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 THE STORY OF THE "WHITE SLAVE TRADE' 
 
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 E. NORINE LAW.
 
 THE SHAME OF A 
 GREAT NATION 
 
 The Story of the ''White Slave Trade" 
 
 BY 
 
 E. NORINE LAW 
 
 harrisburg, pa. 
 
 United Evangelical Publishing House 
 
 1909 
 
 Send all orders to E. N. Law, 37 Hague Ave., Detroit, Mich.
 
 Copyright 1909 
 
 BY 
 
 E. NORINE LAW
 
 SRLF 
 
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 HQ 
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 PREFACE 
 
 No apology is needed for this book. We are living in peril- 
 ous times. This great nation of ours, bought with the price 
 of blood, and saved again by the same sacrifice, is in danger 
 of departing from the principles of our fathers. 
 
 The truths we write about will be told in a very humble 
 manner but we trust the people will read, think and act, 
 before it shall be too late to stop the tide of immorality and 
 crime that bid fair to sweep us to destruction unless soon 
 checked. 
 
 It is a warning, a plea from one whose heart and soul burn 
 with a desire to bind up the broken-hearted and save the 
 lost ones from eternal death. Let every reader pray that we 
 may return to God before it is too late. Let us be a Nation 
 whose God is the Lord: else we cannot claim His promises 
 and secure His everlasting blessings. 
 
 Yours for the uplift of the people, 
 
 E. Norine Law.
 
 The Shame of a Great Nation 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The Strength op National Life. 
 
 In his first message to the United States Congress, President 
 Roosevelt said: "There are two pillars upon which every 
 nation must rest, namely, Christianity and Education." All 
 good people agree with this declaration, and many of us are 
 of the conviction that we should practice it in our govern- 
 mental affairs. God must be the ruler of our temporal affairs, 
 if we are to have Him guide us in the eternal. Jesus Christ 
 must be the Saviour of the state as well as of the individual, 
 or there is no authority for righteousness or deliverance from 
 evils which afflict the people and take them to physical, mental 
 and moral decay. 
 
 One-half of the people cannot allow the other half to 
 remain in ignorance, and not be held back by this hindering 
 influence. If one-half the Nation is left in ignorance, it will 
 hang like a millstone of destruction around the necks of those 
 who strive for peace and safety. 
 
 The same principle holds good in a moral sense. If one- 
 half the people live in vice and immorality, increasing the 
 population with offspring possessed of the same low standard 
 of purity, the whole nation will become morally diseased, and 
 degeneracy must follow as an unchangeable reasult. 
 
 It is not the industrial value, the commercial power, or
 
 10 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 military strength that really saves and keeps the people from 
 harm and brings success, but the honesty, piety and virtue 
 of her people. 
 
 Immorality not only clouds and destroys the intellect, It 
 brings physical disease and decay, as well as spiritual death. 
 
 The conditions of social vice and sexual impurity in exist- 
 ence to-day in the United States are horrible, pitiable and 
 alarming. We must try to cause an arrest of thought and 
 teach a higher grade of ideals or no one can foresee what the 
 awful results will be. Indeed, the sickening tales of impurity 
 and sexual vice that can be told are enough to frighten every 
 person really interested in saving the people from destruction. 
 Not only the present but the future welfare of our people 
 are at stake. 
 
 We must begin to "cry aloud and spare not." The 
 tendency of the people always has been to refuse to be 
 alarmed until the danger is at our doors. To allow the enemy 
 to go unchecked until it is ready to swallow us up. We 
 tolerate wrong and become profit-sharing partners and legal 
 protectors of crime and then shudder when God lays His 
 hand upon us and says, "Thus far shalt thou go and no 
 farther," and demands compensation to the injured, robbed 
 and murdered victims of the crime we have encouraged. 
 
 The Government that promised we should all have an equal 
 chance to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, undertakes 
 to gain revenue by selling to an unprincipled class of people 
 the special privilege of looting the homes and lives of the inno- 
 cent as well as of the willing victims of sin ; forgetting that in 
 the Holy Word is written ' ' woe unto them that take reward to 
 slay the innocent and just person." 
 
 "Woe unto them that buildeth a town with blood and 
 establisheth a city by iniquity."
 
 The Strength of National Life. 11 
 
 1 ' Woe unto them that justify the wicked for reward ! Woe 
 unto him that giveth his neighbor drink." 
 
 Perhaps they have not considered well these words of 1 Cor. 
 8th chapter: "But take heed, lest by any means this liberty 
 of yours becomes a stumbling-block to them that are weak. 
 
 "For if any man see thee which hast knowledge (the man of 
 influence) sit at meat in the idol's temple (do those things 
 which are wrong and forbidden), shall not the conscience of 
 him which is weak (the one not so strong and able to resist) 
 be emboldened to eat those things which are offered in sacri- 
 fice unto idols; and through thy knowledge (your influence, 
 teaching and example) shall the weak brother perish for 
 whom Christ died. But when ye sin so against the brethren 
 and wound their weak conscience (cause them to go astray), 
 ye sin against Christ." 
 
 "Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat 
 no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to 
 offend ; ' ' which, being interpreted means that if anything we 
 are doing, even though we may be able to keep self-control 
 all our lives will cause us to put a stumbling-block in our 
 weaker brother's way, whereby he will commit sin and go to 
 ruin and death, we are expected, for the sake of the weaker 
 brother to deny ourselves the indulgence. 
 
 We must remember that it makes a great difference as to 
 how we are born and brought up in life. Some of us had the 
 good fortune to be born of Christian parents, who from the 
 time of our conception, kept us surrounded with right 
 thoughts and teaching, who trained us in the way we 
 should go and kept us living in an atmosphere of Christian 
 influence and pure teaching. We came from clean bodies, 
 pure souls, and were not allowed to "just grow up" like 
 Topsy, in the wilds of the street and vice of the alley.
 
 12 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Compare these conditions with the lives of millions of chil- 
 dren born every year of diseased bodies, depraved habits, 
 dwarfed intellects. They see nothing but filth. They hear 
 nothing but oaths and the vilest of language. They play 
 around doors that look into saloons and brothels. The drunk- 
 ard and harlot are in the majority of the people they see, 
 until they become old enough to push out into the world, they 
 do not know that there is a spot different from that where 
 they have lived. 
 
 If we are fair-minded in our decisions, we cannot help but 
 know those born under these terrible conditions of impurity 
 cannot be well equipped for the battles of life. They will not 
 have the same physical and mental strength to resist the evil. 
 They will not have the same mental power to define right and 
 wrong. 
 
 For this reason God said ''The strong are to help bear the 
 infirmities of the weak," and made us "Our brother's 
 keeper." 
 
 It is certainly our duty to protect the weak against the 
 strong. To abstain from things that to us might not work 
 any harm, for the sake of helping others to abstain who could 
 not practice the same self-control, and would, therefore, be 
 property and vested rights. "We are all entitled to the chance 
 to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that our fore- 
 fathers bought for us with their sacrifice and blood, whether 
 we be a majority or minority. A government fails in her 
 mission entirely and violates her agreement, if she allows the 
 majority to rob and oppress the minority. One of the most 
 important purposes of government is to protect the minority, 
 if necessary, from the crimes of the majority. 
 
 There are some of us who still cling to our first principles, 
 and are determined, with the help of God, to restore to the
 
 The Strength of National Life. 13 
 
 people that which has been stolen by corrupt, thieving, graft- 
 ing politicians in the name of the Government. 
 
 We are fully aware of the fact that many will resent the 
 statement that we are the worst fooled people on earth to-day. 
 We talk about being a "government of the people, for the 
 people and by the people, ' ' when the facts prove we are a gov- 
 ernment of the politicians, for the politicians, by the poli- 
 ticians, and they are a government of the trusts, for the 
 trusts, and by the trusts. No wonder the crack in old Liberty 
 Bell continues to widen and fears are entertained for its 
 being able to hold together. Call it anarchy, treason, or 
 whatever you wish. It is true. Men used to be sent to Con- 
 gress and the Legislature because they had brains and virtue. 
 Now they can go if they have money enough with which to 
 buy their way, and are known to be easy tools for the un- 
 principled men to handle who care for nothing but money 
 and power; and who are ready to sell us out body and soul. 
 They will walk over broken hearts, sobbing women and chil- 
 dren, robbed of home, husband, father and son, to accomplish 
 their purpose and secure the enactment of laws that will give 
 them a legal right to prey upon us like vultures, for their own 
 personal profit. 
 
 The most unjust and horrible thing of all is, that the inno- 
 cent, helpless children, who are brought into this world by 
 no will or petition of their own, suffer most of all. 
 
 "How long! How long, O, cruel Nation, 
 
 Will you seek to move the world on a child 's heart, 
 And crush beneath your feet its palpitation; 
 
 And stride onward to your goal amid its mart. 
 But that blood splasheth upward, O, Gold heaper, 
 
 And its purple shows your path. 
 For a child's moan in the silence curses deeper 
 
 That a strong man's in its wrath."
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 The Words op Great Men. 
 
 George Washington, in his inaugural address, said: "What- 
 ever measure have a tendency to dissolve the Union, or con- 
 tribute to violate or lesson sovereign authority, ought to be 
 considered as hostile to the Liberty and Independence of 
 America, and the authors of them treated accordingly. 
 
 Unless we can be enabled by the concurrence of the states 
 to participate of the fruits of the revolution, or enjoy the 
 essential benefits of civil society, under a form of government 
 so free and uncorrupted, so happily guarded against the 
 danger of oppression, it will be a subject for regret that 
 so much blood has been shed, and so much treasure lavished 
 for no purpose. That so much suffering has been encountered 
 without compensation ; and so many sacrifices have been made 
 in vain. 
 
 Where is the man to be found who wishes to remain indebted 
 for the defense of his own person and property at the exer- 
 tions, the bravery, the blood of others, without one generous 
 effort to pay the debt of honor and gratitude. 
 
 In what part of the continent shall we find any man, or 
 body of men who would not blush to stand up and pro- 
 pose measures purposely calculated to rob his fellow of his 
 due ; the soldier of his stipend ? Were it possible that such a 
 flagrant instance of injustice could ever happen, would it 
 not excite the general indignation and tend to bring down 
 uopn the authors of such measures the aggravated vengeance 
 of Heaven?" 
 
 14
 
 The Words of Great Men. 15 
 
 There is no denying the fact that we are living in the 
 shameful time of just such measures. 
 
 There -have been many measures enacted during the past 
 twenty-five years which "lessen sovereign authority." Meas- 
 ures which were intended to rob the people of liberty and 
 independence. There is no liberty of speech and freedom 
 of ballot any more. You may talk, if you will talk to suit 
 the controlling politicians. You may vote if you will march 
 up to the tune of the party lash ; but if not, you are told you 
 will lose your job and be boycotted in business. 
 
 The country to-day is full of "Penroses" and "Cannons," 
 liquor dealers, bums, criminals and political traders, who are 
 not only willing but glad to be indebted for the defense of 
 their person and prosperity, to the exertions, expense, bravery 
 and, if necessary, the blood of others. 
 
 They not only fail to make any effort to pay back the debt, 
 but they continue to plunder and oppress with the tyranny 
 of a Czar of a heathen people. 
 
 Without a tinge or a blush of shame, they propose measures, 
 (and see to it that they are put through), which are purposely 
 calculated to rob their fellows of their due. It ought to 
 excite the general indignation of the people and bring down 
 upon these political hawks the vengeance of the people. But 
 pity is, 'tis true, the people seem to love to have it so. 
 
 God may not always choose to have it so. The cries of the 
 oppressed are going up to the throne of God, and who knows 
 but that He shall come, unexpectedly and terribly one of 
 these days, as He has come to nations and individuals in 
 other times. 
 
 One of our rich men says he is going to devote his money 
 and time to avert a revolution. It is not fanatical to say 
 that the spirit of discontent and resentment is on the increase,
 
 16 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 and unless a peaceable way can be found soon to right some 
 of these wrongs, more serious results may follow. 
 
 The conditions of oppression to-day are equal to those 
 which caused our fathers to demand justice. Whether we 
 will demand the yoke to be lifted, or allow it to go on until the 
 wound will never heal, is a question the people must soon de- 
 cide. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, the greatest President this country has 
 ever known, said in his inaugural address, "If by the mere 
 force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of 
 any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral 
 sense, justify revolution. It certainly would if such right 
 were a vital one." 
 
 This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people 
 who inhabit it. (We might add, who pay the bills.) 
 
 You have no oath in heaven to destroy the Government, 
 while I have a most solemn one to preserve and defend it. 
 
 ' ' Woe unto the world because of offenses ; for it must needs 
 be that offenses come, but woe unto that man by whom the 
 offense cometh." 
 
 If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those 
 offenses which in the Providence of God must needs have 
 come, but which, having continued through His appointed 
 time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to bo f h North 
 and South this terrible war as the woe due them by whom 
 the offense cometh, shall we deem them any departure from 
 those divine attributes which the believers in a living God 
 always ascribe to Him? 
 
 Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty 
 scourge of war may speedily pass away. If God wills that it 
 continues, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two 
 hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and
 
 The Words of Great Men. 17 
 
 until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid 
 back with blood drawn by the sword, yet shall we still say 
 that God is merciful and just, and righteous altogether. It 
 is well for us to carefully consider these unchangeable rules 
 of God of the universe, for He is the same yesterday, to-day 
 and forever; and "what is written, is written." 
 
 The money Judas took for selling our Lord into the hands 
 of His enemies, was no more blood money than that which 
 is derived in revenue from the liquor business, and other 
 business deals with unprincipled men whereby the people 
 are robbed by unjust demands of taxation. 
 
 If it be true that God hears the widow's cry, the sob of 
 the children tortured, robbed and killed by the merciless greed 
 of dwarfed, miserly men, and a Nation that sells them into 
 bondage, and leaves them to be preyed upon by these vultures 
 in human form, then it must be that some day He will come 
 in His wrath to drive the money changers out of the temple 
 of the world, and set the captives of their greed and avarice 
 free. 
 
 We shudder sometimes when we think of how God may de- 
 mand that we pay back all the money gained in revenue 
 from the liquor traffic, every dollar of it representing sorrow, 
 misery and woe. Desolate, destitute homes, broken hearts 
 and all the unspeakable horrors that follow in the track of 
 the serpent of the ' ' still. ' ' We wonder sometimes how all the 
 tears of the broken-hearted women and children are to be 
 paid back. If it be by some terrible scourge, or a visitation 
 of His wrath, that shall sweep away every dollar earned 
 by the Government by this traffic in the bodies and 
 souls of her enslaved people ; if it pleases God to demand that 
 all the tears shed by the innocent and helpless victims shall 
 be paid back by the blood of the dear ones of those who made
 
 18 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 it possible for this most horrible of all slave trades to exist ; 
 yet we will turn our faces toward Heaven and say, "God is 
 merciful and just and righteous altogether.'' 
 
 It will be our fault and ours only, if some terrible judgment 
 must be sent upon us to make us see that this oppression 
 has lived beyond God's time of endurance. 
 
 These convictions are not the result of the wild hallucina- 
 tions of a fanatical mind, but upon the written word of God. 
 Let us not refuse to believe His word and rush on to sure 
 destruction.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Inconsistency of the Government. 
 
 William E. Gladstone, that great English statesman, said: 
 " It is the duty of every government to make it as easy as pos- 
 sible for her people to do right and as difficult a spossible 
 for them to do wrong." 
 
 Certainly no other policy is becoming to a nation pretend- 
 ing to be civilized and Christianized. 
 
 Under the present system of licensing the liquor traffic, it 
 makes it as easy as possible for men to do wrong and as diffi- 
 cult as possible for them to do right. 
 
 The evil is encouraged and strengthened instead of being 
 checked and weakened. Men are taught that it is a necessary 
 evil ; a desirable industry ; a sort of a respectable indulgence. 
 Every enticement that can be thought of, every trick that 
 can be planned, every trap that can be set, is used by these 
 unprincipled men of the liquor trade, to draw the men into 
 their dens of iniquity to spend their hard-earned money 
 for that which destroys soul and body, ruins reputation and 
 character and scatters home comforts and blessings. ''They 
 set traps, they catch men." The saloon is the mightiest 
 weapon the devil has for beating souls into his infernal 
 kingdom. Yet, good men believe in it, and vote for it, not 
 realizing that by so doing they become partakers of its fruits. 
 They forget that surely God will hold them responsible for its 
 crimes. The liquor traffic is not the only peril of this Nation, 
 but it is not putting it too strong to say it is the greatest evil in 
 
 19
 
 20 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 our midst, the one deserving above all others our first attention 
 and best endeavors. 
 
 The minute the saloon goes down, that instant many other 
 dens of vice will cease to exist, for there are many of these 
 entirely dependent on the saloon for their life and trade. 
 When the saloon problem is solved, then, and not until that 
 time, will a large number of other vexing questions be settled. 
 We are more and more astonished at the discoveries we make 
 along this line when, with an unprejudiced mind we search 
 for the truth. 
 
 We do not say that all wrong would be made right if the 
 liquor traffic were abolished ; but we do know that the people 
 would be amazed at the decrease of woe, misery and crime 
 which this evil produces. 
 
 It is an oft-repeated statement that ought to be told again, 
 that official reports prove that two-thirds of the inmates of 
 penal institutions and almshouses are there, directly or in- 
 directly, through drink. 
 
 For twenty-eight years the writer has been traveling all 
 over the United States and in other countries. She always 
 visits the prisons and jails, reform schools and almshouses, 
 homes for the feeble-minded and other dependents. There 
 has never been a solitary exception to the rule, that drink, 
 directly or indirectly, sent the victims to these institutions, 
 the expense of which is met by the taxpayers, who are so 
 deluded as to believe that the liquor traffic is a financial benefit 
 to the taxpayer. Facts prove continually that the saloon is 
 not the tax saver, but the tax maker. If the expense charged 
 up to the people for the maintenance of all these houses of 
 refuge and punishment for the victims of the saloon were to 
 be cut out, it would take away an avalanche of taxation. No 
 one can disprove this statement, and yet men go blindly on
 
 Inconsistency of the Government. 21 
 
 believing the liquor business to be a financial benefit and 
 gasp for breath when they say, "Yes, but if you abolish the 
 liquor business, what will we do for revenue ? ' ' 
 
 The Government goes on protecting bonded warehouses, and 
 pays heavily for the privilege. 
 
 Truly we need to pray, ' ' Open thou our eyes that we may 
 see, and our ears that we may hear, and our minds, that we 
 may heed." 
 
 The Government thinks she is deriving revenue from the 
 business, when the truth is, she is paying vast sums of money 
 that ought to go to legitimate sources, to protect an industry 
 that long ago should have been denounced and prohibited 
 as a "Legalized Outlaw." 
 
 She gets one dollar for granting a special privilege for a 
 criminal business, then pays twenty to take care of the 
 wrecks of its trade, and teaches her people to believe that 
 her greatest source of income would be taken away if the evil 
 were abolished. 
 
 Never in the history of the world were a people more de- 
 ceived by cunning teachings of evil doers. 
 
 Although the Government promised by her declaration of 
 principles to do her best to remove evil from the pathway 
 of the people, she not only permits and protects it, but hinders 
 states and municipalities from exercising their vested rights 
 to destroy the monster within their own boundaries. 
 
 Under the head of "How the United States Government 
 Protects the Liquor Traffic," Mr. Finley C. Hendrickson says: 
 
 ' ' No Prohibition State or ' dry ' area can project its govern- 
 mental policy upon license territory. But license states and 
 'wet' territory are permitted, through the powers delegated 
 to the Federal Government, to annul the laws of the Prohi-
 
 22 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 bition States and 'dry' areas. This is done in three direct 
 ways: 
 
 First. — By Congress permitting the drink traffic the rights 
 of inter-state commerce to break down the prohibitory law 
 through inter-state liquor shipments. As the law and practice 
 now stand, all of the forty -six states might adopt state pro- 
 hibitory laws, but the liquor interests, concentrating in the 
 District of Columbia alone, for instance, could virtually annul 
 the internal policies of all the states through the shipment of 
 inter-state liquors to every point in them, limited only in 
 this nullification policy by the cost of transportation. 
 
 Second. — By permitting traffic, outlawed in the major por- 
 tion of the area of the states, unlimited mail facilities through 
 which the liquor interests direct the lawless how to evade or 
 defy the laws of the respective states. 
 
 Third. — By the rule of the Treasury Department, which 
 sells Federal liquor licenses to all applicants regardless of 
 the fact that many thousands of these applicants are tramp- 
 ling state liquor laws under foot in both license and 'dry' 
 territory. This bad practice is buttressed by the rule of the 
 Treasury Department that internal revenue collectors, hav- 
 ing in their possession the best evidence of lawless intent, 
 must not testify in the state courts against these lawbreakers. 
 
 Nothing could now add greater lustre to constitutional 
 freedom, of which this Republic is the leading exponent, than 
 to demonstrate to both its friends and foes that the American 
 people are capable of suppressing in these states, through the 
 orderly functions of government, this internal evil of the 
 drink traffic. To deny this right and power to civil liberty 
 is but to strengthen the apologists of monarchical government.
 
 Inconsistency of the Government. 23 
 
 who still hope to discover some internal weakness in free 
 
 institutions. 
 
 • • • 
 
 The movement against the drink traffic in America is now 
 pronounced in politieis, in ethics and industrialism. While 
 other nations are moving against it, the agitation in the 
 United States has reached such a point as properly characterizes 
 It as an American movement. In politics, in ethics, industrial- 
 ism, education, medical science, inventions and throughout 
 every avenue of American activity the protest against the 
 drink traffic has gone up. The American people have come 
 to realize that they do not lack stimulation in all the glorious 
 history of the past and the splendid prospect which lies 
 before. They are realizing also that since it is necessary to 
 oppose the drink traffic in the avenues of ethics, education, 
 industry, economics and finance, it is all the more necessary 
 to oppose it politically. Success in this movement therefore 
 means an American victory, and failure would be declared 
 an American defeat. The outcome will make new comparisons 
 between the relative merits of free institutions and mon- 
 archical government. 
 
