists so
often describe as "uncontrollable," there is a
certain sanction in this old and well-nigh forgotten
history.
The most superficial student of social cus-
toms quickly discovers the practically unlim-
ited extent to which public opinion has always
regulated marriage. If the traditions of one
tribe were endogamous, all the men dutifully
married within it; but if the customs of another
decreed that wives must be secured by capture
or purchase, all the men of that tribe fared forth
in order to secure their mates. From the primi-
tive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange
for his sisters or daughters, and never dreams of
obtaining them in any other way, to the sophisti-
cated young Frenchman, who without objection
marries the bride his careful parents select for
208 A! NEW CONSCIENCE AND
him; from the ancient Hebrew, who contentedly
married the widow of his deceased brother be-
cause it was according to the law, to the modern
Englishman who refused to marry his deceased
wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire
pathway of the so-called uncontrollable instinct
has been gradually confined between carefully
clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house
of conventional domesticity. Men have fallen
in love with their cousins or declined to fall in
love with them, very much as custom declared
marriages between cousins to be desirable or
undesirable, as they formerly married their sis-
ters and later absolutely ceased to desire to
marry them. In fact, regulation of this great
primitive instinct goes back of the human race
itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are
strictly monogamous, and many species of birds
are faithful to one mate, season after season. Ac-
cording to the great authority, Forel, prostitution
never became established among primitive peo-
ples. Even savage tribes designated the age
at which their young men were permitted to
assume paternity because feeble children were a
drag upon their communal resources. As primi-
AN ANCIENT EVIL
tive control lessened with the disappearance of
tribal organization and later of the patriarchal
family, a social control, not less binding, was
slowly established, until throughout the centuries,
hi spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass
of men have lived according to the dictates of
the church, the legal requirements of the state,
and the surveillance of the community, if only
because they feared social ostracism. It is
easy, however, to forget these men and their
prosaic virtues because history has so long busied
herself hi recording court amours and the gentle
dalliances of the overlord.
The great primitive instinct, so responsive to
social control as to be almost an example of
social docility, has apparently broken with all
the restraints and decencies under two condi-
tions: first and second, when the individual felt
that he was above social control and when the
individual has had an opportunity to hide his
daily living. Prostitution upon a commercial
basis hi a measure embraces the two conditions,
for it becomes possible only in a society so highly
complicated that social control may be success-
fully evaded and the individual thus feels supe-
210 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
rior to it. When a city is so large that it is ex-
tremely difficult to fix individual responsibility,
that which for centuries was considered the
luxury of the king comes within the reach of
every office-boy, and that lack of community
control which belonged only to the overlord who
felt himself superior to the standards of the
people, may be seized upon by any city dweller
who can evade his acquaintances. Against
such moral aggression, the old types of social
control are powerless.
Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions
which make moral isolation possible, constantly
tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the
mutual dependences of city life and its daily
necessities. The city itself socializes the very
instruments that constitute the apparatus of
social control Law, Publicity, Literature, Edu-
cation and Religion. Through their socialization,
the desirability of chastity, which has hitherto
been a matter of individual opinion and decision,
comes to be regarded, not only as a personal
virtue indispensable in women and desirable
in men, but as a great basic requirement which
society has learned to demand because it has
AN ANCIENT EVIL 211
been proven necessary for human welfare.
To the individual restraints is added the con-
viction of social responsibility and the whole
determination of chastity is reinforced by social
sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is
already obviously taking place in regard to the
chastity of women. Formerly all that the best
woman possessed was a negative chastity which
had been carefully guarded by her parents and
duennas. The chastity of the modern woman
of self-directed activity and of a varied circle
of interests, which gives her an acquaintance
with many men as well as women, has therefore
a new value and importance in the establishment
of social standards. There was a certain basis
for the belief that if a woman lost her personal
virtue, she lost all; when she had no activity
outside of domestic life, the situation itself
afforded a foundation for the belief that a man '
might claim praise for his public career even when
his domestic life was corrupt. As woman, however,
fulfills her civic obligations while still guarding
her chastity, she will be in position as never be-
fore to uphold the "single standard," demanding
that men shall add the personal virtues to their
212 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
performance of public duties. Women may at
last force men to do away with the traditional
use of a public record as a cloak for a
wretched private character, because society will
never permit a woman to make such excuses for
herself.
Every movement therefore which tends to
increase woman's share of civic responsibility
undoubtedly forecasts the time when a social
control will be extended over men, similar to
the historic one so long established over women.
As that modern relationship between men and
women, which the Romans called "virtue between
equals" increases, while it will continue to make
women freer and nobler, less timid of reputation
and more human, will also inevitably modify
the standards of men.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that this
new freedom from domestic and community
control, with the opportunity for escaping obser-
vation which the city affords, is often utilized
unworthily by women. The report of the Chi-
cago vice commission tells of numerous girls
living in small cities and country towns, who
come to Chicago from time to time under arrange-
AN ANCIENT EVIL 13
ments made with the landlady of a seemingly re-
spectable apartment. They remain long enough
to earn money for a spring or fall wardrobe
and return to their home towns, where their
acquaintances are quite without suspicion of
the methods they have employed to secure the
much-admired costumes brought from the city.
Often an unattached country girl, who has come
to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a
vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint.