 Animated by the wider prospect as well as the duty which 
 lies at hand, we renew our political task, declaring now, as 
 heretofore, that minor political considerations, based only on 
 short-lived expediency, divorced from the fundamental prin- 
 ciples of right and justice, shall not draw us from our political 
 course. Our devotion to the cause of civil liberty, which is 
 but the cause of humanity, will continue to be our first po- 
 litical consideration. ' ' 
 
 We are supposed to have a system of state rights and muni- 
 cipal control, but it is entirely nullified and utterly destroyed, 
 so far as the liquor traffic is concerned.
 
 24 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 For many years the people opposed to this murdering and 
 thieving business have been trying to get a law through Con- 
 gress to prevent liquor being shipped into Prohibition States 
 and towns, by giving the state absolute control in the matter 
 and so fixing the law that they may have power to confiscate 
 the illicit goods, and treat the offenders as any other criminal. 
 
 Thus far all petitions and pleadings have failed. It is not 
 at all difficult to guess at the reason why this very great 
 demand should be granted. Some of the Congressmen are 
 openly in the liquor business, while many others hold large 
 stock interests. Men of reason and average intelligence can 
 readily see that the ballot must be applied to send a different 
 class of men to "Washington, if we hope to correct this gross 
 injustice, and the determination of the Government to inter- 
 fere with State rights. 
 
 It is just such unfair, unreasonable, oppressive legislation 
 that kindles in the hearts of the people a spirit of revolution. 
 The people will not always submit to this crushing, unjust 
 treatment. "We need not have a revolution of blood. The 
 only knife or bayonet that need be used is the ballot, applied 
 with cannon power to the politicians who prefer to stand 
 for evil rather than good, and rob the people of their rights, 
 rather than to protect them from the pirates who steal in upon 
 them to plunder their peaceful homes. 
 
 The position of the Government in this matter is the great- 
 est hindrance of all to the better enforcement of the pro- 
 hibitory laws of states and municipalities. 
 
 To grant to the states and cities the right to vote out an 
 evil, yet retain the power as a nation to give federal licenses 
 for it to continue, is like letting the sheep into the shelter 
 to be sheared. It is the most inconsistent, unjust act a nation 
 was ever guilty of.
 
 Inconsistency of the Government. 25 
 
 "When a state or community decide that the saloons are a 
 menace to the ' ' life, liberty and pursuit of happiness ' ' of the 
 people, the Government ought to be made to withdraw federal 
 licenses, which largely nullify all good results. 
 
 On this question, the Government is like many individuals ; 
 namely, right in sentiment, but wrong in practice. She hopes 
 to appease the demands of the people by handing out a half 
 loaf, filled with poison. 
 
 Clinton N. Howard says: We are everywhere for that 
 local Prohibition that gives us the right to vote out the saloon. 
 But do not ask us to stop there. We cannot. We will not. 
 With 10,000,000 Christian voters "marching as to war, with 
 the cross of Jesus going on before," do not ask us to limit 
 our endeavor to a campaign in town and county against an 
 organized enemy that is investing the entire field, stretching 
 its battle line from court-house to capitol and infesting the 
 politics of the nation, from policeman to President. We 
 cannot and we will not consent to the inconsistency of voting 
 out the saloon in the town and county and voting in the saloon 
 power in state and nation. 
 
 We are not opposed, therefore, to Local Option, as a meas- 
 ure to give the people the power to vote a saloon out of their 
 town, or the saloons out of the county, but if any one supposes 
 that method will root up the liquor evil, they are mistaken. 
 
 It is helpful sometimes as a local measure, but will not solve 
 the problem." 
 
 We must keep in mind continually that Local Option not 
 only confers the right to vote the saloon out, but likewise to 
 vote it in. We are very glad to have it do what little it 
 can to vote them out ; but any method which bestows the right 
 of the majority to vote in an evil, is wrong in principle and 
 inadequate as to the solution of the problem.
 
 26 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 The states that have gone from Local Option to Prohibition, 
 have done so because Local Option was tried and found want- 
 ing. Its failure helped to establish state Prohibition rather 
 than its success. 
 
 Another very serious weakness in the plan is, that Local 
 Option does not do away with the manufacture of alcohol, 
 and so long as any law or method stops short of closing the 
 liquor factories, the drunkard shops will remain open. 
 
 We would not deprive any town of the privilege to vote 
 the saloon out, but beg them to consider the fact that if the 
 saloon is an evil and a menace to them, it is to all, and ask 
 them to therefore do as they would like to be done by, and 
 while they cast a ballot for their own deliverance from the 
 curse, put one in to banish it from the state and Nation. As 
 Mr. Howard puts it : "To vote it out of the town and county 
 and then vote it in the state and Nation" is "doing evil that 
 good may come," and largely undoing what little good has 
 been accomplished. 
 
 If it is wrong to have the saloon anywhere, it is wrong 
 everywhere. Its work of destruction is the same in any case, 
 and the attempt to establish two different standards of morals 
 and makes confusion and works harm. 
 
 The Anti-Saloon League claims to have spent an average 
 of three to six hundred thousand dollars a year for the past 
 nineteen years, to secure Local Option laws. If that amount 
 of money had been used to teach State and National Prohibi- 
 tion, we do not believe there would be a brewery or distillery 
 standing to-day, turning out poison for beverage purposes, or 
 a saloon anywhere waiting like a thief in the night for his 
 victims or a pirate at sea to sink a ship that he might plunder 
 the drowning people. 
 
 "While it is claimed that Local Option is used as a stepping
 
 Inconsistency of the Government. 27 
 
 stone to State Prohibition, it is positively true that it is very 
 often urged as a substitute for State Prohibition. It is pretty 
 near time for the people to learn that you cannot climb a hill 
 by walking down, and that to attempt to kill a mad dog by 
 chopping off an inch of his tail at a time is a very slow pro- 
 cess at best. "Why not strike him in the head and be done 
 with it? Is it not possible that the time and money spent 
 to coax people to cut off a pinch of the evil, must be used 
 over and over again until we reach the head ? Why not begin 
 to teach that the surest and quickest way to kill a tree is 
 to cut it down. That the way to stop the stench of a hog 
 pen is to destroy the pen. That we cannot expect to kill the 
 saloon by giving it legal right to exist, or even yet to keep 
 on saying whether it shall or shall not be. 
 
 It is a sort of a teeter board plan. One day you are up, and 
 the next time the saloon is up. A "Ring around the Posy" 
 game. One moment you knock the saloon out, but the next 
 game the saloon knocks you out. 
 
 If we depend upon Local Option to settle the problem, we 
 will be many centuries yet winning the victory. If all half- 
 way measures and compromising plans would be dropped, and 
 everybody turn in to accomplish what we all know must be 
 done in the end, namely, secure State and National Prohibi- 
 tion, we would not only save years of time and barrels of 
 money, but millions of murdered bodies and lost souls. Fewer 
 homes broken up, and mothers' hearts healed that must other- 
 wise break. 
 
 The good men of this country must know, if they stop to 
 reason it out, that we must go to Washington and the state 
 legislatures to kill the liquor traffic. 
 
 Why waste so much time and money on the slow Local 
 Option accommodation, when we can take the Prohibition
 
 28 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 special that makes but one stop between home and Washing- 
 ton, and that is for lunch at the State Capitol. 
 
 We shall be obliged to face the originators of the crime and 
 the protectors of the evil some day. Why lose so many pre- 
 cious hours at way-stations ?
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Liquor Business Unconstitutional. 
 
 Whether we shall ever secure a verdict or not, no one who 
 investigates the situation with intelligence shorn of all preju- 
 dice can fail to conclude that, beyond any question of doubt, 
 the Liquor Traffic is unconstitutional. 
 
 Any business which interferes with the application of our 
 expressed principles as voiced in the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence and contrary to the spirit of the Federal Constitu- 
 tion, cannot be legally right. 
 
 The Government itself is performing an act of treason 
 toward the people to even allow such an evil to exist, and 
 doubly so when it gives it legal sanction and protection. 
 
 We have all been guaranteed a ' ' chance to life, liberty and 
 the pursuit of happiness;" yet an evil is licensed that robs 
 millions every year of all their God-given and Government- 
 promised blessings. 
 
 We are told that "No man has an inherent right to sell 
 liquor without a license, because he does not have an inherent 
 right to engage in the sale of anything that will work harm 
 to his fellow-man. Yet the Government commits the crime 
 of granting a special privilege for the sake of revenue to 
 unprincipled men to steal and kill, and utterly destroy the 
 peace and happiness of the people. 
 
 The Supreme Court says, "The legislative bodies cannot 
 barter away the public morals; the people themselves cannot 
 do so ; much less their servants the legislators. ' ' 
 
 Then, in the face of these declarations, the Government 
 
 29
 
 30 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 and the state legislatures pass laws to license evil-minded men 
 to commit all these crimes against the people, affecting mil- 
 lions of innocent, helpless and unwilling victims of the crime. 
 
 It is also written in Supreme Court documents that, "No 
 man has the inherent right, neither can he buy that right 
 at any price to do that which will barter away the public 
 health, the morals and the safety of the people." Who is so 
 mentally blind that he cannot see, and so stubborn that he 
 will not admit, that when the Government and states grant 
 licenses to engage in this heart-breaking, home-robbing, body- 
 killing, soul-destroying, hell-filling business, every law of de- 
 cency, of fair play and civic honesty has been violated and 
 the greatest act of treachery committed which ever sold a 
 people into bondage. Were it possible to do so, every partici- 
 pant in this crime should be arrested for contempt and se- 
 verely punished. 
 
 We wonder how much longer the people will submit to these 
 oppressions and consent to be robbed of their rightful due. 
 
 There is not the least thing about this infernal business 
 that can recommend it to the toleration of the people. 
 
 It demoralizes those who make it, those who sell it, those 
 who drink it. The legislature that passes the law is demoral- 
 ized. The government that enters into the scheme of crime is 
 demoralized. From the time it issues from the poisonous 
 rooms of the distillery until it empties into the hell of crime, 
 dishonor and death, that it demoralizes everybody who tuoches 
 it. It is liquid crime and treason ; forgery and bribery, torment 
 and plunder the whole way of its slimy tracks. 
 
 Go along the banks of the stream of death and look at the 
 suicides, the insanity, the poverty, the ignorance, the distress, 
 the little children tugging at the faded dresses of weeping 
 mothers; look at the blanched faces of despairing wives
 
 Liquor Business Unconstitutional. 31 
 
 asking for bread ; the men of genius it has wrecked ; the mil- 
 lions struggling with the imaginary serpents it has produced 
 in their minds. Then think of the jails, the almshouses, the 
 asylums, the prisons, the scaff olds upon either hand ; How in 
 the name of common sense, decency and justice can a govern- 
 ment find any excuse for the licensing of such an evil as an 
 industry from which to derive revenue; and how can a sen- 
 sible people be so long-suffering, so blind to the welfare of 
 themselves and fellow-men as to allow it to be? 
 
 We have heard much of late about checking "corporate 
 aggression; individual impositions; plundering of the Ee- 
 public under guise of corporate privileges," but we are told 
 in the same breath that to interfere with a business that does 
 all this and more, is to rob the people of their "Personal 
 liberty" and "Constitutional rights." 
 
 We talk about revealing the corruption of officials in public 
 places and condemning them to the fate of criminals, then 
 pass laws to legalize outlaws, and permit men to commit crime 
 in the name of the Government, if they will only hand over 
 a share of the plunder. 
 
 We read about trying to save cities from further sacking 
 by aldermen, and grant men legal privilege to "sack" the 
 homes, the happiness and lives of the people. 
 
 We grow eloquent when we talk about rescuing states from 
 confiscation at the hands of their own legislators; yet allow 
 men in the liquor business to confiscate the people, legislators 
 and all. We declare the people must be saved from the po- 
 litical thieves who have stolen every accessible thing from 
 a postage stamp to an empire of land; then pass laws to 
 give these pirate liquor dealers right of way to steal everything 
 in sight, from the child in the cradle to Congress. The ancient 
 landmarks of our fathers are being removed by these men
 
 32 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 who get fat and grow rich upon the carcasses of those they 
 have killed and robbed. The posts, stained with blood, set 
 along the highway to guide us to life, liberty and happiness 
 have been torn up by these wolves of greed and avarice, who 
 have been licensed to prowl around all hours of the day and 
 night, seeking whom they may devour; and they are none 
 too good to devour everything that can be swallowed, from 
 the sweet little curly -headed boy and angel-faced girl, to the 
 tottering old man, who just before he dropped into his 
 drunkard's grave, to sink on down into a drunkard's hell, 
 went into a murder shop and dropped his last nickel into 
 the saloon-keeper's money drawer. This story of the reign 
 of "King Alcohol" is the bloodiest one ever written. It 
 could never be told; yet we are asked not only to tolerate 
 the crime, but actually make it a protected industry. 
 
 Yet, dark as the picture is, we believe we are, in the 
 words of that grand, uncompromizing hero, Dr. S. C. Swallow, 
 ' ' Far past the sunrise of that glorious day whose setting shall 
 witness the unfolding of our nation's ensign over a country 
 redeemed from the curse of beverage intoxicants," a nation 
 redeemed from the blot and blight of the greatest slave trade 
 that ever blackened its good name. Then, and not until then, 
 have we a right to sing, 
 
 "And the Star-Spangled Banner, 
 O, long may it wave, 
 O'er the land of the free 
 
 And the home of the brave. ' ' 
 
 Here are some figures for men who supported the liquor 
 traffic in 1908, to think about: 
 
 It is estimated that 580,000 boys in the United States be- 
 came addicted to the use of alcohol in that year. The same
 
 Liquor Business Unconstitutional. 33 
 
 year 200,000 babies were smothered to death by drunken pa- 
 rents. Wallowed over in their beds and killed as animals 
 would kill their offspring; 4,786 wives were murdered by 
 drunken husbands; 7,000 murders were committed by persons 
 under the influence of liquor. There were 6,000 suicides as 
 a result of drink; 1,000,000 deaths were brought about by 
 drunken cab drivers and chauffeurs; 40,000 wives and moth- 
 ers were lost husbands and sons as a result of drink; 85,000 
 persons were made insane through intoxicating liquors, and 
 100,000 men, women and youths went to prison during 1908 
 as the result of alcoholic drinks. Yet, the government does 
 not recognize this business as an evil, menacing the welfare 
 of the people, but treats it as an industry from which to de- 
 rive revenue. 
 
 The dominant political parties ignore the question and say 
 it is not an issue for political parties to take up. Worse than 
 all this professed Christian men vote for men and parties to 
 remain in power, who are so blind and so inhumanly selfish 
 they cannot or will not see that in licensing the liquor busi- 
 ness, the government and the states are protecting slaughter- 
 ing houses that kill every year their millions of victims who 
 otherwise would have a fair chance to their promised "life, 
 liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 
 
 Let every man who votes for license parties, and whiskey 
 men, remember that he cannot escape being held responsible 
 in the sight of God, as well as the people, for the products of 
 these murder mills. 
 
 What are we going to do, dear friends, 
 
 In the year that is to come, 
 To banish this fiendish hand of death, 
 
 "Whose messenger is rum?
 
 34 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Shall we fold our hands and bid him pass, 
 
 As he has done before! 
 Leaving his deadly, poisoned breath, 
 
 At every unbarred door. 
 
 Let the fiend still torture the weary wife? 
 
 Still poison the coming child? 
 Still break the sorrowing mother's heart? 
 
 Still drive the sister wild? 
 
 Still bring to the grave the gray -haired sire? 
 
 Still martyr the brave young soul? 
 Till the streams of death like one great wave 
 
 O'er the whole great nation roll. 
 
 Is this our mission on earth, dear friends, 
 
 In the year that is to come? 
 If not, let us rise and do our work, 
 
 Against this spirit of rum. 
 
 There is not a soul so poor and weak, 
 
 In all this goodly land; 
 But against this evil a word may speak 
 
 And lift a warning hand. 
 
 And lift a warning hand, dear friends, 
 
 With a cry for home and hearth, 
 Adding voice to voice to voice 'till the sound shall swell 
 
 Like rum's death knell o'er the earth. 
 
 And the weak and the wavering shall hear, 
 And the faint grow brave and strong, 
 
 And the true and good and great and wise 
 Join hands to right this wrong.
 
 CHAPTER' V. 
 
 The White Slave Trade. 
 
 Forsaken by all but Jesus. 
 
 By E. Norink Law. 
 
 In a dark and lonely chamber, 
 
 Lay a wand 'ring girl one night, 
 With her erring comrades 'round her, 
 
 And death's messenger in sight. 
 As they soothed her aching forehead, 
 
 Wildly tossing with the pain, 
 O'er and o'er there came the saying, 
 
 ' ' 'Twas for me that Christ was slain. ' ' 
 
 Once she was a pure, loved daughter, 
 
 Walking in the ways of God; 
 But the foul destroyer sought her; 
 
 Now she rests beneath the sod. 
 No kind hand outstretched to save her, 
 
 So she wandered far away, 
 While the sad and weeping mother, 
 
 Prayed for her return each day. 
 
 When the mother looked upon her, 
 
 Laying there so cold and white, 
 Words of promise from the Saviour 
 
 Made her feel that all was right. 
 'Twas for such as she that Jesus 
 
 Said those loving tender words, 
 Breathing hope and comfort to us, 
 
 ' ' They that knock shall e 'er be heard. ' ' 
 
 35
 
 36 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Come to-night, O Lord, and fill us 
 
 With Thy Spirit and Thy love, 
 Saviour, dear, O, help and lead us 
 
 To the realms of peace above. 
 And we pray that we may never 
 
 Fail the cheering word to give; 
 But with the help of God endeav'r, 
 
 Bid the erring "Look and live." 
 
 The greatest shame of our nation to-day is that not only 
 the liquor traffic is licensed and protected hy the Government, 
 but that other great evils are allowed to go on unmolested. 
 
 We shall consider the unspeakable horror known as the 
 "White Slave Trade," as another great peril of this pro- 
 fessed civilized, Christianized Nation. 
 
 The greatest story of shame ever told in the history of the 
 world must be given to the people in the narration of this 
 horrible "Traffic in girls." There are many who will say 
 such a story should never be told. The exposures of municipal 
 officers and even those higher up in authority should not be 
 made. It must be done, however, if we are to stop this 
 buying and selling of human flesh and immortal souls into 
 the most shameful, pitiful, horrifying, sinful practice that 
 men who pretend to have a spark of civilization in them ever 
 engaged in. 
 
 In the beginning of this story, we will reprint in full the 
 article written by S. S. McClure, and printed in their splendid 
 magazine in November, 1909. 
 
 Let no one say these things are not true. They are too 
 horribly so, and what is true of New York is also true of many 
 other cities in the country.
 
 The White Slave Trade. 37 
 
 THE TAMMANYIZING OF A CIVILIZATION. 
 
 By 8. S. McClure. 
 
 For a thousand years the Germanic races have built up, 
 slowly and laboriously, the present civilization of the West, 
 the great and complicated structure that now lifts the whole 
 race above barbarism and bestiality, and gives the individual 
 the guaranties of security and justice and decency that make 
 civilized life more worth living than savagery. The three 
 leading nations in which this development has come about 
 have been England, Germany, and the United States. The 
 United States had every prospect, from the traditions and 
 motives and stock of its founders, of carrying this develop- 
 ment to its highest point. 
 
 But for at least half a century strong reactionary forces 
 have been continuously at work in this country to drag its 
 inheritance of civilization down again to barbarism. The 
 lowest point that they have yet attained is their nation-wide 
 organization for the sale of the bodies of women, described 
 in the article, ' ' The Daughters of the Poor, ' ' by George Kibbe 
 Turner, in this number of McClure' 's. The deep-seated and 
 instinctive disgust of every normal person for this transac- 
 tion proves beyond any demonstration its essential nature. 
 It is not a mere attack on individual morals. It aims at the 
 disintegration and degradation of a civilization, and the social 
 training of centuries — set in the bones and marrow of the 
 race — revolts against it. 
 
 How America's Civilization Has Been Degraded. 
 
 This fifty years of struggle to degrade the standards and 
 guaranties of civilization in America has come about largely 
 through the populations of cities. This is perfectly natural.
 
 38 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 For forty years large American cities have contained great 
 masses of primitive peoples from the farms of Europe, trans- 
 ported to this country as laborers, together with a considerable 
 proportion of negro slaves liberated by the Civil War. To 
 this body of people — absolutely ignorant in tradition or prac- 
 tice of the development and operation of civilization by self- 
 government — was suddenly given the domination of American 
 city life by manhood suffrage. From the beginning of the 
 shifting of power into these unaccustomed hands, the develop- 
 ment inevitable to this class of population since and before 
 the time of Rome has been in progress. They have been 
 exploited on every hand, and, through them, the entire popu- 
 lation of American cities; in the meanwhile they have been 
 kept in control by their exploiters through systematic largesses 
 of public wages, charity, or entertainment. In this ample 
 field for their enterprise have sprung up organizations for 
 the profitable debauching of populations, such as have rarely 
 if ever been equaled in the history of the world. 
 
 The obvious way to exploit and degrade populations of this 
 kind has been along two lines of strong primitive appeal — 
 their saturation with alcoholic liquor, and the development 
 of sexual license. The whole system has been a perfectly 
 natural social growth — the exploiters as well as the exploited. 
 And the incentive necessarily behind the process has been the 
 profit that could be made by abrogating the laws so as to de- 
 velop and exploit to the limit the appetites and passions of 
 the great body of the least trained and most undefended 
 population. 
 
 Seventy Years of Tammany Hall. 
 