Such a girl, when living in a smaller community,
realized that good behavior was a protective
measure and that any suspicion of immorality
would quickly ruin her social standing; but
when removed from such surveillance, she hopes
to be able to pass from her regular life to an.
irregular one and back again before the fact,
has been noted, quite as many young men are,
trying to do.
Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to
temptation of this sort than the one who worka
in an office where she may be the sole woman
employed and where the relation to her employer
and to her fellow-clerks is almost on a social
basis. Many office girls have taken "business
214 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
courses" in their native towns and have come
to the city in search of the large salaries which
have no parallels at home. Such a position is
not only new to the individual, but it is so recent
an outcome of modern business methods, that
it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl
is without the wholesome social restraint afforded
by the companionship of other working-women
and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger.
An investigation disclosed that a startling number
of Chicago girls had found their positions through
advertisements and had no means of ascertaining
the respectability of their employers. In addi-
tion to this, the girls who seek such positions are
sometimes vain and pretentious, and will take
any sort of office work because it seems to them
"more ladylike." A girl of this sort came to
Chicago from the country three years ago at
the age of seventeen and secured a position as a
stenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She
was pretty and attractive, and in her desire to
see more of the wonderful city to which she had
come, she accepted many invitations to din-
ners and theatres from a younger member of the
firm. The other girls hi the office, representing
AN ANCIENT EVIL 215
the more capable type of business women, among
whom a careful code of conduct is developing,
although at present it is often manifested only
by the social ostracism of the one of their num-
ber who has broken the conventions, protested
against her conduct, first to the girl and then to
the head of the office. The usual story developed
rapidly, the girl lost her position, her brother-in-
law, learning the cause, refused her a home and
she became absolutely dependent upon the man.
As their relations became notorious, he at length
was requested to withdraw from the firm. When
brought to my knowledge she had already been
deserted for a year. The only people she had
known during that time were those in the dis-
reputable hotel in which she had been living
when her lover disappeared, and it was through
their mistaken kindness in making an opportu-
nity for her in the only life with which they were
familar, that she had been drawn into the worst
vice of the city.
She was but one of thousands of young women
whose undisciplined minds are fatally assailed
by the subtleties and sophistries of city life,
and who have lost their bearings in the midst of
216 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
a multitude of new imaginative impressions.
It is hard for a girl, thrilled by the mere propin-
quity of city excitements and eager to share
them, to keep to the gray and monotonous path
of regular work. Almost every such girl of the
hundreds who have come to grief, "begins" by
accepting invitations to dinners and places of
amusement. She is always impressed with the
ease for concealment which the city affords,
although at the same time vaguely resentful
that it is so indifferent to her individual ex-
istence. It is impossible to estimate the amount
of clandestine prostitution which the modern city
contains, but there is no doubt that the growth
of the social evil at the present moment, lies in
this direction. Another of its less sinister de-
velopments is perhaps a contemporary mani-
festation of that break, long considered neces-
sary, between established morality and artistic
freedom represented by the hetaira hi Athens,
the gifted actress hi Paris, the geisha hi
Japan. Insofar as such women have been
treated as independent human beings and
prized for their mental and social charm,
even although they are on a commercial basis,
AN ANCIENT EVIL 217
it makes for a humanization of this most
sordid business. Such open manifestations of
prostitution hasten social control, because pub-
licity has ever been the first step toward
community understanding and discipline.
Doubtless the attitude toward the victims of
commercialized vice will be modified by many
reactions upon the public consciousness, through
a thousand manifestations of the great democratic
movement which is developing all about us.
Certainly we are safe in predicting that when
the solidarity of human interest is actually
realized, it will become unthinkable that one
class of human beings should be sacrificed to the
supposed needs of another; when the rights of
human life have successfully asserted themselves
in contrast to the rights of property, it will
become impossible to sell the young and heedless
into degradation. An age marked by its vigorous
protests against slavery and class tyranny, will
not continue to ignore the multitudes of women
who are held in literal bondage; nor will an age
characterized by a new tenderness for the losers
in life's race, always persist in denying forgiveness
to the woman who has lost all. A voice which
218 A NEW CONSCIENCE AND
has come across the centuries, filled with pity
for her who has "sinned much," must at last
be joined by the forgiving voices of others, to
whom it has been revealed that it is hardness
of heart which has ever thwarted the divine
purposes of religion. A generation which has
gone through so many successive revolts against
commercial aggression and lawlessness, will at
last lead one more revolt on behalf of the young
girls who are the victims of the basest and vilest
commercialism. As that consciousness of human
suffering, which already hangs like a black cloud
over thousands of our more sensitive contempo-
raries, increases in poignancy, it must finally
include the women who for so many generations
have received neither pity nor consideration;
as the sense of justice fast widens to encircle
all human relations, it must at length reach the
women who have so long been judged without a
hearing.
In that vast and checkered undertaking of its
own moralization to which the human race is
committed, it must constantly free itself from the
survivals and savage infections of the primitive
life from which it started. Now one and then
AN ANCIENT EVIL 219
another of the ancient wrongs and uncouth
customs which have been so long familiar as to
seem inevitable, rise to the moral consciousness
of a passing generation; first for uneasy contem-
plation and then for gallant correction.
May America bear a valiant part in this inter-
national crusade of the compassionate, enlist-
ing under its banner not only those sensitive
to the wrongs of others, but those conscious of
the destruction of the race itself, who form the
standing army of humanity's self-pity, which is
becoming slowly mobilized for a new conquest!
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