 The oldest and most infamous organization in America for 
 exploiting this population is Tammany Hall of New York,
 
 The White Slave Trade. 39 
 
 which the great classic historian, Professor Guglielmo Ferrero, 
 recently compared to the very similar organizations that were 
 formed for exploiting the city of Rome during its decadence. 
 For fifty years and more this body has perverted civilization 
 in New York, using the great politically untrained population 
 for this purpose. Its political saloon-keepers have killed un- 
 numbered multitudes of these people through excessive drink- 
 ing; its political procurers have sold the bodies of their 
 daughters; its contractors and street-railway magnates have 
 crowded them into the deadly tenement districts by defraud- 
 ing them of their rights of cheap and decent transportation ; 
 and its sanitary officials have continuously murdered a high 
 percentage of the poor by their sale of the right to continue 
 fatal and filthy conditions in these tenement districts, con- 
 trary to law. Meantime they have kept control of the popula- 
 tion they have exploited by their cunning distribution of 
 wages and charity. 
 
 The story of the development of this organization for the 
 promoting of barbarism is illuminating enough to justify giv- 
 ing the following outline of its progress during the past 
 seventy years, taken from Gustavus Myers' history of the 
 society : 
 
 In 1842 Tammany organized immigrants into voting gangs. 
 
 In 1851 the Common Council first became generally known 
 as "The Forty Thieves." The city government was thor- 
 oughly organized for "graft," from the receipt of large 
 bribes by the aldermen for franchises, to the payment by the 
 police of a regular schedule of prices for promotions. 
 
 By 1856 the saloon power had grown until it controlled the 
 politics of the city. The saloon-keepers furnished cheaply 
 gangs of illegal voters, ballot-box stuffers, and "shoulder hit- 
 ters" to intimidate citizens and smash ballot-boxes.
 
 40 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Between 1865 and 1871 — including both city appropriations 
 and bond issues — New York City was robbed of about $200,- 
 000,000 by Tammany Hall under the rule of "Boss" Tweed. 
 
 In 1869 the impossibility of obtaining justice under the 
 corrupt Tammany judiciary brought about the serious sug- 
 gestion — published in a standard magazine — that a vigilance 
 committee be formed in New York along the lines of that 
 of that organized to clear up San Francisco in the days of its 
 first lawlessness. 
 
 In 1871 the exposures of Tammany Hall rule, together with 
 the arrest of Tweed, made its name a by-word across the earth 
 for political corruption. It was believed to be crushed. 
 
 In 1872, Samuel J. Tilden, August Belmont, Charles 
 O 'Conor, and other leading citizens were elected Tammany 
 sachems. 
 
 In 1874 Tammany Hall again secured control of New York 
 City government (by the familiar plan of advancing respecta- 
 ble and notable men to the prominent places in their organiza- 
 tion). Fully three-quarters of its office-seekers in the election 
 were connected with the liquor trade, many of them being 
 keepers of low groggeries. Nine out of fifteen Tammany can- 
 didates for alderman were former creatures of the Tweed ring 
 — one of them being under two indictments for fraud. 
 
 In 1884 came the Broadway street-railway scandal, which 
 gave the word "boodle" to the language, and resulted in 
 sending many aldermen to the penitentiary. 
 
 In 1892 revenue from vice assumed great proportions. The 
 estimated annual blackmail by the Tammany police alone was 
 $7,000,000. 
 
 In 1904 the Lexow Committee's investigations showed of- 
 ficial encouragement and cultivation of vice by the Tammany
 
 The White Slave Trade. 41 
 
 Hall administration, which astonished and horrified the ciliv- 
 ized world. 
 
 Mr. Moss on the Beginning op the Political Procurer. 
 
 Myers' history closed before the development of the pro- 
 curer and merchant of vice as a power in Tammany Hall was 
 fully comprehended. However, the new development of 
 vice in the Tammany districts of the East Side tenement sec- 
 tion of New York was being watched and understood by com- 
 petent observers. 
 
 In 1897 Frank Moss, ex-president of the New York Police 
 Board, trustee of the City Vigilance League, and counsel of 
 the Society for the Prevention of Crime, described conditions 
 of life in the red-light district of the East Side in his book, 
 ' ' The Amercan Metropolis, ' '* as follows : 
 
 "Women of all nationalities have drifted into the district, 
 and are unable to live out of it. There has grown up, as an 
 adjunct of this herd of female wretchedness, a fraternity of 
 fetid male vermin (nearly all of them being Russian or Polish 
 Jews), who are unmatchable for impudence and bestiality, 
 and who reek with all unmanly and vicious humors. They 
 are called ' pimps. ' A number of them are on the roll of the 
 Max Hochstim Association. They have a regular federation, 
 and manage several clubs, which are influential in local poli- 
 tics, and which afford them the power to watch their poor 
 women victims, to secure their hard- and ill-earned money, 
 
 and to punish them when they are refractory They 
 
 stand by each other, and by the aid of the powerful politicians 
 of the ward, and of professional witnesses, they send refrac- 
 tory women to the 'Island' ( prison )."f 
 
 •Published by the late P. F. Collier, founder of Collier's Weekly. 
 f That is, those who would not pay their earnings to their manager.
 
 42 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Bishop Potter's Protest Against Tammany's Exploitation 
 
 of Vice. 
 
 est* 
 
 In 1900 the moral forces of New York awoke to an under- 
 standing of the great political power of the purveyor of vice 
 under the Tammany administration of Mayor Van Wyck. 
 The late Bishop Henry C. Potter, who was particularly active 
 among the Protestants of the time, summarized the existing 
 conditions as follows : 
 
 "A corrupt system, whose infamous details have been 
 steadily uncovered, to our increasing horror and humiliation, 
 was brazenly ignored by those who were fattening on its spoils, 
 and the world was presented with the astounding spec- 
 tacle of a great municipality whose civic mechanism was 
 largely employed in trading in the bodies and souls of the 
 defenseless." 
 
 The situation was treated in great detail by Bishop Potter 
 in his open letter to Mayor Van Wyck on November 15, 1900 : 
 
 "But the thing that is of consequence, Sir, is that when a 
 minister of religion goes to the headquarters of the police of 
 his district to appeal to them for the protection of the young, 
 the innocent and defenseless, against the leprous harpies 
 who are hired as runners and touters for the lowest and 
 most infamous dens of vice, he is met not only with contempt 
 and derision (of police officials) but with the coarsest insult 
 and obloquy. 
 
 "I affirm that the virtual safeguarding of vice in the city 
 of New York is a burning shame to any decent and civilized 
 community and an intolerable outrage upon those whom it 
 especially and pre-eminently concerns. 
 
 "But I approach you, Sir, to protest with all my power 
 against a condition of things in which vice is not only toler-
 
 The White Slave Trade. 43 
 
 ated but shielded and encouraged by those whose sworn duty 
 it is to repress and discourage it, and in the name of unsullied 
 youth and innocence, of young girls and their mothers who, 
 living under conditions often of privation and the hard 
 struggle for a livelihood, have in them every instinct of virtue 
 and purity that are the ornaments of any so-called gentle- 
 woman in the land. 
 
 "I know those of whom I speak — their homes, their lives, 
 their toil, and their aspirations. Their sensibility to outrage 
 or insult is as keen as that of those who are in your own house- 
 hold or mine and, before God and in the face of the citizens 
 of New York, I protest, as my people have charged me to do, 
 against the habitual insult, the persistent menace, the unut- 
 terably defiling contacts, to which, day by day, because of the 
 base complicity of the police of New York with the lowest 
 forms of vice and crime, they are subjected. 
 
 "And in the names of these little ones, these weak and de- 
 fenseless ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races 
 and tongues, but of homes in which God is feared, and His 
 law reverenced, and virtue and decency honored and exempli- 
 fied, I call upon you, Sir, to save these people from a living 
 hell, defiling, deadly, damning, to which the criminal supine- 
 ness of the constituted authorities, set for the defense of de- 
 cency and good order, threatens to doom them. 
 
 The situation which confronts us in this metropolis of 
 America is of such a nature as may well make us a by-word 
 and hissing among the nations of the world. 
 
 ' ' Such a Condition Nowhere Else on Earth. ' ' 
 
 "For nowhere else on earth, I verily believe, does there 
 exist such a situation as defiles and dishonors New York today. 
 Vice exists in many cities, but there is at least some persistent
 
 44 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 repression of its external manifestations, and the agents of the 
 law are not, as here, widely believed to be fattening npon the 
 fruits of its most loathsome and unnamable forms. 
 
 "I come to you, Sir, with this protest in accordance 
 with the instructions lately laid upon me by the Convention 
 of the Episcopal Church of the Diocese of New York. 
 
 "In all these months (of protest) the condition of things 
 in whole neighborhoods has not improved, but rather grown 
 worse. Vice not only flaunts itself in the most open, ribald 
 forms, but hard-working fathers and mothers find it harder 
 than ever to-day to defend their households from a rapacious 
 licensiousness which stops at no outrage and spares no ten- 
 derest victim. Such a state of things cries to God for ven- 
 geance, and calls no less loudly to you and me for redress. 
 , "Henry C. Potter, 
 
 "Bishop of New York." 
 
 The Committee of Fifteen. 
 
 The horrible revelations of conditions under the Van Wyck 
 administration aroused public interest to such an extent that 
 a body of citizens was chosen to investigate the conditions 
 of the white slave trade. This was the Committee of Fifteen ; 
 rarely, if ever, has an organization of such able and prominent 
 men taken part in the public affairs of New York, as will be 
 seen from the following list of its members : 
 
 The late "William Henry Baldwin, Jr. (chairman), Harvard, 
 1885; president of the Long Island Kailroad Company. 
 
 Felix Adler, Columbia, 1870, Ph.D., Berlin; professor of 
 Hebrew at Cornell 1874 to 1876 ; founder of Society for Ethi- 
 cal Culture. 
 
 The late Joel Benedict Erhardt; prominent business man 
 and soldier; from 1883 to 1884 Police Commissioner of New
 
 The White Slave Trade. 45 
 
 York City; president of the Lawyers' Surety Company and a 
 trustee of the Bowery Savings Bank. 
 
 Austen G. Fox, Harvard 1869; Special Assistant District 
 Attorney in the prosecution of police officials after the Lexow 
 investigation ; chairman of the Committee of Nine on the Po- 
 lice Problem in 1905. 
 
 John S. Kennedy, prominent banker. 
 
 William J. O'Brien, master granite-cutter and a prominent 
 labor-union leader. 
 
 The late Alexander E. Orr, several times president of the 
 Produce Exchange and of the New York Chamber of Com- 
 merce; President of the Board of Rapid Transit Commis- 
 sioners. 
 
 George Foster Peabody, prominent banker; trustee of the 
 Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institution. 
 
 George Haven Putnam, publisher. 
 
 The late John Harsen Rhoades, president of the Greenwich 
 Savings Bank and director of many banks and financial insti- 
 tutions. 
 
 Jacob H. Schiff, member of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Com- 
 pany, bankers; director of the National City Bank and vari- 
 ous other institutions. 
 
 A. J. Smith, professor in the Medical Department of the 
 University of Pennsylvania and various other medical insti- 
 tutions; author. 
 
 Charles Sprague Smith, educator, lecturer, and writer. 
 
 Charles Stewart Smith, ex-president of the Chamber of 
 Commerce; director in a large number of financial institu- 
 tions. 
 
 Edwin R. A. Seligman, professor of political economy; 
 prominent in various movements for municipal reform in New 
 York City.
 
 46 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 The Committee of Fifteen on the Political Power of Vice. 
 
 This body of men published, in 1902, a book covering their 
 investigation of the social evil in New York City. Their state- 
 ments showed conditions so inconceivable that they would 
 scarcely be credited on lesser authority. Concerning the 
 power which the purveyors of vice had now secured in the 
 political machine they said : 
 
 "The employees (of these disorderly houses) openly cried 
 their wares upon the streets, and children of the neighborhood 
 were given pennies and candy to distribute the cards of the 
 prostitutes. A system of 'watch-boys' or 'lighthouses' was 
 also adopted, by which the news of any impending danger 
 could be carried throughout a precinct in a very few minutes. 
 
 "Honest police officers who attempted to perform their 
 duties were defied by the 'cadets' and 'lighthouses.' 
 
 "For a police officer to incur the enmity of a powerful 
 'madame' meant the transfer of that officer 'for the good of 
 the service,' if not to another precint, at least to an undesir- 
 able post in the same precinct. A virtual reign of terror 
 existed among the honest patrolmen and the ignorant citizens 
 of these districts. ' ' 
 
 Committee of Fifteen Describes the "Cadet." 
 
 The Committee of Fifteen describes the "cadet," the new 
 political power of whom Mr. Moss had written in 1897, as 
 follows : 
 
 "His occupation is professional seduction. By occasional 
 visits he succeeds in securing the friendship of some attractive 
 shop-girl. By apparently kind and generous treatment, and 
 by giving the young girl glimpses of a standard of living 
 which she has never dared hope to attain, this friendship
 
 The White Slave Trade. 47 
 
 rapidly widens into infatuation. The Raines-law hotel or the 
 'furnished room house,' with its cafe on the ground floor, is 
 soon visited for refreshments. After a drugged drink, the 
 girl wakens and finds herself at the mercy of her supposed 
 friend. Through fear and promises of marriage she casts her 
 fortunes with her companion and goes to live with him. The 
 companion disappears; and the shop-girl finds herself an in- 
 mate of a house of prostitution. ' ' 
 
 Committee of Fifteen on Dangers of Children in 
 Tenements. 
 
 The committee's investigation of the condition of the tene- 
 ment house showed how almost impossible it was for the 
 children of the poor to grow up honest and virtuous under 
 this thorough organization of vice and procuring by Tam- 
 many politicians. Concerning this it says: 
 
 "The revenue-producing power of the sale of immunity by 
 the police seemed to make the appetite of the police insatiable. 
 The infamy of the private house, with all the horrors arising 
 from the 'cadet' system, did not satisfy official greed. The 
 tenement houses were levied upon, and the prostitutes began 
 to ply their trade therein openly. In many of these tene- 
 ment houses as many as fifty children resided. An acquaint- 
 ance by the children with adult vices was inevitable. The 
 children of the tenements eagerly watch the new sights in 
 their midst. The statistics of venereal diseases among chil- 
 dren and the many revolting stories from the red-light district 
 tell how completely they learned the lessons taught them." 
 
 United Hebrew Charities on Jewish Conditions. 
 
 The condition of life among the Jewish people, who were 
 subjected to the influences of this district, was described
 
 48 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 by a statement published in the Twenty-seventh Annual Re- 
 port of the United Hebrew Charities of New York, in October, 
 1901. This said: 
 
 "The horrible congestion in which so many of our co- 
 religionists live, the squalor and filth, the lack of air and 
 sunlight, the absence frequently of even the common de- 
 cencies, are too well known to require repetition at this writ- 
 ing. Even more pronounced are the results accuring from 
 these conditions: the vice and crime, the irreligiousness, lack 
 of self-restraint, indifference to social conventions, indulgence 
 of the most degraded and perverted appetites, which are daily 
 growing more pronounced and more offensive." 
 
 When it is realized that the Jewish people in New York 
 number over 800,000, and that a great percentage of these are 
 very poor, — so poor that from 75,000 to 100,000 persons, ac- 
 cording to reliable authorities, are more or less dependent 
 upon alms, — the danger arising from the tempting and ex- 
 ploiting of members of such a population by political pro- 
 curers can easily be seen. 
 
 Government Reports on Present "White Slave Trade. 
 
 It was the hope of the Committee of Fifteen that the system 
 of political procuring in New York City was on the wane. 
 But two United States Government investigations and a 
 State investigation dealing with the problem indicate that this 
 is far from true. The findings of the Federal investigators are 
 not given out for publication at the time this is written, but 
 they will soon appear. They will show a shocking condition 
 condition throughout the United States, and a general drift of 
 the merchandising of women into the hands of procurers. 
 Students of the problem believe that at least two-thirds of the
 
 The White Slave Trade. 49 
 
 prostitutes of the country are controlled by individual cadets, 
 and that in New York City the proportion is much higher. 
 
 New York State Eeport on White Slave Trade's 
 Organization. 
 
 The report of the Commission of Immigration of the State 
 of New York, published last summer, treats the present condi- 
 tions of the white slave trade in New York as follows : 
 
 ' ' In the State of New York, as in other States and countries 
 of the world, there are organized, ramified, and well-equipped 
 associations to secure girls for the purpose of prostitution. 
 The recruiting of such girls in this country is largely among 
 those who are poor, ignorant, or friendless. The attention of 
 the Commission has been called to one organization, incor- 
 porated under the laws of New York State as a mutual benefit 
 society, with the alleged purpose 'to promote the sentiment 
 of regard and friendship among the members and to render 
 assistance in case of necessity. ' This society is, in reality, an 
 association of gamblers, procurers, and keepers of disorderly 
 houses, organized for the purpose of mutual protection in 
 their business. Some of the cafes, restaurants and other places 
 conducted by the members are meeting-places for those en- 
 gaged in the business of importation. The organization in- 
 cludes a membership of about one hundred residents of New 
 York City, and hast representatives and correspondents in 
 various cities of the country, notably in Pittsburg, Chicago, 
 and San Francisco." 
 
 The Trade in Pittsburg. 
 
 The conditions existing in the three large centers of the 
 ' ' white slave trade ' ' alluded to by the State Commission have 
 been previously described in this magazine. In May, 1903,
 
 50 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Lincoln Steffens wrote of the situation in Pittsburg as follows : 
 " Disorderly houses are managed by ward syndicates. Per- 
 mission is had from the syndicate real-estate agent, who alone 
 can rent them. The syndicate hires the houses from the own- 
 ers at, say, $35 a month, and he lets it to a woman at from 
 $35 to $50 a week. For furniture the tenant must go to the 
 'official furniture man,' who delivers $1,000 's worth of 'fix- 
 ings' for a note for $3,000, on which high interest must be 
 paid. For beer the tenant must go to the 'official bottler,' 
 and pay $2 for a one-dollar case of beer ; for wines and liquors 
 to the 'official liquor commissioner,' who charges $10 for five 
 dollars' worth; for clothes to the 'official wrapper-maker.' 
 These women may not buy shoes, hats, jewelry, or any other 
 luxury or necessity except from the official concessionaries, 
 and then only at the official, monopoly prices. If the victims 
 have anything left, a police or some other city official is 
 said to call and get it (there are rich ex-police officials in 
 Pittsburg)." 
 
 The Large Business in Chicago. 
 
 In April, 1907, George Kibbe Turner, after an investigation 
 of several months, described the situation of this political in- 
 dustry in Chicago as follows : 
 
 "The largest regular business in furnishing women, how- 
 ever, is done by a company of men, largely composed of Rus- 
 sian Jews, who supply women of that nationality to the trade. 
 These men have a sort of loosely organized association extend- 
 ing through the large cities of the country, among their chief 
 centers being New York, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans. 
 In Chicago they now furnish the great majority of the pros- 
 titutes in the cheaper district of the West Side Levee, their 
 women having driven out the English-speaking women in the
 
 The White Slave Trade. 51 
 
 last ten years. From the best returns available, there are 
 some ten or a dozen women offered for sale of the houses of 
 prostitution in the Eighteenth Ward every week. The price 
 paid is about fifty dollars a head. In some exceptional cases 
 seventy-five dollars has been given. This money, paid over to 
 the agent, is charged up to the debt of the woman to the 
 house. She pays, that is, for her own sale. In addition, she 
 gives over a large share of her earnings to the man who 
 places her." 
 
 What this means to the victims is thus described further 
 on by Mr. Turner: 
 
 ' ' To the average individual woman concerned, it means the 
 expectation of death under ten years; to practically all the 
 longer survivors, a villainous and hideous after-life. There 
 is a great profit in this business, however. Chicago has it or- 
 ganized — from the supplying of young girls, to the drugging 
 of the older and less salable women out of existence — with the 
 nicety of modern industry. As in the stock-yards, not one 
 shred of flesh is wasted. ' ' 
 
 A Chicago Newspaper Describes the Local Market. 
 
 The Chicago papers carry articles dealing with this business 
 almost continuously; indeed, that city is now in the midst of 
 the discussion of its perennial municipal scandal, concerning 
 the protection of the traffic in women by city officials. On 
 October 22, 1906, during one of the periodical outbreaks of 
 feeling against the trade in Chicago, the Daily News said : 
 
 "Vice and depravity are openly traded in as a commodity 
 in Chicago, and the streets of a district traversed daily by at 
 least one-third of the city's population are its marketplace. 
 The district is bounded by Sangamon, Halsted, Lake, and 
 Monroe streets, and is known as the West Side Levee. This
 
 52 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 public emporium of immorality and degration exists by virtue 
 of a regularly organized 'protective association,' whose mem- 
 bers laugh at law, successfully defy those who have tried to 
 cope with them, and, through some mysterious influence, are 
 enabled to continue their traffic with a license and abandon 
 that makes of the West Side Levee an open brothel." 
 
 Chicago Organizes to Fight Traffic. 
 
 In Chicago, as throughout the country, the moral and con- 
 structive forces among the Jews have been greatly exercised 
 by the appearance of the Jewish cadet and girl in the white 
 slave trade. During the past summer a police inspector, 
 Edward McCann, was tried for receiving money for the pro- 
 tection of the traffic in women on the West Side of the city. 
 In this trial it appeared that Julius Frank, who, with his 
 brother Louis, has been for years notorious as a leader in 
 the business in women there, was the president of a Jewish 
 church congregation. This revelation caused great excite- 
 ment among the Jews of Chicago, and has resulted in bring- 
 ing to a head a general movement to organize against the 
 white slave trade of that city. The Chicago News of Septem- 
 ber 25, 1909, tells the story of this movement, which is led 
 by Jews, and whose counsel is to be Clifford G. Roe, the young 
 Chicago attorney who has been the most prominent figure in 
 the local campaign against the white slave trade in Chicago 
 during the past two years. The News says : 
 
 "Traffic in white slaves and pandering are to be stamped 
 out in a wide and far-reaching crusade in Chicago, plans for 
 which were made known to-day by Adolf Kraus, one of the 
 guiding spirits in the movement. This vice is to be attacked 
 in a systematic way, according to Mr. Kraus, who talked of 
 the aims of the movement, following disclosures in the recent
 
 The White Slave Trade. 53 
 
 trial of Police Inspector Edward McCann. Big church and 
 civic organizations, regardless of creed, are to back the move 
 in a financial way. The B 'nai B 'rith, of which Mr. Kraus is 
 president, and the Commercial Club, are two of the big asso- 
 ciations behind the crusade. 
 
 ''Clifford Gr. Eoe, former Assistant States' Attorney, who, 
 under the administration of John J. Healy as State prose- 
 cutor, handled the white slave traffic cases, has been engaged 
 and will direct the obtaining of evidence to be laid before the 
 State's Attorney in the campaign against pandering. 
 
 Result of Article est "McClures." 
 
 "Mr. Kraus said he and others had been investigating this 
 traffic for almost three years, and that the law on the statute- 
 books now was a result of exposures that came three years ago 
 in an article printed in McClure's Magazine* This dealt with 
 the Jewish phase of conditions, and was the first information 
 that Jews in Chicago had that members of their race were 
 engaged in this illegal traffic. 
 
 ' ' Mr. Kraus and others questioned the article and asked the 
 author to submit proof or apologize. Proof was forthcoming, 
 said Mr. Kraus, and the fight has been on ever since, and is 
 to be broadened now so as to take in all denominations. 
 
 " 'The article appearing in McChire's,' said Mr. Kraus, 
 ' came as a shock to us. Two years ago a bill was drafted and 
 sent to the legislature as the first move to remedy conditions. 
 This measure was finally passed upon by Judge Mack, Samuel 
 Alschuler, and myself. I went down to Springfield, and, with 
 the assistance of Speaker Shurtleff, it was pushed through the 
 legislature. 
 
 *"The City of Chicago," by George Kibbe Turner, published in 
 McClure's Magazine for April, 1907.
 
 54 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 "There was no law on the books then whereby it was pos- 
 sible to punish those who engaged in so-called white slavery. 
 The law as it has been amended is more severe now than it was 
 as originally enacted. As there was no law at the time, we 
 were afraid to make it too severe for fear the legislature might 
 reject it. 
 
 " 'In two years the people became educated to the gravity 
 of the situation, and it was made more severe by the last 
 legislature by amendments. 
 
 ' ' ' There is a movement now on foot by different organiza- 
 tions, regardless of creed, to stamp out this traffic in Chicago. 
 The Jews have prided themselves upon the chastity of their 
 women and their moral family life; and when the article in 
 McClure's Magazine came out, many felt that it ought not to 
 be talked about and thereby made to give more publicity and 
 possibly create prejudice. Better judgment prevailed after- 
 ward, and it is the universal opinion that those who profit 
 by such practices must be punished. ' ' ' 
 
 "Name of God and Jew Profaned as Never Before." 
 
 Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, preaching at the Sinai Temple in Chi- 
 cago on September 25, 1909, on the Jewish connection with 
 the traffic in women, said : 
 
 "We have learned in a recent infamous trial that rich 
 men in our race are profiting through leasing their property 
 for purposes of evil. 
 
 "You who are here to-day have, many of you, given largely 
 of your money for charities, but now a crisis has arisen that 
 makes it needful that you give more than money. You must 
 give of your souls to regenerate those of our race who have 
 allowed their ideals to be lowered. 
 
 "Over on the West Side, the worst thing has occurred that
 
 The White Slave Trade. 55 
 
 has ever happened to our race. The name of God and Jew 
 has been profaned as never before." 
 
 The " Forward "on Jewish White Slave Traders. 
 
 The Forward made a special investigation of the matter, 
 and devoted a large amount of its space to the situation. In 
 an editorial it said: 
 
 "The facts that were uncovered at the trial of Inspector 
 McCann are horrifying. Seventy-five per cent, of the white 
 slave trade in Chicago is in Jewish hands. The owners of most 
 of the immoral resorts on the "West Side are Jews. Even in 
 Gentile neighborhoods Jews stand out prominently in this 
 nefarious business. 
 
 "The shame would not be so overwhelming if the thing 
 stopped there. For, after all, we could say: 'What can we 
 do if such creatures persist in calling themselves Jews ? ' But 
 we could say this only if these outcasts had remained where 
 they belong, and had no standing in the Jewish community 
 of this city. When these men, however, fill public offices in 
 the Jewish community, when they parade and are designated 
 as model citizens in certain quarters of the Jewish population, 
 we no longer can remain on the defensive. 
 
 "One of these 'prominent' Jews is Julius Frank. Julius 
 Frank confessed openly that he is the owner of a number of 
 disorderly houses. He confessed that he paid protection 
 money to the police so that his houses might not be raided. 
 
 "This creature, this Julius Frank, is president of the Con- 
 gregation Anshe Calvaria, Twelfth and Union Streets. 
 
 "Julius Frank, self-confessed owner of disorderly houses, 
 is the head of a Jewish congregation ! 
 
 "Can you, Jews of Chicago, conceive it fully? A Jewish 
 synagogue, a holy temple, which should be the cleanest, the
 
 56 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 loftiest, the most beautiful place and institution in our lives — 
 such an institution gives away its most honorable rank and 
 post to a man who lives on the money earned by running dis- 
 orderly houses!" 
 
 San Francisco's Riot of Vice and Crime. 
 
 The situation in San Francisco was shown by George Ken- 
 nan 's description of the municipal scandals there, published in 
 McClure's Magazine in November, 1907: 
 
 1 ' The entire government of the city, therefore, fell into the 
 hands of blackmailers, extortioners, and thieves ; and the cor- 
 ruption affected the whole body of citizens simply because the 
 whole body of citizens was brought directly into contact 
 with it. 
 
 "Under the rule of Schmitz and Ruef, men were forced to 
 pay for protection and privileges which they ought to have 
 had without payment; the work of the city was badly done 
 or wholly neglected; and professional law-breakers could buy 
 the right to commit almost any crime short of burglary, high- 
 way robbery, and murder. 
 
 "In consequence of this exercise of unlimited power for 
 selfish purposes, by an unscrupulous municipal bureaucracy, 
 the credit of the city was impaired; vice and crime, in their 
 most dangerous forms, were encouraged or protected; thou- 
 sands of boys and girls were tempted into evil courses; life 
 and property became insecure; and the moral standards of 
 the whole community were gradually lowered and debased. 
 
 "Ruef, Schmitz, and their confederates not only robbed 
 San Francisco ; they debauched it as well, because they made 
 graft, bribery, and vice so common and so familiar that 
 they seemed almost to be normal features of business and 
 social life.
 
 The White Slave Trade. 57 
 
 '"At that time, according to Police Captain Mooney, the 
 area of the Tenderloin had greatly increased. 
 
 "The saloons' generally, had thrown off all restraints of 
 law, brothels, gambling dens, and assignation houses multi- 
 plied and nourished under administrative protection ; women 
 lured men to 'dives' and 'deadfalls' and assisted in the work 
 of drugging and robbing them; charges brought against 
 law-breakers were dismissed, or indefinitely postponed, 
 by the Police Commission and the police courts; 
 honest officers who tried to enforce the laws were trans- 
 ferred to quiet and unimportant resident districts; nickelo- 
 deons, disreputable theatres, and penny arcardes corrupted 
 the young; street-walking prostitutes intercepted even men 
 who were on their way to church and gave them cards ; drunk- 
 enness, immorality, and dissipation in every form became 
 common; all-night drug-stores sold opium, morphine, and 
 chloral without regulation or restraint; and the number of 
 'drug fiends' in the city increased to about eight thousand." 
 
 Cities — Americans' Danger Point. 
 
 It is not necessary to go beyond the examples of these three 
 well-known cities. The same political forces engaged in de- 
 grading civilization into barbarism are at work with general 
 success in all the larger cities of the country. The fight 
 against them is the greatest single governmental problem of 
 to-day. As Bishop Potter well said, there is absolutely noth- 
 ing on earth similar to the degraded rule in American cities. 
 Many nations and cities have races of inferior breed or train- 
 ing among their population, but nowhere else is the control 
 of the government taken over by criminals, organized to 
 break the law, for the purpose of exploiting the appetite and 
 criminal weaknesses of such populations for their own profit.
 
 58 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 In the meanwhile the stock of the immigrants entering the 
 United States, and especially its cities, is growing constantly 
 worse. Drawn first from the higher and more intelligent 
 types of northwestern Europe, our immigration has degener- 
 ated constantly to the poorest breeds of the eastern and south- 
 ern sections of the continent. We have made the United 
 States an asylum for the oppressed and incompetent of all 
 nations, and have put the government into the hands of the 
 inmates of the asylum. "We are now permitting the country 
 to become the Botany Bay of the world. The most incom- 
 petent and vicious settle down in our great cities; and there 
 an army of political criminals, like Tammany, trained by half 
 a century of political crime, exploit, and degrade, and corrupt 
 them, and with them our whole civilization. 
 
 The Insecurity of Human Life. 
 
 The results of this degradation of society cannot be traced 
 in all things, but where they are observable they show startling 
 results. One point that can be clearly seen is the comparative 
 insecurity of human life against murder. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago D. Appleton & Company published a 
 Cyclopedia of Biography which contained 14,243 names of 
 the most eminent Americans, the names of the men who had 
 laid the foundations of the United States and had fought 
 through the Civil War. Of these 14,243 names northwestern 
 Europe contributed 14,219; the English-speaking sections of 
 it contributed 12,519 — that is, all but 1,724. At this time — in 
 1884 — the annual murder rate of the United States was 26.7 
 per million inhabitants; that is, there were 1,465 murders 
 for nearly 55,000,000 inhabitants. As years went by the 
 murder rate increased with frightful rapidity, reaching its 
 maximum in 1895, when 152 people per million per annum
 
 The White Slave Trade. 59 
 
 were murdered. Since that time the average has run consid- 
 erably over 100 per million per annum. The extraordinary- 
 prevalence of murder in the United States now as compared 
 with twenty-eight years ago is shown by the following table 
 of homicides compiled annually for that period by the Chi- 
 cago Tribune. 
 
 1881, 1,266 1895, 10,500 
 
 1882, 1,467 1896, 10,652 
 
 1883, 1,697 1897, 9,520 
 
 1884, 1,465 1898, 7,840 
 
 1885, 1,808 1899, 6,225 
 
 1886, 1,499 1900, 8,275 
 
 1887, 2,335 1901, 7,852 
 
 1888, 2,184 1902, 8,834 
 
 1889, 3,567 1903, 8,976 
 
 1890, 4,290 1904, 8,482 
 
 1891, 5,906 1905, 9,212 
 
 1892, 6,791 1906, 9,360 
 
 1893, 6,615 1907, 8,712 
 
 1894, 9,800 1908, 8,952 
 
 Our Huge Murder Rate. 
 
 The immigration of people from sections of southern and 
 eastern Europe, noted for their high murder rate, had much 
 to do with this condition. But still more potent is the fact 
 that, once in this country, the criminal element among these 
 immigrants is protected by, and strongly allied with, the 
 political criminals who manage our cities. Among the Italians 
 of New York, for example, murder is less dangerous to the 
 murdered, on the average, than the stealing of a five-dollar 
 bill by a clerk from his employer. If the murderer is ar-
 
 60 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 rested, he is rarely convicted. The operation of the coroner's 
 court in New York in dealing with the average murder is one 
 of the ghastliest travesties of justice in human government. 
 
 As a result of all this, the murder rate in the United States 
 is from ten to twenty times greater than the murder rate of 
 the British Empire and other worthwestern European coun- 
 tries. The northwestern countries of Europe, which are the 
 only nations worthy of comparison with the United States in 
 their civilization, would require nearly a billion inhabitants 
 — that is, more than half of the population of the world — 
 in order to bring the number of their murders up to that of 
 the United States, with its eighty to ninety millions of popu- 
 lation. Canada would require a billion and a quarter to have 
 as many murders as the United States has at the present time. 
 Murder has increased many times as rapidly as population 
 for the last twenty-five years. During the past fifteen years 
 the number of murders in the United States has been, ac- 
 cording to the annual records of the Chicago Tribune, 133,192. 
 The entire number of men in the Union army who were killed 
 in battle or died of wounds was 110,070; in both the Union 
 and Confederate forces it was 183,348. 
 
 Fourteen Times as Many Judges as in England. 
 
 This insecurity of life in the United States is but one in- 
 dication of the lapse from civilization that the whole popula- 
 tion is suffering, as a result of its government by criminals. 
 The huge size of our machinery of justice is certainly due in 
 large part to the amount of crime it has to deal with. New 
 York and Illinois have together a population under 14,- 
 000,000; these two States require 572 judges in their courts. 
 England and Wales have a population of about 32,000,000; 
 over this population there are 92 judges of the same general
 
 The White Slave Trade. 61 
 
 rank as that of the 572 who serve in New York and Illinois 
 — that is, the two American States have about fourteen times 
 as many judges in proportion to their population as England 
 and "Wales. 
 
 Taft and Eliot on American Lawlessness. 
 
 The great excess of crime in this country over that in other 
 civilized lands is recognized by all students of American life. 
 President Taft, speaking in Chicago on September 16 of this 
 year, said: 
 
 " It is not too much to say that the administration of crimi- 
 nal law in this country is a disgrace to our civilization, and 
 that the prevalence of crime and fraud, which here is greatly 
 in excess of that in the European countries, is due largely to 
 the failure of the law and its administrators to bring criminals 
 to justice." 
 
 Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University said 
 in New York on December 16, 1908 : 
 
 ""We are to consider how American freedom has made pos- 
 sible lawlessness in many forms. The defenses of society 
 against criminals have broken down. The impunity with 
 which crimes of violence are committed is a disgrace to the 
 country." 
 
 These conditions have arisen chiefly for one reason: our 
 large cities and many of our States are governed by organized 
 criminals. But back of this more obvious lapse toward barbar- 
 ism is a second still greater though less obvious disintegration 
 of society, due to the same forces that were responsible for the 
 first. Speaking broadly, the excessive use of alcohol and the 
 presence of venereal disease are the two greatest dangers of 
 the country to-day. The slum politicians, who, through their 
 delivery of great numbers of votes, have a controlling grip
 
 62 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 in the administration of law in cities, have for years drawn 
 their chief revenue from the saturation of the population with 
 liquor and the promotion of the public prostitution of women. 
 To-day they are, as Mr. Turner 's article clearly shows, almost 
 exclusively responsible for the "white slave" trade in the 
 United States. If they did not arrange to break down the 
 laws of civilization to allow a market for the bodies of young 
 girls, these girls would never be sold. 
 
 Two Chief Dangers op Civilization. 
 
 Alcohol, as is well known, has filled our poor-houses, insane 
 asylums, and prisons for fifty and a hundred years. But the 
 proportions of the other great danger to our population are 
 little appreciated. An excellent and authoritative statement 
 of this danger may be secured from the carefully edited book, 
 ' ' A Report on Our National Vitality, ' ' compiled by Professor 
 Irving Fisher, and published by the United States Government 
 in 1909. In this Dr. Prince A. Morrow, the famous specialist, 
 is quoted as follows: 
 
 ' ' The extermination of social diseases would probably mean 
 the elimination of at least one-half our institutions for de- 
 fectives." 
 
 Dr. Morrow further says that the number of syphilitics 
 alone in the United States has been estimated at 2,000,000, 
 and, finally, makes this terrible assertion: "Possibly ten per 
 cent, of men who marry infect their wives with venereal dis- 
 ease. ' ' 
 
 The worst punishment of a mutinous regiment in the time 
 of Rome was decimation — a word that has passed into our 
 language as a term for fearful punishment. By this, one 
 soldier in ten was chosen by lot to be killed. According to 
 Dr. Morrow's estimate, decimation by venereal disease is now
 
 The White Slave Trade. 63 
 
 taking place among the wives of America; that is, one out 
 of every ten innocent women who are married is destined to 
 be affected with diseases as frightful in their consequences as 
 leprosy. 
 
 Across the entire United States a standing army of tens of 
 thousands of cadets and prostitutes, practically all of them 
 diseased, is maintained by the politicians of its large cities 
 for the perennial infection of the population. An army of 
 lepers of equal size would be far less dangerous. The very 
 existence of the present force demonstrates that it is daily 
 infecting thousands of people with one of the most terrible 
 diseases known to medicine. 
 
 The Waste op Human Lives. 
 
 It is the fashion of the time to place the chief emphasis in 
 the fight for better city government upon financial considera- 
 tions. The real consideration is far deeper than this. The 
 cities of the United States are not concerned merely with the 
 stealing of a few millions of dollars by political thieves : they 
 are fighting for their civilization. The Evening Post of New 
 York on September 27, 1909, stated this excellently in re- 
 sponse to the announcement of Otto T. Bannard, the Repub- 
 lican candidate for Mayor, that the fight against Tammany 
 Hall was to be conducted on a business issue. It said : 
 
 "Mr. Bannard defines the anti-Tammany issue as 'waste.' 
 Waste there is, but the waste of money, grave as it may be, 
 is the least part. It is the waste of human lives that appalls — 
 the consumptives in the 'lug blocks,' dying in dark, inside 
 rooms, the waste of children in partly inspected rattle-trap 
 tenements, the waste of womanhood and manhood that comes 
 with a 'wide-open' town. No, Mr. Bannard. The chief issue 
 is Tammany Hall in all its unspeakable vileness; with all its
 
 64 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 smattering of respectables to lend the cloak of virtue, chock- 
 a-block with the Sullivans, with panderers to vice and vile- 
 ness of every description ; with its rich treasury lined by con- 
 tributions of corrupt or cowed corporations, of brothels and 
 saloons, of all the powers that prey, and also from the edu- 
 cated rich who pay for office or for immunity. The issue is 
 Tammany itself, because it is still, as for one hundred years 
 past, a league of men banded together by the ' cohesive power 
 of public plunder,' without conscience, without a spark of 
 civic pride or patriotism, like Eichard Croker, working for 
 their pockets all the time. The issue is Tammany, because it 
 is a veritable Juggernaut, crushing beneath its wheels the 
 prostrate poor it pretends to succor and befriend. A monster 
 of hypocrisy and greed, it is a disgrace to the city, a double 
 disgrace to the nation under whose flag it flourishes. There 
 is but one issue, and that is whether the Imperial City shall 
 be in chains to Tammany." 
 
 American Cities Made Partners With Criminals. 
 
 Besides the convincing statements of the late Bishop Potter, 
 Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, 
 the President of the United States, the Committee of Fifteen, 
 and of other authorities, we invite the readers of this article 
 to weigh carefully the few points in which statistics enable 
 us to understand the present conditions of the United States, 
 and to compare ourselves with other nations: The fact that 
 murders are ten times as frequent in the United States as in 
 other civilized countries; the fact that in the last thirteen 
 years the deaths by murder in the United States have equaled 
 the entire losses by death or wounds of the Northern armies 
 in the entire four years of the War of the Rebellion; that 
 more than ten times as many judges are required in the
 
 The White Slave Trade. 65 
 
 United States as in England to administer justice; and that 
 the white slave trade, pressing the sale of women to its ulti- 
 mate point, has incidentally and enormously spread the most 
 terrible diseases. 
 
 But, above all, it must be remembered that these condi- 
 tions exist primarily because dominating factors in the gov- 
 ernment of most of the large cities of the United States are 
 men engaged in the propagation of crime and in pandering to 
 vice. This is true in no other civilized country in the world. 
 There is crime in all countries, and the white slave traffic 
 exists everywhere, but this is the only country in which this 
 traffic is supported by the political forces that govern cities. 
 It is the only country in which honest policemen have every- 
 thing to fear in enforcing the law, and in which the police in 
 general are engaged in degrading the communities that they 
 are supposed to serve. It is principally the result of this 
 fact that the white slave trade, with all its unnamable cruel- 
 ties and atrocities, has become so fastened upon the United 
 States. Under normal conditions, with such government as 
 the cities of the United States have a right to expect, the 
 number of prostitutes in the country would decrease by two- 
 thirds. It is a crowning shame to American democracy that 
 while the white slave trade is being driven by the authorities 
 of the entire world, including the pioneer countries of South- 
 ern Africa and South America, it is growing and fattening 
 in the United States, with the connivance of the authorities of 
 our cities themselves. 
 
 What Are the Churches Going to Do About It? 
 
 The Christian World of September 25 makes this pertinent 
 comment upon the situation in New York : 
 "It is a sad thing to hear such words as those of a Japan-
 
 66 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 ese recently spoken to a friend of the writer. He said: 
 'Christianity is greatly discounted in Japan because of its 
 seeming impotency in your own country.' He then referred 
 to the corrupt and pagan condition of our own cities, remark- 
 ing that the missionary was completely handicapped in Japan 
 by these revelations of the impotency of Christianity to re- 
 deem the so-called Christian countries from paganism. We 
 presume he had been reading the Survey, with the disclosure 
 of the inhuman social practices of Pittsburg, and the recent 
 numbers of McClure's Magazine and Hampton's Magazine, 
 with their articles by General Bingham on the misgovernment 
 of New York. General Bingham has stirred the whole coun- 
 try by revealing the secrets of his office. His contention that 
 New York is governed by a band of professional criminals he 
 substantiates from incontrovertible proofs of his own experi- 
 ence as Police Commissioner. There is no doubt in many 
 people's minds that he was deposed from office because he 
 would not fall in with the corrupt political schemes of some 
 party boss. "We cannot quote from him here, but would ad- 
 vise everybody, especially every citizen of New York, to read 
 these articles. As the Mayoralty campaign approaches, the 
 question becomes vital to the churches of New York, as well 
 as the people. What are the churches going to do about 
 New York? Are there not enough members of church and 
 synagogue to lift the city out of this slough of iniquity ? The 
 New York State Conference of Religion is striving to unite 
 the leaders of all denominations in such a campaign as has 
 never been seen in the city. We wish that every minister 
 might use every moment in pulpit and out in arousing people 
 to the pagan condition of the city. If he is not already on 
 fire with indignations, let him read General Bingham's arti- 
 cles."
 
 The White Slave Trade. 67 
 
 There is one thing that will change this, and one only. 
 The local government of cities must be taken from the hands 
 of criminals and purveyors of vice. This is perfectly obivious. 
 The reason it has not yet been done is that the American 
 people have never concentrated their attention on this one 
 main issue. The best forces in our life have, in fact, scattered 
 their energies disastrously. The cities of the United States 
 are filled to overflowing with organizations of all kinds to 
 oppose crime and to dispense aid to the masses of criminals 
 and unfortunates who are created by present conditions ; law 
 and order societies, temperance organizations, college settle- 
 ments, committees to put down the traffic of women. All 
 these work well and earnestly, but their efforts are either the 
 work of salvage, after the great damage is done, or, at most, 
 attempts at a very partial cure. They assist the popula- 
 tion in very much the same way that a servant might who 
 was hired to drive away the flies from the table of a dinner- 
 party set upon the edge of a cesspool. What our country 
 needs is, not more societies to remove flies, but the removal of 
 the cesspool. 
 
 The Eemedy — City Government by Commission. 
 
 For this, it is only necessary to concentrate the attention 
 and interest of the whole public upon the one main issue — 
 local government. This will take place just as soon as the 
 general public is given a clean-cut understanding of present 
 conditions, and the power to see that these are changed. 
 There is a great deal of silly talk about city populations not 
 wanting decent city government. This is exactly equivalent 
 to saying that the aggregate of individuals in a community 
 desire to be robbed, murdered, and have their daughters sold 
 as prostitutes. The real trouble is that under present forms
 
 68 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 of city government the general public can never know the 
 truth, and, if it does, it can almost invariably be defrauded 
 of its power to express its will. The necessity of the time is 
 not an incentive for a change, but a system of local govern- 
 ment for cities that will do two things : first, give an intelli- 
 gent idea of the management of city affairs; and, second, 
 allow the public to express its will accurately and subject to 
 no change. 
 
 Exactly such a system has been developed and well tested 
 in America during the past ten years. It is called the Gal- 
 veston or Des Moines plan of commission government.* In 
 reality it is merely New England town government by select- 
 men — the most famous and successful single development of 
 democracy in America — adapted to the use of the city. This 
 system elects a board of five or six members from a city at 
 large, and gives them the entire power of government; each 
 member is given charge of one of several general divisions 
 of the government. In this way the best specialists in the 
 population are chosen to manage the big departments of the 
 city, such as finance, streets, and police. There is no shirk- 
 ing or shifting of responsibility; one well-known man is al- 
 ways responsible for one department. And careful and con- 
 cise reports show the public periodically just what is being 
 done. 
 
 This movement, starting with Galveston, Texas, is sweeping 
 across the West and Southwest, and a large group of cities 
 have already adopted the new governmental plan, including 
 
 *A complete description of government by commission was published 
 by Mr. Turner in McClure's Magazine for October, 1906. This article 
 has been frequently republished in pamphlets and newspapers, by per- 
 mission of the magazine.
 
 The White Slave Trade. 69 
 
 such large cities as Kansas City, Kansas, which has already 
 put it into operation, and Memphis, Tennessee, which is about 
 to do so. 
 
 New York City, under such a system, could command the 
 services of the ablest men in the United States ; a position in 
 its government would offer not only one of the greatest honors 
 in the United States, but a salary as large as those paid by the 
 greatest corporations in America. The entire government 
 of the city, excepting only the judiciary, would be given over 
 to five men. The second greatest city the world would not be 
 governed, as now, by an association of criminals ; it could and 
 naturally would expect to secure the direction of a board of 
 men of the caliber of the following ticket. 
 
 Mayor, Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 Commissioner of Finance, J. Pierport Morgan. 
 
 Commissioner of Police, General Leonard Wood. 
 
 Commissioner of Public "Work, William G. McAdoo, the 
 builder of the Hudson Tunnels. 
 
 Commissioner of Law, Senator Elihu Eoot. 
 
 A board of men of this ability, according to the experience 
 of other cities, could be elected by an overwhelming vote to 
 take charge of New York City. Once elected, they would not 
 only save it millions of dollars, but would entirely change 
 the quality of its civilization. 
 
 It is clear that some change must take place soon in the 
 government of American cities, if we are to retain the quality 
 of our civilization. Many careless and indifferent persons 
 may choose to doubt this. Any one who wishes a clear under- 
 standing of the barbarism of the forces that dominate the 
 present management of our cities need only read such articles 
 as the autobiography of Judge Ben Lindsey, now running in 
 Everybody's Magazine, showing typical municipal conditions
 
 70 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 in Denver ; or those of Mr. Turner on Chicago, published by 
 us in April, 1907, and on New York in June, 1909; and, 
 finally, that on "The Daughters of the Poor" in the present 
 magazine. The valuable reform that Mr. Turner's first article 
 started in Chicago has already been shown. The present 
 article is printed in the hope that it may lead to a movement 
 of national scope against the vilest and most dangerous growth 
 of present conditions in America which it describes. Only by 
 the most thorough and revolutionary reforms along this line 
 is there hope for the future American democracy. 
 
 "This lovely land, this glorious liberty, the dear purchase 
 of our fathers, are ours ; ours to enjoy, ours to preserve, ours 
 to transmit. Generations past and generations to come hold 
 us responsible for the sacred trust. Our fathers from behind 
 admonish us with their anxious paternal voices ; posterity calls 
 out to us from the bosom of the future ; the world turns hither 
 its solicitous eye — all, all conjure us to act wisely and faith- 
 fully in the relation which we sustain." — Webster. 
 
 Can any man read this article, which in truth puts the sit- 
 uation mildly, and not realize that we have reached the 
 greatest crisis in the history of our country. "We are stand- 
 ing at the threshold of the most important decision a people 
 ever made. Whether we will continue to allow these political 
 thieves, murderers, and despoilers of our homes, rule us, and 
 sell us body and soul at will, or whether the good men of the 
 country will prove themselves loyal and courageous enough 
 to demand a political separation from these political vultures 
 who are ready to prey upon any who may be considered val- 
 uable game. 
 
 Men of America, if we are going to be redeemed from these
 
 The White Slave Trade. 71 
 
 terrible conditions, you must be willing, if necessary, to cut 
 loose from political parties under whose name and protection 
 such men as Mr. McClure describes, have been able to secure 
 and maintain the control of the government, from Washing- 
 ton down to these great cess-pools of crime, and injustice, 
 called cities. Which do you love more, the name of a political 
 party, or your country's redemption from these terrible con- 
 ditions of shame? 
 
 If we are to redeem and save our blood bought civilization, 
 every man who loves the truth and right, let stand up and be 
 counted at the ballot box, and be sure that he does not vote 
 for men or parties who are known to train with these gangs 
 of thieves and murderers. If it means severing your con- 
 nections with a political party with which you have long affil- 
 iated, be brave and*true enough to break away at any cost. 
 Unless men are willing to do this, we are destined to remain 
 the captives of the political thieves who have been selling us 
 out, body and soul, home and country, until good men gasp 
 with fear as they recognize the conditions of our time. 
 
 Every citizen must value his ballot as a sacred trust ; a holy 
 weapon of war to be used for the defense of the people and 
 the redemption of his country from the hands of the spoilers. 
 He must remember it ought not to be sold to the highest po- 
 litical bidder, whose only purpose in buying it, is to manipu- 
 late it for his own gain, no matter how much he may rob 
 others of their just due. Every good man must consider it to 
 be his duty to vote, remembering his ballot may be needed 
 to kill the power of some bum or thief; political grafter and 
 slave trader. 
 
 If the manhood of the nation will assert itself we may be 
 saved from moral decay and civic destruction. If not, we are 
 doomed, and the end is not far away.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE DAUGHTERS OF THE POOR. 
 
 A Plain Story of the Development op New York City as 
 
 a Leading Center op the White Slave Trade 
 
 op the World, Under Tammany Hall. 
 
 By George Eibbe Turner. 
 
 The test of civilization is the estimate of woman — 
 George William Curtis. 
 
 There are now three principal centers of the so-called white 
 slave trade — that is, the recruiting and sale of young girls 
 of the poorer classes by procurers. The first is the group 
 of cities in Austrian and Russian Poland, headed by Lemberg ; 
 the second is Paris; and the third the city of New York. 
 In the past ten years New York has become the leader of the 
 world in this class of enterprise. The men engaged in it 
 there have taken or shipped girls, largely obtained from the 
 tenement districts of New York, to every continent on the 
 globe; they are now doing business with Central and South 
 America, Africa, and Asia. They are driving all competitors 
 before them in North America. And they have established, 
 directly or indirectly, recruiting systems in every large city 
 of the United States. 
 
 The story of the introduction of this European business 
 into New York, under the protection of the Tammany Hall 
 political organization, its extension from there through the 
 
 72
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 73 
 
 United States, and its shipments of women to the four corners 
 of the earth, is a strange one. It would seem incredible if it 
 were not thoroughly substantiated by the records of recent 
 municipal exposures in half a dozen great American cities, 
 by two independent investigations by the United States Gov- 
 ernment during the past year, and by the common knowledge 
 of the people of the East Side tenement district of New York, 
 whose daughters and friends' daughters have been chiefly 
 exploited by it. 
 
 Poland and the Markets of the East. 
 
 The ancient and more familiar white slave trade was the 
 outright sale of women from Eastern Europe into the Orient 
 through the big general depot of Constantinople. The chief 
 recruiting-ground for this was the miserable Ghetto of Europe 
 in the old kingdom of Poland, now held by Austria and 
 Russia, where the Jews were herded out of the rest of Chris- 
 tendom by the persecutions of the Middle Ages. This section 
 is known from Alexandria to Shanghai for its shipment of 
 women like "Anne of Austria" in Kipling's "Ballad of 
 Fisher's Boarding-House" in India: 
 
 From Tarnau in Galicia 
 
 To Jaun Bazar she came, 
 To eat the bread of infamy 
 
 And take the wage of shame. 
 
 The recruiting-ground for the supplies of women for this 
 trade, East or "West, is always the section inhabited by the 
 very poor. Out of this racial slum of Europe has come for 
 unnumbered years the Jewish kaftan, leading the miserable 
 Jewish girl from European civilization into Asia. The Jewish 
 church fought the kaftan with all its power. In life he was
 
 74 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 ostracized ; in death, dragged to an unholy grave. But to this 
 day he conies out of Galicia and Russian Poland, with his 
 white face and his long beard, — the badge of his ancient 
 faith, — and wanders across the face of the earth. Occasion- 
 ally members of the fraternity come into New York: men 
 of seventy, sometimes, with gray beards, following their trade 
 through life to the very end. Within the year there was in 
 New York an individual of this profession, known as "Little 
 Bethlehem, ' ' from the scene of his former business — the Holy 
 Land. 
 
 The Kaftan in the New World. 
 
 In the last part of the last century a new field opened for 
 this European industry. Great masses of young male labor- 
 ers went westward out of Europe to do the work of estab- 
 lishing civilization in a new hemisphere. There were two 
 or three men to one woman in this great shifting of popula- 
 tion, which is still taking place. And the social relations 
 of the whole world were affected by it. One great market for the 
 procurer's supplies, from the time of the Middle Ages, had 
 been the camps of armies. In the last fifty years two con- 
 tinents have been filled, in city and country, with a new and 
 similar market — the camps of male laborers. 
 
 The Jewish kaftan, for some reason, did not try his trade 
 with North America. He exploited South America instead ; 
 and in Argentine Republic he found a market that rivaled 
 the East. He could transfer women there, for a lump sum, 
 into what are known to the New York Trade as "slave 
 houses"; or, in accordance with the more Occidental develop- 
 ment of the business common to most Western countries, one 
 youth could marry or pretend to marry one girl, travel abroad 
 with her, and live with her as her manager.
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 75 
 
 So largely have these people emigrated to Argentina that 
 there is a considerable colony of them in the suburbs of 
 Buenos Aires. Excluded from the society of other persons 
 of their own race and religion, they have secured burial-places 
 of their own, — somewhat similar to that which has been estab- 
 lished in New York, — and have even set up their own syna- 
 gogue, in which they hold ghastly caricatures of religious 
 services. The colony is strong on ceremonial forms, and 
 Jewish holidays are strictly dedicated by the women to devo- 
 tion. The people still remain in Buenos Aires. But recently 
 — as part of an agitation extending across the civilized world 
 — the Argentine Eepublic has made their business of importa- 
 tion difficult by new and stringent laws. 
 
 Paris the Second Center of the World. 
 
 It remained for Paris, the second center of the business in 
 Europe, to develop the white slave trade with North America. 
 The Parisian type of trader is so old an institution that his 
 common name, maquereau (mackerel), appears in the French 
 dictionary. His trade became to all intents and purposes a 
 recognized calling, with a distinguishing costume of its own, 
 consisting of black velvet trousers, a blouse, and a peculiar 
 silk cap known as the bijou. These maquereaux start in the 
 business — and most of the remain in it — as the manager of 
 one girl of the poorer classes, whom they place to the best 
 possible advantage. From one, the more successful advance 
 to the business management of a number of girls. In all this 
 theirs is exactly similar to the American type of trade which 
 has developed in New York. The maquereaux reached the 
 height of their prosperity in Paris during the fashionable and 
 amusement-loving reign of Louis Napoleon in the '60 's. 
 With the simpler and more democratic feeling at the begin-
 
 76 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 ning of the present French Republic, public sentiment turned 
 more against the traffic. Its operators were frequently trans- 
 ported to the penal colonies in New Caledonia and French 
 Guiana. They gradually discarded their costume and slunk 
 out of sight. And in the '70 's they began to emigrate in 
 large numbers, and now may be found across the entire 
 globe. The chief points of export were London and New 
 York. But so much more profit and freedom from law were 
 obtained in the capital of the new continent that it very 
 soon received more attention from the exporters of women 
 than any other place in the world. 
 
 The Unprotected Immigrant Girl. 
 
 Up to this time prostitution had existed in the United 
 States — as most people assume that it exists to-day — without 
 having attracted the business management of men to securing 
 and exploiting its supplies. So far as it had management, 
 it was entirely a woman 's business. Its supplies came, as they 
 must always come, from poor and unfortunate families. From 
 1850 to the present time, the poorest and most unprotected 
 class has been the newest European immigrants. The most 
 exposed and unprotected girls are those in domestic service. 
 For over half a century this class of population has been 
 called upon to furnish the great bulk of the supplies of girls 
 in our large cities, and this class of employment far more 
 than any other. 
 
 In 1857, the police of New York, under the direction of 
 Dr. "W. "W. Sanger, the resident physician of the institutions 
 on BlackwelTs Island, gathered statistics on carefully pre- 
 pared blanks from two thousand of the six thousand pros- 
 titutes then supposed to be in New York. Of these over 
 three-fifths were born abroad, and at least three-quarters were
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 77 
 
 of foreign birth or parentage; one-half had been servants 
 before entering the profession. The new immigration of the 
 time was Irish and German ; it furnished the greatest number 
 of women, simply because of their exposed position in the city 
 slums. More than one-third of the two thousand women were 
 born in Ireland — noted throughout Europe for the chastity 
 of its women. 
 
 The French Importer's Shortcomings. 
 
 The French maquereau was immediately successful in a 
 country where the business had developed in so haphazard 
 a way. The women he brought to this country he dressed 
 well; he kept them abstemious from liquors, and implanted 
 in their minds the ambition of acquiring a competence and 
 returning to live in France. They tended from the first to 
 replace the disheveled and desperate creatures produced by 
 the American slums. 
 
 But, though extremely successful in America at first, and 
 still prosperous in the majority of our greater cities, the 
 French maquereau was not the type finally adapted to 
 conduct the business in the self-governing American munici- 
 palities. He intended to return to France after securing a 
 competency, frequented his own exclusive boarding-houses 
 and clubs, and did not even learn the language. He failed to 
 identify himself with any political organization. He conse- 
 quently had no direct political influence, and obtained 
 his right to break the law simply by payments of money. In 
 this way he occupied very much the same position as the 
 Chinese gambler in the community of law-breakers. Both are 
 always able to do business in a large city, but they are much 
 more liable to extortion and blackmail than persons who are 
 directly identified with the political machine. It was neces-
 
 78 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 sary for the procuring and selling of girls to become an inte- 
 gral part of slum politics — as the tenement-house saloon and 
 gambling-houses had been preceding it — before it could be 
 established on its present firm footing. 
 
 The Tammany Red-Light District. 
 
 About twenty-five years ago the third great flush of immi- 
 gration, consisting of Austrian, Russian, and* Hungarian 
 Jews, began to come into New York. Among these immigrants 
 were a large number of criminals, who soon found that they 
 could develop an extremely profitable business in the sale of 
 women in New York. The Police Department and the police 
 courts, before which all the criminal cases of the city were 
 first brought, were absolutely in the hands of Tammany Hall, 
 which, in its turn, was controlled by slum politicians. A great 
 body of minor workers among this class of politicians obtained 
 their living in tenement-house saloons or gambling-houses, 
 and their control of the police and police courts allowed them 
 to disregard all provisions of the law against their business. 
 The new exploiter of the tenement-house population among 
 the Jews saw that this plan was good, and organized a local 
 Tammany Hall association to apply it to the business of pro- 
 curing and selling girls. 
 
 The organization which they formed was known in the 
 Lexow investigation as the Essex Market Court gang, but 
 named itself the Max Hochstim Association. Among various 
 officers of this organization was Mr. Martin Engel, the Tam- 
 many Hall leader of the Eighth Assembly District in the late 
 '90 's; and with him a group of Tammany Hall politicians in 
 control of this district and the Third Assembly District along 
 the Bowery, just to the east.
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 79 
 
 Getting Supplies for New York. 
 
 This Jewish district, as it was when Mr. Martin Engel was 
 leader, opened the eyes of the minor politician of the slums 
 to the tremendous financial field that a new line of enterprise, 
 the business of procuring and the traffic in women, offered 
 him. The red-light district, operated very largely by active 
 members of the local Tammany organization, gave to indi- 
 vidual men interested in its development in many cases twenty 
 and thirty thousand dollars a year. Very few of the lead- 
 ing workers in the tenement saloons or gambling enterprises 
 had been able at that time to make half of that from the 
 population around them. 
 
 The supplies of girls for use in the enterprises of the po- 
 litical procurers did not at first come entirely from the fami- 
 lies of their constituents. The earlier Jewish immigration 
 contained a great preponderance of men, and comparatively 
 few young girls. The men in the business made trips into the 
 industrial towns of New England and Pennsylvania, where 
 they obtained supplies from the large number of poorly paid 
 young mill girls, one especially ingenious New Yorker being 
 credited with gaining their acquaintance in the garb of a 
 priest. But, gradually, as the population grew and the num- 
 ber of men engaged in the business increased, the girls were 
 taken more and more from the tenement districts of the East 
 Side. 
 
 "When this misfortune began to develop among the Jewish 
 people of the East Side, it was a matter of astonishment, as 
 well as horror. The Jewish race has for centuries prided 
 itself upon the purity of its women. Families whose daugh- 
 ters were taken away in the beginning of the New York traffic 
 often formally cast them off as dead; among the very ortho-
 
 80 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 dox, there were cases where the family went through the 
 ancient ceremonial for the dead — slashing the lapels of their 
 clothing and sitting out the seven days of mourning in their 
 houses. But individual families of new immigrants, often 
 not speaking English, naturally had little chance against a 
 closely organized machine. The Essex Market gang, as was 
 shown in the Lexow testimony, not only could protect their 
 own business in women, but had the facilities to prove entirely 
 innocent women guilty. 
 
 New York's First Export Trade. 
 
 The business grew so rapidly under these favoring auspices 
 that the East Side was soon not only producing its own sup- 
 plies, but was exporting them. The first person to under- 
 take this export trade with foreign countries, according to the 
 verbal history of the East Side, was a man who later became 
 a leading spirit in the Tammany organization of the district ; 
 he took one or two girls in 1889 or 1890 to compete with the 
 the Russian and Galician kaftan in the Buenos Aires market. 
 This venture was not very successful and the dealer soon re- 
 turned to New York. Since that time a few hundred New 
 York girls have been taken to Buenos Aires, but, generally 
 speaking, it has not proved a successful market for the New 
 York trade. 
 
 South Africa, on the contrary, proved an excellent field, 
 as mining districts always are. In the middle of the '90 's — 
 during the lean years of Mayor Strong's administration — the 
 stories of the fabulous wealth to be made in the South African 
 gold and diamond fields came to the attention of the New 
 York dealers, and they took women there by the hundred. 
 They proved successful in competition with the dealers from 
 the European centers in Paris and Poland, and established
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 81 
 
 colonies of New Yorkers through the southern end of the 
 continent. Large sums of money were made there, and a 
 few considerable fortunes were acquired, which their owners 
 brought home and put into various businesses in New York 
 — including gambling-houses and "Raines-laws" hotels. The 
 English Government in recent years has been more stringent 
 against the trade, and under a new law gave imprisonment 
 and lashing to men engaged in it. One man, now occupied 
 in a Raines-law hotel enterprise in New York, was among 
 those imprisoned, having recently served a sentence of one 
 year. The campaign against the business made South Africa 
 a much less attractive field than formerly ; but there are still 
 small New York colonies in various cities there. 
 
 Once acquainted with the advantages of the foreign trade, 
 the New York dealer immediately entered into competition 
 with the French and Polish traders across the world. There 
 are no boundaries to this business ; its travelers go constantly 
 to and fro upon the earth, peering into the new places, espe- 
 cially into spots where men congregate on the golden fron- 
 tiers ; and the news comes back from them to Paris and Lem- 
 berg and New York. After South Africa, the New York 
 dealers went by hundreds into the East — to Shanghai and to 
 Australia ; they followed the Russian army through the Russo- 
 Japanese war; they went into Alaska with the gold rush, 
 and into Nevada; and they have camped in scores and hun- 
 dreds on the banks of the new Panama Canal. However, the 
 foreign trade was not large compared with the trade with 
 the cities of the United States, which was to develop later. 
 The demand was naturally not so great.
 
 82 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 The Independent Benevolent Association. 
 
 In the meantime, the business grew and strengthened and 
 developed its own institutions in its headquarters at New 
 York. The best known of these is the Jewish society that goes 
 under the name of the New York Independent Benevolent 
 Association. This organization was started in 1896 by a party 
 of dealers who were returning from attendance at the funeral 
 of Sam Engel, a brother of Martin Engel, the Tammany 
 leader of the red-light assembly district. In the usual post- 
 funeral discussion of the frailty of human life, the fact was 
 brought out that the sentiment of the Jews of the East Side 
 against men of their profession barred them generally from 
 societies giving death benefits, and even caused discrimination 
 against them in the purchase of burial-places in the cemetery. 
 A society was quickly incorporated under the laws of New 
 York, and a burial-plot secured and enclosed in Washington 
 Cemetery in Brooklyn. This plot contains now about forty 
 dead, including some ten young children. Of the adults, about 
 a third have died violent or unnatural deaths. 
 
 The Independent Benevolent Association guarded its mem- 
 bership carefully, but grew to contain nearly two hundred 
 persons. As most of its people were prosperous, it was able, 
 as a body, to exert a continual influence through political 
 friends to prevent punishment of individual members. Mat- 
 ters of mutual trade interest were discussed at its gatherings, 
 and later, when the more enterprising men in it found larger 
 opportunities in the other cities of the country, its members 
 would naturally inform one another of conditions of business 
 in different sections. In New York, as various members grew 
 to undertake larger business enterprises, the usual difference 
 of trade interest between the retailer and the wholesaler grew
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 83 
 
 up; and the leading operators formed a strictly trade asso- 
 ciation; among themselves — the association whose meeting- 
 place was discovered and broken into during business sessions 
 by the District Attorney's force in his campaign of 1907. 
 
 New York's Creation — The Cadet. 
 
 In the freedom of the Van "Wyck administration of the late 
 '90 's, the latest type of slum politician that New York has 
 developed demonstrated further his peculiar value to politics, 
 and the great rewards of politics for him.. Like the saloon- 
 keeper before him, he had large periods of the day to devote 
 to planning and developing political schemes; there were a 
 great many dependents and young men connected with the 
 business ; and there grew up in the various political and social 
 centers of the East Side so-called "hang-out joints," saloons 
 and coffee-houses, where these men came together to discuss 
 political and business matters. It soon became evidence that 
 these gangs were exceedingly valuable as political instruments 
 in "repeating" or casting a great number of fraudulent votes. 
 
 Yet, in spite of this growth of an entirely new element 
 of political strength, Tammany Hall was defeated in the elec- 
 tion of 1901, largely because of a revulsion of popular feeling 
 against some phases of the white slave trade. This feeling 
 was especially directed against the so-called cadets — a name 
 now used across the world to designate the masses of young 
 men engaged in this trade in and out of New York, exactly 
 as the name of maquereau is used to designate the Paris 
 operator. As the women secured for the business are at first 
 scarcely more than children, the working of inducing them 
 to adopt it was naturally undertaken most successful by 
 youths not much older than themselves. In this way the 
 specialization of the business in New York produced the New
 
 84 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 York cadet — the most important figure in the business in 
 America to-day. The Committee of Fifteen — which made a 
 thorough and world-wide investigation bearing upon the con- 
 ditions of life in New York developed by the disclosures of 
 1901 and 1902 — defined this new American product as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 "The cadet is a young man, averaging from eighteen to 
 twenty-five years of age, who, after having served a short ap- 
 prenticeship as a 'watch-boy' or 'lighthouse,' secures a staff 
 of girls and lives upon their earnings. The victim of the 
 cadet is usually a young girl of foreign birth, who knows little 
 or nothing of the conditions of American life. ' ' 
 
 The Spread to Other American Cities. 
 
 A general feeling of resentment because the Tammany or- 
 ganization of the East Side had developed this new institu- 
 tion, and others connected with it, among the unprotected 
 immigrants of that district, caused the destruction of the red- 
 light district by an anti-Tammany administration, and a 
 great lessening of the freedom of the business in New York 
 City. In a way, however, this temporary period of reform 
 was a means of greatly extending the business in United 
 States and eventually in New York. The larger operators in 
 the business established themselves throughout the various 
 larger cities of the country ; and the cadets still secured their 
 supplies in the old recruiting-grounds of the East Eide, where 
 they were in no particular danger. An elaborate campaign 
 against them a little later resulted in the arrest and imprison- 
 ment of seven of these men as vagrants. They were released 
 long before the expiration of their term, by the influence of 
 political friends. 
 
 The now type of political industry developed in New York
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 85 
 
 proved very successful in other cities of the country — so much 
 so that it has now established itself to some extent in at least 
 three-quarters of the large cities of the United States. The 
 first places to be developed were naturally the nearest. One 
 of the earliest was Newark, New Jersey, within ten miles of 
 New York. 
 
 A group of members of the Independent Benevolent Asso- 
 ciation came into that city in the early 1900 's, and soon after 
 the New York red-light district had been broken up they ob- 
 tained control of practically the entire business of Newark. 
 They secured as supplies the ignorant immigrant girls taken 
 from the East Side of New York, and they brought with them 
 from New York, or educated in Newark, their own staff of 
 cadets — who not only worked vigorously as "repeaters" in 
 local elections, but returned to form some of the most vigorous 
 voters in the lower Tammany Hall districts of New York. 
 But in 1907 the attempt of one member of the Benevolent 
 Association to defraud another out of his business by the 
 aid of local political forces led to a disruption in the body of 
 men who were so well established in Newark. An expose fol- 
 lowed this disagreement, which broke up, for the time at least, 
 the local business, wtih its importations of New York women, 
 and temporarily stopped the return supply of illegal voters 
 to New York. The testimony of the time showed that these 
 men had worked industriously in the interests of the Tam- 
 many leaders in the downtown tenement districts of New 
 York, from which the supply of Newark girls was largely 
 obtained. In Newark the chief of police killed himself subse- 
 quently to the exposure.
 
 86 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 The Emigration into Philadelphia. 
 
 Another group of Jewish operators transferred themselves 
 from New York to Philadelphia. They secured their supplies 
 of women — largely young immigrant girls — from New York, 
 and retained their New York cadets. The members joined the 
 Mutual Republican Club of the Thirteenth Ward of Philadel- 
 phia, whose president was the sheriff of the county ; and their 
 cadets were extremely valuable to the political machine as 
 "repeaters," and as managers of the growing Jewish vote 
 in Philadelphia. These "repeaters" are incredibly efficient, 
 some having the record of working in three States — at Phila- 
 delphia, Newark, and New York — on the same election day. 
 
 The public expose in Philadelphia did not, of course, come 
 through any political source in Philadelphia — there is but 
 one political party there. It was started by the case of 
 Pauline Goldstein, one of the Russian-Jewish immigrant girls, 
 who was obtained in New York, and later thrown out, scantily 
 clothed, upon the streets of Philadelphia, when sick. The 
 matter was taken up by the Law and Order Society. Some 
 hundred places were found being operated by the New York 
 Jewish group, with several hundred foreign immigrant girls. 
 The investigation showed that there was a close community 
 of interest among this body of men, and that a small group 
 had charge of the relations with the politicians and police. 
 Some sixty men were given jail sentences. "Jake" Edelman, 
 one of the leaders, was the man arrested in the case of the 
 Goldstein girl. He "jumped his bail"; went to join the New 
 York colony in South Africa; returned, to be arrested on the 
 Bowery in New York; and at his trial he was represented by 
 New York counsel, accompanied by a large group of New 
 York friends. The prosecution of these men in Philadelphia
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 87 
 
 was very largely responsible for the eighteen months of re- 
 form administration in that city in 1905 and 1906. But since 
 then the New York operator is returning to Philadelphia, and 
 the cadet is firmly established in the local life. 
 
 Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis. 
 
 In Chicago the New York operators secured an even 
 stronger hold. Several hundred New York dealers came into 
 the West Side section after the Low administration and estab- 
 lished there an excellent reproduction of the red-light dis- 
 trict. At its height it contained between seven hundred and 
 fifty and a thousand Jewish girls from New York — largely 
 new immigrants, who could scarcely speak the language. 
 Local crusades have sent a great number of the New York 
 men farther west ; but the cadet is now one of the prominent 
 features of the local slum life, and a considerable number 
 of New York Jews still remain in positions of business and po- 
 litical leadership there. 
 
 A detailed statement of the spread of activities of the New 
 York dealer and cadet through the United States since the 
 exodus from New York after 1901 would serve as a catalogue 
 of the municipal scandals of the past half dozen years, and 
 would include the majority of the large cities of the country. 
 The New York Jewish cadets were found to be present in hun- 
 dreds in San Francisco at the great expose there, and took a 
 prominent part in the rottenness that preceded it; they were 
 strong in Los Angeles before the disclosing of conditions in 
 their line of business changed the administration there a 
 year ago ; and two of the most notorious leaders of New York 's 
 East Side were prominent figures in the political underworld 
 uncovered by Folk in St. Louis. To-day there are strong 
 in all the greater cities; they swarm at the gateway of the
 
 88 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Alaskan frontier at Seattle; they infest the streets and res- 
 taurants of Boston ; they flock for the winter to New Orleans ; 
 they fatten on the wages of the Government laborers in 
 Panama ; and they abound in the South and Southwest and in 
 the mining regions of the West. 
 
 Slum Politics' New Concentration. 
 
 The growth of this new factor in American city politics 
 was due, not alone to the advantages it offered, but to a 
 general necessity on the part of the slum politician to concen- 
 trate his attention upon prostitution as a means of getting 
 a living. This condition was brought about by the astonishing 
 success of the campaign against gambling, beginning some 
 ten years ago, both in New York and in most of the large cities 
 of the country. Policy is almost obliterated, pool-rooms are 
 rapidly declining, and little by little gambling at race-trncks 
 is dwindling throughout the country. To any one remember- 
 ing the condition of public sentiment and the frank and open 
 operation of gambling in American cities fifteen years ago, 
 this change is little less than startling. 
 
 One principal reason for the change was the awaking of 
 the personal interest of the richer and more influential classes 
 against gambling. Practically all of the gambling enterprises 
 fed upon the earnings of the poor — a sure tax levied upon the 
 people by the slum politician, who stooped in his policy games 
 to pick up the last and meanest penny of the child. But 
 too many small embezzlements from their employers were 
 made by clerks and book-keepers to pay the race-track and 
 pool-room gambler. The imagination and interest of the 
 employing class became enlisted, and gambling enterprises 
 were pursued with a vigorous attention which drove them 
 out. The net result of all this to the slum politician was sue-
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 89 
 
 cintly expressed by an observant old-time policeman upon the 
 Bowery of New York about a year ago : 
 
 "Where's a district politician goin' to get a bit of money 
 nowadays ? The pool-rooms are all shut down ; policy 's gone. 
 There ain 't no place at all but the women. ' ' 
 
 Tammany's Delicate Situation. 
 
 Because of this narrowing tendency in the field of slum 
 pohtics, the politicians of Tammany Hall below Fourteenth 
 Street found themselves in an exceedingly delicate position 
 after the exposure that defeated them in the red-light cam- 
 paign. The decline of gambling was already evident, and its 
 thousands of political employees — a mainstay in illegal voting 
 — had been discharged; and new election machinery made 
 difficult the wholesale voting of broken tramps and town 
 loafers. Not only was some participation in the sale of women 
 necessary, but the use of the gangs of young procurers and 
 thieves, who had their beginning in the red-light days, be- 
 came almost indispensable if the politicians were to secure 
 the vote upon which their power rested, both in their party 
 and out. 
 
 This situation was met with adroitness. The district below 
 Fourteenth Street had now come under control of the fore- 
 most combination of slum politicians in the United States, 
 known the country over. Martin Engel, the old Tammany 
 Hall leader of the red-light district, was solemnly deposed; 
 a husky young politician was made leader of the district, 
 seriously put on a pair of kid gloves, called in the reporters, 
 and pounded with great pomp and ceremony the persons of 
 a few unfriended cadets. After this drama, it was announced 
 with stern and glassy front that cadets were forever banished 
 from the district — and one of the most useful Tammany myths
 
 90 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 ever sent gliding down the columns of the local newspapers 
 was launched on its long way. The district retained the 
 chief disorderly -house keepers and captains of cadets upon its 
 list of election captains — where it keeps them yet; and the 
 bands of cadets and thieves worked in its service as they had 
 never worked before. But in the Third District — about the 
 Bowery — they began to have their real headquarters. 
 
 It is, of course, the belief — fostered by the great ignorance 
 and indifference of the more influential classes as to the con- 
 ditions of the alien poor in a city like New York — that the 
 cadet died out largely with the red light. On the contrary, 
 he has largely multiplied — as every close observer of the con- 
 ditions of the East Side knows. The whole country has been 
 opened up for the supplies of New York procurers since the 
 red-light days; the development of the lonely woman of the 
 street and tenement has increased the field for these young 
 cadets greatly; and not only the lower but now the upper 
 East Side of New York City is full of them. The woman 
 they live upon, and her daily necessity of political protection, 
 brings them into public life, and makes them the most ac- 
 cessible of political workers. They have a hostage to fortune 
 always on the street. 
 
 The East Side "Working Girl and Her Exploiters. 
 
 It is interesting to see how the picking up of girls for the 
 trade in and outside of New York is carried on by these 
 youths on the East Side of New York, which has now grown, 
 under this development, to be the chief recruiting-ground for 
 the so-called white slave trade in the United States, and prob- 
 ably in the world. It can be exploited, of course, because in 
 it lies the newest body of immigrants and the greatest supply 
 of unprotected young girls in the city. These now happen
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 91 
 
 to be Jews — as, a quarter and a half century ago, they hap- 
 pened to be German and Irish. 
 
 The odds in life are from birth strongly against the young 
 Jewish- American girl. The chief ambition of the new Jewish 
 family in America is to educate its sons. To do this the girls 
 must go to work at the earliest possible date, and from the 
 population of 350,000 Jews east of the Bowery tens of thou- 
 sands of young girls go out into the shops. There is no more 
 striking sight in the city than the mass of women that flood 
 east through the narrow streets in a winter's twilight, return- 
 ing to their homes in the East Side tenements. The exploita- 
 tion of young women as money-earning machines has reached 
 a development on the East Side of New York probably not 
 equaled anywhere else in the world. 
 
 It is not an entirely healthy development. Thousands of 
 women have sacrificed themselves uselessly to give the boys 
 of the family an education. And in the population of young 
 males raised in this atmosphere of the sacrifice of the woman 
 to the man, there have sprung up all sorts of specialization in 
 the petty swindling of women of their wages. One class of men, 
 for instance, go about dressed like the hero in a cook's ro- 
 mance, swindling unattractive and elderly working-women 
 out of their earnings by promising marriage, and borrowing 
 money to start a shop. The acute horror among the Jews of 
 the state of being an old maid makes swindling of Jewish 
 women under promise of marriage especially easy. 
 
 The People Who Dance. 
 
 But the largest and most profitable field for exploitation 
 of the girls of the East Side is in procuring them for the white 
 slave traffic. This line of swindling is in itself specialized. 
 Formerly its chief recruiting-grounds were the public amuse-
 
 92 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 ment parks of the tenements districts; now for several years 
 they have been the dance halls, and the work has been special- 
 ized very largely according to the character of the halls. 
 
 The amusement of the poor girl of New York — especially 
 the very poor girl — is dancing. On Saturdays and Sundays 
 the whole East Side dances after nightfall, and every night 
 in the week there are tens of thousands of dancers within 
 the limits of the city of New York. The reason for all this 
 is simple : dancing is the one real amusement within the work- 
 ing girl's means. For five cents the moving-picture show, 
 the only competitor, gives half an hour's diversion and sends 
 its audience to the street again; for five cents the cheaper 
 "dancing academies" of the East Side give a whole evening's 
 pleasure. For the domestic servant and the poorer shop-girl 
 of the East Side there is practically no option, if she is to 
 have any enjoyment of her youth ; and not being able to dance 
 is a generally acknowledged source of mortification. 
 
 "Working the "Castle Garden" Halls. 
 
 There are three main classes of dance-halls, roughly-speak- 
 ing, which are the main recruiting-places. In two of them 
 are secured the more ignorant, recent immigrants, who appear 
 in the houses kept by the larger operators of the Independent 
 Benevolent Association. The halls of the first class are known 
 by the East Side boys by the name of "Castle Gardens." 
 To these places, plastered across their front with the weird 
 Oriental hieroglyphics of Yiddish posters, the new Jewish im- 
 migrant girl — having found a job — is led by her sister domes- 
 tics or shop-mates to take her first steps in the intricacies 
 of American life. She cannot yet talk the language, but rigid 
 social custom demands that she be able to dance. She ar- 
 rives, pays her nickel piece, and sits — a big, dazed, awkward
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 93 
 
 child — upon one of the wooden benches along the wall. A 
 strident two-piece orchestra blasts big, soul-satisfying pieces 
 of noise out of the surrounding atmosphere, and finally a 
 delightful young Jewish-American man, with plastered hair, 
 a pasty face, and most finished and ingratiating manners, 
 desires to teach her to dance. Her education in American life 
 has begun. 
 
 The common expression for this process among the young 
 dance-hall specialists of the East Side is "to kop out a new 
 one." Night after night the cheap orchestra sounds from the 
 bare hall, the new herds of girls arrive, and the gangs of 
 loafing boys look them over. The master of the "dancing 
 academy ' ' does not teach dancing to these five-cent customers ; 
 he cannot, at the price; he simply lets his customers loose 
 upon the floor to teach themselves. Some of the boys are 
 "spielers," — youths with a talent for dancing, — who are ad- 
 mitted free to teach the girls, and are given the proceeds 
 of an occasional dance. The others pay a ten-cent fee. The 
 whole thing, catering to a class exceeding poor, is on a most 
 inexpensive scale. Even the five-cent drink of beer is too 
 costly to be handled at a profit. The height of luxurious in- 
 dulgence is the treat at the one- and two-cent soda-stands on 
 the sidewalk below the dance-hall. Contrary to the common 
 belief, intoxicating liquor plays but a small part in securing 
 girls from this particular type of place. These lonely and 
 poverty-stricken girls, ignorant and dazed by the strange 
 conditions of an unknown country, are very easily secured 
 by promise of marriage, or even partnership. 
 
 The Polish Saloon Dance-Halls. 
 
 A class very similar to this, but of different nationality and 
 religion, is furnished by a second kind of dance-hall on the
 
 94 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 East Side. Just north of Houston Street are the long streets 
 of signs where the Polish and Slovak servant-girls sit in stiff 
 rows in the dingy employment agencies, waiting to be picked 
 up as domestic servants. The odds against these unfortunate, 
 bland-faced farm-girls are greater than those against the Ga- 
 lician Jews. They arrive here more like tagged baggage than 
 human beings, are crowded in barracks of boarding-houses, 
 eight and ten in a room at night, and in the morning the 
 runner for the employment agency takes them, with all their 
 belongings in a cheap valise, to sit and wait again for mis- 
 tresses. Every hand seems to be against such simple and 
 easily exploited creatures, even in some of the "homes" for 
 them. 
 
 Just below this section of the Poles and Slaves lies the great 
 body of the Jews, and in the borderland several Hebrews with 
 good political connections have established saloons with dance- 
 halls behind them. For the past five or six years the Jewish 
 cadets have found these particularly profitable resorts. These 
 girls are so easily secured that in many cases the men who 
 obtain control of them do not even speak their language. 
 
 Tammany Hall and the "Grand Civic Ball." 
 
 For a third of a century, at least, the young slum politician 
 in Tammany has danced and picknicked his way into political 
 power. The chief figures in New York slum politics followed 
 this method. And thus arose the "grand civic ball" of the 
 Bowery district — of which, perhaps, since its completion, the 
 present Tammany Hall Building in Fourteenth Street has 
 been the center. But the recent political gangs that have 
 formed the chief strength of the slum districts of Tammany 
 Hall have had a much closer connection with dance-halls 
 than any political bodies before them, because their member-
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 95 
 
 ship is so largely composed of cadets. Practically all the big 
 gangs that have figured in slum politics in recent years started 
 about cheap-dance-halls. Paul Kelly's began in the halls 
 about the lower Bowery; Eastman's grew strong about new 
 Irving Hall in the Russian-Jewish district below Delancey 
 street; and Kid Twist's about a dance-hall for the Galician 
 Jews in the far East Side. 
 
 These gangs of political cadets naturally gravitate toward 
 Tammany Hall for their larger affairs, when they are strong 
 enough to do so. In this way Tammany Hall itself, among 
 the many ''tough" dance-halls in the city has come to be the 
 leading headquarters for disreputable dances. It is this class 
 of dances that plays a most prominent part in finally produc- 
 ing the American-bred girl for the cadet. 
 
 The Cadet's Contribution. 
 
 The American-bred Jewish girl does not attend the ' ' Castle 
 Garden" dancing academies for "greenhorns." Generally 
 she is able to take dancing lessons, and her dancing is done 
 at weddings or balls. A large number of these balls are given 
 by the rising young political desperadoes, who form for the 
 East Side girls local heroes, exactly as the football captains 
 do for the girls in a college town. The cadets, who make up 
 these men's followers, become acquainted with the girls upon 
 the street at noon hour or at closing time, when the young 
 toughs hang about the curbings, watching the procession 
 of shop-girls on the walks. Nothing is more natural than 
 the invitation to the ball ; and nothing is more degrading than 
 the association, at these balls, with the cadets and their ' ' flashy 
 girls." 
 
 There is liquor at these dances, which plays its part in their 
 influence. The course of a girl frequenting these East
 
 96 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Side balls is one of increasing sophistication and degrada- 
 tion. At its end she is taken over by the cadet by the offer 
 of a purely commercial partnership. Only one practical ob- 
 jection to the life remains to her — the fear of arrest and im- 
 prisonment. 
 
 " That's all right; you won't get sent away," says the 
 cadet. ' ' I can take care of that. ' ' 
 
 His indispensable service in the partnership is the political 
 protection without which the business could not exist. How 
 well he performs his work in New York was demonstrated by 
 the recent testimony, before the Page commission of the 
 legislature, of the immunity of women of this kind from seri- 
 ous punishment by the local courts. 
 
 These three classes of girls form the principal sources of 
 the supply that is secured in New York. The ignorant "green- 
 horns" are taken over more by the larger operators into the 
 houses. The American-bred girl is the alert and enterpris- 
 ing creature who is going through the cities of the United 
 States with her manager, establishing herself in the streets 
 and cafes. The cadet in the past was almost always Jewish; 
 now the young Italians have taken up the business in great 
 numbers. There are a number of "dancing academies" in the 
 Jewish section near the Bowery, where the Italian cadet 
 secures immigrant girls. He attends and conducts balls of 
 his own, which are attended by both Christian and Jewish 
 girls, and he has developed an important field for Slavic and 
 Polish girls in the saloon dance-halls of the employment 
 agency district just north of "Little Italy" in Harlem. 
 
 The Group of Italian Importers. 
 
 There is a smaller special business in the lower part of 
 New York, which brings in and sends out of the city a number
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 97 
 
 of girls, and which corresponds more closely in its methods 
 to the old white slave trade of the Orient. For a number of 
 years a small group of Italians, who have been very active in 
 the cause of the Tammany Hall organization of the Third As- 
 sembly District, has procured Italian girls for the Italian 
 trade in America. The girls in the Italian population of New 
 York are guarded as carefully by their mothers as any class 
 of girls in America, and for this reason are not picked up 
 in any considerable number in the ordinary way by the New 
 York cadet. It has been necessary to secure them from Italy. 
 The plan that is, perhaps, most frequently worked, is to get 
 them through various "wise" members of the great mass of 
 young Italian laborers who return to Italy every year for the 
 winter. These youths induce young peasant girls to accom- 
 pany them back to America under promise of marriage. 
 "When they arrive here, they are satisfied to give up the girls 
 to the dealers in New York upon payment of their passage 
 money and a small bonus. 
 
 In the survey of the conditions of the procuring business 
 in the United States during the recent Government investiga- 
 tions, no more melancholy feature was discovered than that 
 of the little Italian peasant girls, taken from various dens, 
 where they lay, shivering and afraid, under the lighted 
 candles and crucifixes in their bedrooms. Fear is more 
 efficacious with this class than any other, because of the no- 
 torious tendency of the low-class Itaian to violence and mur- 
 der. These girls are closely confined see only their man- 
 agers and Italian laborers, do not talk English, and naturally 
 do not know how to escape. At last, of course, they become 
 desperate and hardened by the business. The American 
 trade in them centers in the Bowery Assembly District in 
 New York. From there they are sent in small numbers to
 
 98 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 various cities where the Italian laborer is found in consider- 
 able numbers, including Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Chicago and 
 Boston. 
 
 Half the Country's Supply from New York. 
 
 This is a rough outline of the system of procuring and 
 sending girls out of New York City under the safeguard of 
 political protection. Detectives of the Federal Government, 
 who have made within the past year a special investigation 
 of this business in all of the large cities in this country, esti- 
 mate that about one-half of all the women now in the business 
 throughout the United States started their career in this coun- 
 try in New York. This estimate includes, of course, the wo- 
 men imported into that city, as well as those taken from the 
 population. This estimate may be large, but there can be 
 little doubt, since recent developments, of New York's growth 
 to leadership as the chief center of the white slave trade in 
 in the world. 
 
 The Galician and Russian kaftan of Lemberg and Warsaw 
 has had one chief market almost destroyed by the recent 
 drastic laws in Argentine Republic, which leave his present 
 field of operation much narrowed. The same loss of trade 
 by legal attack has come now upon the French trader in his 
 greatest single market, the United States. During the past 
 year two independent Federal investigations — one by the 
 regular government immigration service and one by a special 
 commission appointed by Congress — have been conducted. 
 Their attention has centered chiefly on the activities of the 
 French trade. This branch of the white slave trade in 
 America has been thoroughly frightened by the Government's 
 activity, and the number of maquereaux in this country has 
 greatly decreased for this reason.
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 99 
 
 New Yorkers Benefit by Supreme Court Decisions. 
 
 The movement that is driving the French importer out of 
 America has proved ineffectual against the operator from 
 New York who secures immigrant girls after they have landed. 
 In the campaign of the Federal authorities of Chicago, Joseph 
 Keller and Louis Ullman, the former a member of the New 
 York Benevolent Association, were each sentenced to one and 
 a half years of imprisonment for harboring two Jewish immi- 
 grant girls they had brought to Chicago from the East Side 
 of New York. They appealed to the United States Supreme 
 Court, and this held that while directly importing girls could 
 be punished by Federal law, the provision punishing men for 
 merely harboring girls taken after they arrive here was not 
 constitutional; and that the exploiting of such girls must be 
 punished by the State law, if at all. 
 
 Thus, while the business out of Poland and Paris has been 
 severely curtailed in the past few years, there has so far been 
 no practical setback for the trader from New York. He has 
 to-day several thousands of girls, secured from the population 
 of New York, established in various sections of the earth. 
 And month after month the ranks of these women must be 
 filled or extended out of the East Side population. This is a 
 matter of desperate seriousness to the population that is being 
 drawn upon for this supply, and a staring advertisement of 
 New York's disgrace across the world; but for the United 
 States at large it is less serious than another phase of the de- 
 velopment of the business out of New York — the extension 
 of its political cadet system throughout the cities of the 
 United States.
 
 100 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Spread of the New York System. 
 
 During the past six or seven years the police of most large 
 American cities outside of New York have noticed a strange 
 development which they have never been able to explain en- 
 tirely to themselves. The business enterprises for marketing 
 girls have passed almost entirely from the hands of women 
 into those of men. In every case these men have the most in- 
 timate connections with the political machines of the slums, 
 any everywhere there has developed a system of local cadets. 
 
 The date of this new development of the white slave trade 
 outside of New York corresponds almost uniformly with the 
 time when the traders and cadets from the New York red- 
 light district introduced New York methods into the other 
 cities of the country in 1901 and 1902. Hundreds of New 
 York dealers and cadets are still at work in these other cities. 
 But much more important are the local youths, whom these 
 missionaries of the devil brought by their sight of their sleek 
 prosperity into their trade. Everywhere the boy of the slums 
 has learned that a girl is an asset which, once acquired by 
 him, will give him more money than he can ever earn, and a 
 life of absolute ease. In Chicago, for example, prosecutions 
 in 1908 conducted by Assistant State's Attorney Clifford G. 
 Roe caused to be fined or sent to prison one hundred and 
 fifty of these cadets, nearly all local boys, who had procured 
 local working-girls from the dance-halls and cheap pleasure 
 resorts in and around Chicago. 
 
 The Double Influence of the New System. 
 
 There is little doubt that from now on to the larger part 
 of the procuring and marketing of women for the United 
 States will be carried on by the system of political procurers
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 101 
 
 developed in New York. The operation of this system has a 
 double influence upon our large cities. On the one side, it has 
 great political importance, for the reason that more and more, 
 with the growing concentration of the slum politician upon 
 this field, the procurer and marketer of women tends to hold 
 the balance of power in city elections. This is true not alone 
 in New York; analyzers of recent political contests in Phila- 
 delphia and Chicago have been convinced that the registra- 
 tion and casting of fraudulent votes from disorderly places 
 in those cities may easily determine the result in a close city 
 election, for false votes by the thousand are cast from these 
 resorts. 
 
 Certainly this is not an over-scrupulous class to hold the 
 balance of political power in a community. But it is the 
 other influence of the development that counts most — its 
 highly efficient system for procuring its supplies. The average 
 life of women in this trade is not over five years, and supplies 
 must be constantly replenished. There is something appalling 
 in the fact that year after year the demands of American 
 cities reach up through thousands to the tens of thousands 
 for new young girls. The supply has come in the past and 
 must come in the future from the girls morally broken by the 
 cruel social pressure of poverty and lack of training. The 
 odds have been enough against these girls in the past. Now 
 everywhere through the great cities of the country the sharp 
 eyes of the wise cadet are watching, hunting her out at her 
 amusements and places of work. And back of him the most 
 adroit minds of the politicians of the slums are standing to 
 protect and extend with him their mutual interests. 
 
 The trade of procuring and selling girls in America — taken 
 from the weak hands of women and placed in control of acute 
 and greedy men — has organized and specialized after its kind
 
 102 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 exactly as all other business has done. The cadet does his 
 procuring, not as an agent for any larger interest, but know- 
 ing that a woman can always be sold profitably either on the 
 streets or in houses in American cities. The larger operators 
 conduct their houses and get their supplies from the cadet — 
 take him, in fact, into a sort of partnership, by which every 
 week he collects the girl's wages as her agent. The ward 
 politician keeps the disorderly saloon — a most natural po- 
 litical development, because it serves both as a "hang-out" 
 for the gangs of cadets and thieves, and a market for women. 
 And, back of this, the politician higher up takes his share 
 in other ways. No business pays such toll to the slum poli- 
 ticians as this does. The First "Ward ball of "Hineky Dink" 
 Kenna and "Bath House John" Coughlin, the kings of slum 
 politics in Chicago ; the Larry Mulligan ball in New York ; the 
 dances of the Kelly and East Side and Five Points New York 
 gangs, all draw their chief revenue, directly or indirectly, 
 from this source. From low to high, the whole strong organi- 
 zation gorges and fattens on the gross feeding from this par- 
 ticular thing. , 
 
 It is the poor and ignorant girl who is captured — the same 
 class that has always furnished the "white slaves" of the 
 world. Interesting figures made by the police concerning the 
 newcomers into the South Side Levee district of Chicago tell 
 the same story as the statistics of New York in 1857. All but 
 twelve or fifteen per cent, are of foreign birth or parentage, 
 about one-third were of the domestic servant class before they 
 entered the life of prostitution. 
 
 The National Center op the Procurer. 
 
 Meanwhile, New York, the first in the development of this 
 European trade in America, remains its center, and its pro-
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 103 
 
 curing interests are the strongest and most carefully organ- 
 ized of all. The young cadet has his beginning, as well as the 
 woman he secures. These boys learn in the primary schools 
 of the farther East Side, from the semi-political gangs in the 
 dance-halls ; step by step, as they grow in the profession, they 
 graduate into the Third Assembly District, the chief "hang- 
 out ' ' place of the procurer in the world. In all the East Side 
 districts of Tammany Hall these youths have representatives 
 who look out for their interests; but here two-thirds of the 
 active workers are or have been interested in markets of pros- 
 titution. 
 
 Around the district's eastern edge in lower Second Avenue 
 hang the mass of the Jewish cadets, who are members of the 
 strong East Side political gangs. Many of them are deter- 
 mined thieves as well. Farther along is a mixture of the more 
 leisurely class, who devote all their attention to their work 
 as managers of women. Among them are scores — and through 
 the near-by East Side hundreds — of youths who have women 
 at work throughout this country, especially in the "West and 
 Southwest, or abroad, but who prefer to remain, themselves, 
 in the companionship and comfort of the national headquar- 
 ters of their trade. Correspondence on the condition of the 
 white slave trade comes here from all over the world. On 
 the lower Bowery and in Chatham Square are the Italian 
 cadets. 
 
 There are scores of "hang-outs" for cadets in the Third 
 District, and in all the notorious saloons the waiters are man- 
 agers of women, and receive their jobs on the recommendation 
 of politicians. Special lawyers defend the cadets when they 
 are caught, and all have their direct access to the political 
 machine, largely through the political owners of their special 
 "hang-outs." Altogether, it is a colony of procurers not
 
 104 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 equaled throughout the world in its powers of defense and of- 
 fense. 
 
 The New York and Paris Apache. 
 
 This class of political criminal has had a distinct tendency 
 toward greater and greater license. The type of youth first 
 known as cadet was a slinking, cowardly person, who was 
 physically formidable only to the more timid foreign immi- 
 grants. Now, and especially since the young Italian has taken 
 up this profession in New York, the gangs of these men have 
 constantly grown uglier and bolder. A curious similarity is 
 shown between these gangs as they have developed in New 
 York, and the Apaches, the bands of city savages in Paris, 
 whose violent crimes were responsible for the recent re-intro- 
 duction of capital punishment in France. A statement by M. 
 Bay, head of the Research Brigade in that city, concerning 
 the outbreak of crime there in 1902, shows how identical the 
 gangs of New York are with those that have formed in the 
 capital of France, about the same business that is their main- 
 stay here. 
 
 " Paris,'' he said, "is empty; the women upon whom the 
 great mass of these hooligans prey are unable to obtain money. 
 Eesult — the scoundrels, none of whom are capable of doing 
 an hour's honest work, fall back on the knife, the revolver, 
 or the burglar's jimmy. All of these articles can be pur- 
 chased cheaply. Another reason for the street fights which 
 take place with revolvers is jealousy. A woman leaves her 
 'protector' and takes up with another man; the two men at 
 once become sworn enemies, and a regular vendetta is started 
 between them. They gather their friends and in pitched 
 battles try to kill each other." 
 
 The highway assaults, murders, and street fights that New
 
 The Daughters of the Poor. 105 
 
 York has suffered from in the last five years have come from 
 an exactly similar class of organization. For two years past 
 the operations of these gangs have been curtailed by the ac- 
 tivity against them of the Police Department, under the ad- 
 ministration of General Bingham. Gradually his campaign 
 led to the higher and more important enterprises which they 
 made headquarters for themselves and their women. It ex- 
 tended first through the centers about the Bowery, Second 
 Avenue, and Chatham Square, and finally to the associated 
 summer headquarters at Coney Island. Then, suddenly, Gen- 
 eral Bingham was removed by Mayor McClellan. 
 
 The various interests dependent upon the procuring and 
 sale of women considered this event their first victory. But 
 now all eyes of these people are concentrated on the main 
 issue this fall. Will or will not Tammany be elected? The 
 whole future of their career in New York hangs upon the issue 
 of this event. And they are preparing to work for the Demo- 
 cratic party with every means in their power. 
 
 The Rebates of the Slum Politician. 
 
 The exploitation of a popular government by the slum poli- 
 tician is a curious thing, always. I sat some time ago with a 
 veteran politician, for many years one of the leading election 
 district captains of the Tammany Bowery organization, con- 
 versing soviably in the parlor of his profitable Raines-law 
 hotel. 
 
 "The people love Tammany Hall," said my host. "We 
 use 'em right. When a widow's in trouble, we see she has her 
 hod of coal; when the orphans want a pair of shoes, we give 
 it to them." 
 
 It was truly and earnestly said. As he spoke, the other half 
 of the political financing was shown. The procession of the
 
 106 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 daughters of the East Side filed by the open door upstairs 
 with their strange men. It was the slum leader's common 
 transaction. Having wholesaled the bodies of the daughters 
 at good profit, he rebates the widow 's hod of coal. 
 
 The so-called "human quality" is the threadbare defense 
 of slum politics. But all its charitable transactions have been 
 amply financed. From the earliest time is has been the same 
 old system of rebates to the poor. First the rebate of the 
 tenement saloon at the death of the drunken laborer; then, 
 the rebate from the raking-up of the last miserable pennies of 
 the clerk and laborer and scrubwoman, by the pool-rooms and 
 policy ; and now, smiling its same old hearty smile, it extends 
 to the widow and orphan its rebates from the bodies of the 
 daughters of the poor. 
 
 It is a source of perennial wonder how much longer the 
 poorer classes will be cajoled and threatened and swindled 
 into taking them. 
 
 The issues of the coming campaign for the control of New 
 York City have been framed in charges to enlist all classes 
 of the people against Tammany Hall. For the rich, the great 
 tax rate for wasted and misappropriated money ; for the citi- 
 zen of average means, the inadequate schools, dirty highways, 
 burglaries, and violence upon the public streets. There is a 
 perennial issue for the people of the tenement districts. Shall 
 New York City continue to be the recruiting-ground for the 
 collection for market of young women by politically organ- 
 ized procurers? The only practical way to stop it will be by 
 the defeat of Tammany Hall.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 We shall continue the story of this black crime, as told 
 by Edward W. Sims, United States District Attorney of 
 Chicago, and Clifford E. Roe, Assistant State's Attorney of 
 Illinois. Also Harry A. Parkins, Assistant United States 
 District Attorney. These articles were given to the "Wo- 
 man's World." and by their permission reprinted in full in 
 this book. 
 
 We prefer to give the facts as they tell them. Surely no 
 one would think of disputing these statements made by repu- 
 table officers. 
 
 THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE OF TO-DAY. 
 
 By Edwin W. Sims, United States District Attorney, Chicago. 
 
 Mr. Sims says: "There are some things so far removed 
 from the lives of normal, decent people as to be simply un- 
 believable by them. The "white slave" trade of to-day is 
 one of these incredible things. The calmest, simplest state- 
 ments of its facts are almost beyond the comprehension or be- 
 lief of men and women who are mercifully spared from con- 
 tact with the dark and hideous secrets of "the under world" 
 of the big cities. 
 
 You would hardly credit the statement, for example, that 
 things are being done every day in New York, Philadelphia, 
 Chicago and other large cities of this country in the white slave 
 traffic which would, by contrast, make the Congo slave traders 
 of the old days appear like Good Samaritans. Yet this figure is 
 
 107
 
 108 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 almost a literal truth. The man of the stone age who clubbed 
 the woman of his desire into insensibility or submission was 
 little short of a high-minded gentleman when contrasted with 
 the men who fatten upon the ' ' white slave ' ' traffic in this day 
 of social settlements, of forward movements, of Y. M. C. A. 
 and Christian Endeavor activities, of air ships and wireless 
 telegraphy. 
 
 Naturally, wisely, every parent who reads this statement 
 will at once raise the question : "What excuse is there for the 
 open discussion of such a revolting condition of things in 
 the pages of a household magazine? What good is there to 
 be served by flaunting so dark and disgusting a subject before 
 the family circle?" 
 
 Only one — and that is a reason and not an excuse! The 
 recent examination of more than two hundred "white slaves" 
 by the office of the United States District Attorney at Chi- 
 cago has brought to light the fact that literally thousands 
 of innocent girls from the country districts are every year 
 entrapped into a life of hopeless slavery and degradation 
 because parents in the country do not understand conditions 
 as they exist and how to protect their daughters from the 
 "white slave" traders who have reduced the art of ruining 
 young girls to a national and international system. I sin- 
 cerely believe that nine-tenths of the parents of these thou- 
 sands of girls who are every year snatched from lives of 
 decency and comparative peace and dragged under the slime 
 of an existence in the "white slave world" have no idea that 
 there is really a trade in the ruin of girls as much as there 
 is a trade in cattle or sheep or other products of the farm. 
 If these parents had known the real conditions, had believed 
 that there is actually a syndicate which does as regular, as 
 steady and persistent a "business" in the ruination of girls
 
 The White Slave Trade of To-day. 109 
 
 as the great packing houses do in the sale of meats, it is 
 wholly probable that their daughters would not now be in 
 dens of vice and almost utterly without hope of release ex- 
 cepting by the hand of death. 
 
 Is not this, then, reason enough for a little plain speech 
 to parents? I understand that the "Woman's World" every 
 month goes into two million American homes — average, repre- 
 sentative home of the common people — and that most of these 
 homes are outside of the big cities. This is why I have con- 
 sented to respond to the request of a publisher who is cour- 
 ageous enough to touch upon this forbidden topic. No other 
 consideration would move me to write upon this topic. 
 
 The purpose of all our laws and statutes against crime 
 is the suppression of crime. The protection of the people, 
 of the home, of the individual is the purpose which inspires 
 the honest and conscientious prosecutor. This is what the 
 law is for, and if this result of protection to individuals and 
 homes can be made more effective and more general by a 
 statement such as this, then I am willing to make it for 
 the public good. And the most direct and unadorned state- 
 ment of facts will, I think, carry its own conviction and make 
 everything like "preaching" or denunciation superfluous. 
 
 The evidence obtained from questioning 250 girls taken 
 within the last four weeks in Chicago houses of ill repute 
 leads me to believe that not fewer than fifteen thousand 
 girls have been imported into this country in the last year as 
 white slaves. Of course this is only a guess — an approximate 
 — it could be nothing else — but my own personal belief is 
 that it is a conservative guess and well within the facts as to 
 numbers. Then please remember that girls imported are 
 certainly but a mere fraction of the number recruited for 
 the army of prostitution from home fields, from the cities, the
 
 110 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 towns, the villages of our own country. There is no possible 
 escape from this conclusion. 
 
 Another significant fact brought out by the examination 
 of these girls is that practically every one who admitted hav- 
 ing parents living begged that her real name be withheld from 
 the public because of the sorrow and shame it would bring to 
 her parents. One said: "My mother thinks I am studying 
 in a stenographic school;" another stated, "My parents in 
 the country think I have a good position in a department 
 store — as I did have for a time — and I've sent them a little 
 money from time to time; I don't care what happens, so long 
 as they don 't know the truth about me. " In a word, the one 
 concern of nearly all those examined who have homes in this 
 country was that their parents — and in particular their 
 mothers — might discover, through the prosecution of the 
 "white slavers," that they were leading lives of shame in- 
 stead of working at the honorable callings which they had 
 left their homes and come to the city to pursue. There are, 
 to put it mildly, hundreds — yes, thousands — of trusting 
 mothers in the smaller cities, the towns, villages, and farm- 
 ing communities of the United States who believe that their 
 daughters are "getting on fine" in the city, and too busy to 
 come home for a visit or "to write much," while the fact is 
 that these daughters have been swept into the gulf of white 
 slavery — the worst doom that can befall a woman. The mother 
 who has allowed her girl to go to the big city and work should 
 find out what kind of life that girl is living and find out from 
 some other source than the girl herself. No matter how good 
 and fine a girl she has been at home, and how complete the 
 confidence she has always inspired, find out how she is living, 
 what kind of associations she is keeping. Take nothing for 
 granted. You owe it to yourself and to her and it is not dis-
 
 The White Slave Trade of To-day. Ill 
 
 loyalty to go beyond her own words for evidence that the 
 wolves of the city have not dragged her from safe paths. 
 It is, instead, the highest form of loyalty to her. 
 
 Again, there is, in another particular, a remarkable and 
 impressive sameness, in the stories related by these wretched 
 girls. In the narratives of nearly all of them is a passage 
 describing how some man of their acquaintance had offered 
 to "help" them to a good position in the city, to "look after" 
 them and to "take an interest" in them. After listening to 
 this confession from one girl after another, hour after hour 
 until you have heard it repeated perhaps fifty times, you feel 
 like saying to every mother in the country : Do not trust any 
 man who pretends to take an interest in your girl if that in- 
 terest involves her leaving her own roof. Keep her with you. 
 She is far safer in the country than in the big city, but if, 
 go to the city she must, then go with her yourself; if that is 
 impossible, place her with some woman who is your friend, 
 not hers; no girl can safely go to a great city to make her 
 own way who is not under the eye of a trustworthy woman 
 who knows the ways and dangers of city life. Above all, 
 distrust the "protection," the "good offices" of any man 
 who is not a family friend known to be clean and honorable 
 and above all suspicion. 
 
 Of course all the examinations to which I have referred 
 have been conducted for the specific purpose of finding girls 
 who have been brought into this country from other lands in 
 defiance of the Federal statute, passed by Congress February 
 20, 1907. This act declares that any person who who shall 
 "keep, maintain, support or harbor" any alien woman for 
 immoral purposes within three years after her arrival in this 
 country shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be liable 
 to a fine of $5,000 and imprisonment for five years at the
 
 112 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 discretion of the court. "When a department of justice at 
 Washington decided that this law was being violated, the 
 United States District Attorney at Chicago was instructed to 
 take such action as was necessary to apprehend the violators 
 of the act and convict them. One of the first steps required 
 was the raiding of the various dives and houses of ill fame 
 and the arrest of the girl inmates, as well as the arrest of the 
 keepers and the procurers of the white slaves. 
 
 While the Federal prosecution is officially concerned only 
 with those cases involving the importation of girls from other 
 countries — there being no authority under the present na- 
 tional statutes for the Federal Government to proscute those 
 concerned in securing white slaves who are natives of this 
 country — it was inevitable that the examination of scores of 
 these inmates, captured in raids upon the dives, should bring 
 to officers and agents of the department of justice an immense 
 fund of information regarding the methods of the white slave 
 traders in recruiting for their traffic from home fields. 
 
 Whether these hunters of the innocent ply their awful call- 
 ing at home or abroad their methods are much the same — 
 with the exception that the foreign girl is more hopelessly 
 at their mercy. Let me take the case of a little Italian peasant 
 girl who helped her father till the soil in the vineyards and 
 fields near Naples. Like most of the others taken in the raids, 
 she stoutly maintained that she had been in this country more 
 than three years and that she was in a life of shame from 
 choice and not through the criminal act of any person. When 
 she was brought into what the sensational newspapers would 
 call the "sweat box" it was clear that she was in a state of 
 abject terror. Soon, however, Asst. United States District At- 
 torney Parkin, having charge of the examination, convinced 
 her that he and his associates were her friends and protectors
 
 The White Slave Trade of To-day. 113 
 
 and that their purpose was to punish those who had profited 
 by her ruin and to send her back to her little Italian home 
 with all her expenses paid ; that she was under the protection 
 of the United States and was as safe as if the king of Italy- 
 would take her under his royal care and pledge his word that 
 her enemies should not have revenge upon her. 
 
 Then she broke down and with pitiful sobs related her awful 
 narrative. That every word of it was true no one could doubt 
 who saw her as she told it. Briny this is her story: A "fine 
 lady" who wore beautiful clothes came to her where she lived 
 with her parents, made friends with her, told her she was 
 uncommonly pretty (the truth, by the way), and professed 
 a great interest in her. Such flattering attentions from an 
 American lady who wore clothes as fine as those of the Italian 
 nobility could have but one effect on the mind of this simple 
 little peasant girl and on her still simpler parents. Their 
 heads were completely turned and they regarded the ' ' Ameri- 
 can lady" with almost adoration. 
 
 Very shrewdly the woman did not attempt to bring the 
 little girl back with her, but held out hope that some day a 
 letter might come with money for her passage to America. 
 Once there she would become the companion of her American 
 friend and they would have great times together. 
 
 Of course, in due time, the money came — and the $100 
 was a most substantial pledge to the parents of the wealth 
 and generosity of the ' ' American lady. ' ' Unhesitatingly she 
 was prepared for the voyage which was to take her to the 
 land of happiness and good fortune. According to the ar- 
 rangements made by letter the girl was met at New York by 
 two "friends" of her benefactress who attended to her en- 
 trance papers and took her in charge. These "friends" were 
 two of the most brutal of all the white slave drivers who are
 
 114 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 in the traffic. At this time she was about sixteen years old, 
 innocent and rarely attractive for a girl of her class, having 
 the large, handsome eyes, the black hair and the rich olive 
 skin of a typical Italian. 
 
 "Where these two men took her she did not know — but by 
 the most violent and brutal means they quickly accomplished 
 her ruin. For a week she was subjected to unspeakable treat- 
 ment and made to feel that her degradation was complete and 
 final. 
 
 And here let it be said that the breaking of the spirit, the 
 crushing of all hope for any future save that of shame is 
 always a part of the initiation of a white slave. Then the 
 girl was shipped on to Chicago, where she was disposed of 
 to the keeper of an Italian dive of the vilest type. On her 
 entrance here she was furnished with gaudy dresses and wear- 
 ing apparel for which the keeper of the place charged her 
 $600. As is the case with all new white slaves she was not 
 allowed to have any clothing which she could wear upon the 
 street. 
 
 Her one object in life was to escape from the den in which 
 she was held a prisoner. To "pay out" seemed the surest 
 way, and at length, from her wages of shame, she was able 
 to cancel the $600 account. Then she asked for her street 
 clothing and her release — only to be told that she had incurred 
 other expenses to the amount of $400. 
 
 Her Italian blood took fire at this and she made a dash 
 for liberty. But she was not quick enough and the hand of 
 the oppressor was upon her. In the wild scene that followed 
 she was slashed with a razor, one gash straight through her 
 right eye, one across her cheek and another slitting her ear. 
 Then she was given medical attention and the wounds gradu-
 
 The White Slave Trade of To-day. 115 
 
 ally healed, but her face was horribly mutilated, her right 
 eye is always open and to look upon her is to shudder. 
 
 When the raids began she was seeereted and arrangements 
 made to ship her to a dive in the mining regions of the west. 
 Fortunately, however, a few hours before she was to start 
 upon her journey the United States marshals raided the place 
 and captured herself as well as her keepers. To add to the 
 horror of her situation she was soon to become a mother. The 
 awful thought in her mind, however, was to escape from as- 
 sassination at the hands of the murderous gang which op- 
 pressed her. 
 
 One recital of this kind is enough, although instances by 
 the score might be cited which differ only in detail and degree. 
 
 It is only necessary to say that the legal evidence thus far 
 collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful 
 facts: That the white slave traffic is a system — a syndicate 
 which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the 
 Pacific Ocean, with "clearing houses" or "distributing cen- 
 ters" in nearly all of the larger cities; that in this ghastly 
 traffic the buying price of a goung girl is $15, and that the 
 selling price is generally about $200 — if the girl is especially 
 attractive the white slave dealer may be able to sell her for 
 $400 or $600; that this syndicate did not make less than 
 $220,000 last year in this almost unthinkable commerce; that 
 it is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to 
 scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for vic- 
 tims ; that the man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise 
 is known among his hunters as "The Big Chief." 
 
 Also the evidence shows that the hirelings of this traffic 
 are stationed at certain ports of entry in Canada, where 
 large numbers of immigrants are landed, to do what is known 
 in their parlance as "cutting out work." In other words,
 
 116 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 these watchers for human prey scan the immigrants as they 
 come down the gang plank of a vessel which has just arrived 
 and "spot" the girls who are unaccompanied by fathers, 
 mothers, brothers or relatives to protect them. The girl who 
 has been spotted as a desirable and unprotected victim is 
 properly approached by a man who speaks her language and 
 is immediately offered employment at good wages, with all 
 expenses to the destination to be paid by the man. Most fre- 
 quently laundry work is the bait held out, sometimes house- 
 work or employment in a candy shop or factory. 
 
 The object of the negotiations is to "cut out" the girl from 
 any of her associates and to get her to go with him. Then the 
 only is to accomplish her ruin by the shortest route. If they 
 cannot be cajoled or enticed by promises of an easy time, 
 plenty of money, fine clothes and the usual stock of allure- 
 ments — or a fake marriage — then harsher methods are re- 
 sorted to. In some instances the hunters really marry the 
 victims. As to the sterner methods, it is of course impossible 
 to speak explicitly, beyond the statement that intoxication 
 and drugging are often used as means to reduce the victims 
 to a state of helplessness, and sheer physical violence is a 
 common thing. 
 
 "When once a white slave is sold and landed in a house or 
 dive she becomes a prisoner. The raids disclosed the fact that 
 in each of these places is a room having but one door, to 
 which the keeper holds the key. In here are locked all the 
 street clothes, shoes and the ordinary apparel of a woman. 
 
 The finery which is provided for the girl for house wear 
 is of a nature to make her appearance on the street impos- 
 sible. Then added to this handicap, is the fact that at once 
 the girl is placed in debt to the keeper for a wardrobe of 
 "fancy" clothes which are charged to her at preposterous
 
 The White Slave Trade of To-day. 117 
 
 prices. She cannot escape while she is in debt to the keeper 
 — and she is never allowed to get out of debt — at least until 
 all desire to leave the life is dead within her. 
 
 The examination of witnesses have brought out the fact that 
 not many of the women in this class expect to live more than 
 ten years after they enter upon their voluntary or involuntary 
 life of white slavery. Perhaps the average is less than that. 
 Many died painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, 
 but it is hardly beyond the truth to say that suicide is their 
 general expectation. "We all come to it sooner or later," 
 one of the witnesses remarked to her companions in the jail, 
 the other day, when reading in the newspaper of the suicide of 
 a girl inmate of a notorious house. 
 
 A volume could be written on this revolting subject, but I 
 have no disposition to add a single word to what will open 
 the eyes of parents to the fact that white slavery is an exist- 
 ing condition — a system of girl hunting that is national and 
 international in its scope, that it literally consumes thousands 
 of girls — clean, innocent girls — every year ; that it is operated 
 with a cruelty, a barbarism that gives a new meaning to the 
 word fiend; that it is an imminent peril to every girl in the 
 country who has a desire to get into the city and taste its ex- 
 citements and its pleasures. 
 
 The facts I have stated are for the awakening of parents 
 and guardians of girls. If I were to presume to say anything 
 to the possible victims of this awful scourge of white slavery 
 it would be this : ' ' Those who enter here leave hope behind ; ' ' 
 the depths of debasement and suffering disclosed by the in- 
 vestigation now in progress would make the flesh of a seasoned 
 man of the world creep with horror and shame."
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Roe. 
 
 No language can describe the horrors of the white slave 
 traffic. It is so beastly, so repulsive, so shocking that it stag- 
 gers the senses. It seems like a hideous nightmare of hell and 
 yet it is a fact of our everyday life under capitalism, and so 
 engrossing is the struggle for existence that but little atten- 
 tion is paid to this unspeakable traffic in the bodies and souls 
 of innocent girls who are deceived by human tarantulas and 
 lured to their ruin and death. 
 
 It is widespread, even international. It proved so appalling 
 and the public was so unaware of the existence of the preda- 
 tory monster that the " Woman's World" told its 2,000,000 
 readers, in two tremendous articles by United States District 
 Attorney Sims of Chicago, the facts — warned them, so that 
 they and the country in general might be forearmed. 
 
 Thus was it revealed to the people that there is a white slave 
 traffic. 
 
 The disgraceful facts are these : 
 
 Some 65,000 daughters of American homes and 15,000 alien 
 girls are the prey each year of procurers in this traffic, ac- 
 cording to authoritative estimates. Even marriage is used as 
 one of the diabolical methods of capturing girlhood and young 
 womanhood and "breaking them in" to a life of shame. 
 
 They are hunted, trapped in a thousand ways; trapped, 
 wing-broken, sold — sold for less than hogs! — and h^d »n white 
 slavery worse than death. 
 
 118
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Eoe. 119 
 
 The daughters of all of us, our sisters, even our wives are 
 looked upon as prey for the white slave traffic. 
 
 Here is the story in full, as told by Clifford E. Roe, As- 
 sistant State's Attorney of Illinois: 
 
 There is a problem of slavery to-day for the people to solve. 
 The question is: "How shall the warfare against "White 
 Slavery be waged to blot out this cloud upon civilization ex- 
 peditiously ? " Over two years ago I learned that there was 
 a gigantic slave trade in women, and with a handful of people 
 we began to fight the traders. That a system of slavery, de- 
 basing and vile, had grown to enormous proportions before 
 our very doors seemed beyond belief, an impossibility, and 
 even romantic. Most people were skeptical of the existence 
 of a well defined and organized traffic in girls, and they seemed 
 to think that those advocating the abolition of this nefarious 
 trade were either visionists or fanatics. The struggle against 
 this trade in women was a hard one at first. The ministry, 
 although dazed, were finally aroused to an appreciation of the 
 truth. 
 
 Having faith in the people, and believing that this republic 
 lauds and honors the chastity and sanctity of women, I be- 
 lieved in bringing this hideous traffic in girls to the public 
 notice, and when our citizens fully realized its importance 
 they would rise to the occasion and aid in the warfare to ex- 
 terminate white slavery. The result has been most gratifying, 
 for churches, clubs, associations, newspapers, men and women 
 in all walks of life have taken up the cause. Great armies 
 like those of a generation ago cannot uproot this slavery, but 
 the slavery of to-day must be eliminated by publicity, educa- 
 tion, legislation and law enforcement. That is the reason the 
 "Woman's "World" has brought to its readers facts concern- 
 ing this hideous trade. The results of this heroic work have
 
 120 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 been wonderful, for thousands of letters inquiring about white 
 slavery have been received, and associations and clubs have 
 formed to fight white slavery, and legislation upon the sub- 
 ject has been introduced in many states. If this great good 
 to our social life could not be brought about by publicity, 
 there would not be any reason for bringing before the people 
 and into the midst of the family circle facts which are so black 
 and revolting. But to know and understand we must cast 
 aside false modesty, take off our kid gloves and handle this 
 great social problem with our naked hands. 
 
 The trade in women is domestic and foreign, local and in- 
 ternational. The Honorable Edwin W. Sims and Harry A. 
 Parkin, Assistant United States District Attorney in Chicago, 
 have been waging valiant warfare against the foreign and in- 
 ternational trade during the past year. The preceding ar- 
 ticles in this magazine written by them have dealt chiefly with 
 that phase of the white slave trade. They have explained, 
 also, the debt system as a means of keeping the girls in resorts 
 after they are procured and sold. It is with the domestic and 
 local trade I have been mostly concerned. In Chicago alone 
 there are more than 25,000 women leading a life of shame, and 
 statistics show that the average life of a fallen woman is five 
 years. Five thousand persons must, therefore, be recruited 
 every year in Chicago alone. How many voluntarily go into 
 this life ? It is estimated that about twenty per cent. ! This 
 shows us that eighty per cent, are led into it by some scheme 
 or entrapped and sold, and at least two-thirds of this number 
 are from our own country, being inveigled from farms, towns 
 and cities. One may inquire, "How is that girls are procured 
 so easily without the public being aware of what is going on?" 
 
 The answer is that love and ambition are the baits which 
 the procurers flaunt in the facts of their proposed victims.
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Koe. 121 
 
 Often it happens that promises of positions on the stage, in 
 stores, and various occupations alluring to young girls cause 
 many to fall, captives in the great net set for them. 
 
 During the past two years there have been more than two 
 hundred and fifty white slave cases tried in Chicago under 
 the Illinois law, resulting in scores of confessions made by the 
 procurers, and statements by hundreds of the girls who were 
 procured as to the methods employed by the traders. 
 
 To show how easily it is done, let me tell you a story of a 
 girl from Elgin, Illinois, who was caught by the love scheme. 
 One day this pretty little German lass was in a Chicago store 
 buying sheet music when a well-dressed, handsome young 
 man, apparently looking at music, too, asked her the names of 
 some of the latest popular songs, as he wanted to buy them. 
 At first she turned away and did not heed him, but he was 
 not to be repulsed, and pressing his attentions further upon 
 her, he finally engaged her in conversation. A luncheon at a 
 nearby restaurant, in which she joined him, was the result, 
 and there he told her how at first sight he had fallen in love 
 with her beauty. After lunch he suggested a visit to his 
 bachelor apartments, but this she refused. Seeing that this 
 plan was a failure, he asked her to marry him then and there. 
 The silly girl, believing he loved her, and enchanted by the 
 picture he had painted of his father 's wealth and fine home in 
 New York City, consented, and they were married. After 
 the ceremony he told her that he was about ' ' broke, ' ' and said 
 that he would take her to a place where she could make 
 enough money in a few days to pay their way to New York, 
 where everything would be lovely, and as they were married 
 it would be no one's business how she got the money. Im- 
 mediately accounts of white slaver procurers which she had 
 read came to her mind, and she then realized what she had
 
 122 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 fallen into. Lest she might arouse in him suspicion, she con- 
 sented to do as he asked, but told him that before going out 
 to the resort she wanted to buy some clothing, and arranged 
 to meet him at a certain downtown corner toward evening. 
 She hurried to the County Court, where an escort was given 
 her, and she was brought to the court where I was prosecuting. 
 I armed an officer with a warrant and he followed the girl to 
 the appointed place of meeting. The young man was there 
 waiting for his victim. The officer stepped up and put him 
 under arrest, and the next day he was tried and convicted. It 
 was then learned that he was a well known procurer of girls. 
 Thus saved from a life of ruin, the Elgin girl went home 
 heart-broken, but wiser for her experience. Recently she 
 secured in the County Court an annulment of the marriage. 
 Inquiry proved that the girl was from a very respectable 
 home, and that she had always been a good, honest, industri- 
 ous girl. Many similar cases have come out in the courts; 
 however, the girls in most instances were not favored by the 
 same good fortune which blessed the little girl from Elgin, 
 and the outcome was much more disastrous. This is an il- 
 lustration of the ease with which panderers make use of love 
 as a means of securing girls for immoral houses. 
 
 The other method used by the traders is the one which ap- 
 peals to the girl's ambition. Sometimes the procurers have 
 gained the parents' consent to allow their daughters to accom- 
 pany the supposed theatrical or employment agent, as the case 
 may be, to some city, thinking that through the daughter's 
 success their station in life would be raised. A girl in a 
 country community, or say factory town, is working for four 
 or five dollars each week, when one of these procurers, travel- 
 ing under the guise of an agent, meets her and promises ten to 
 twenty dollars a week for work in the city. She may be per-
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Roe. 123 
 
 fectly sincere and honest in her intention to better her con- 
 dition. She may want finer clothes, a wider knowledge of the 
 world, or an education, and so she consents to go with him, 
 and finally, against her will, ends up as an inmate in some im- 
 moral place. 
 
 One of the most recent cases shows how readily girls jump 
 at an opportunity to better their station in life. This case first 
 came before the court the day after last Christmas, when 
 Frank Kelly was arrested for carrying a revolver, with which 
 he tried to shoot an old man. During the trial the story de- 
 veloped as follows: 
 
 A year ago last summer fifteen-year-old Margaret Smith 
 was working about the simple home near Benton Harbor, 
 Michigan. The father, employed by the Pere Marquette Rail- 
 road, was away from home a good share of the time. One day 
 a graphophone agent called at the house and the family be- 
 came much interested in one of his musical machines. Shortly 
 afterward this agent brought with him to the Smith home 
 Frank Kelly, and introduced him to Maggie, as she was called 
 by her folks. In a day or two Margaret was on her way to 
 Chicago with Kelly, who promised her an excellent position 
 in the city. Upon their arrival Margaret was sold into one 
 of the lowest dives in Chicago, located in South Clark Street, 
 and owned by an Italian named Battista Pizza. Here she 
 learned that her captor was not Frank Kelly, but an Italian 
 whose real name was Alphonse Citro. For a year she was kept 
 as a slave in this resort, which was over a saloon, and the en- 
 trance was through a back alley. The only visitors were 
 Italians, who came for immoral purposes. Learning last 
 summer that Margaret 's father, who had been hunting relent- 
 lessly for his daughter, was on the track of her, the girl was 
 taken by Alphonse Citro, alias Kelly, to Gary, Indiana. When
 
 124 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 the father came to the resort with a policeman he found that 
 his daughter had gone. She was kept in Gary about two 
 months, and then returned to this disreputable place, from 
 which she escaped finally, the Monday before last Christmas. A 
 young barber took pity on her after hearing her sad story 
 and enlisted the sympathy of his parents, who took her to 
 their home. Alphonse Citro (Kelly) looked for her for al- 
 most a week, and at last saw her going from a store to this 
 home, where she was staying. He went to the house and de- 
 manded at the point of a revolver that she be given up, as he 
 said: 
 
 ' ' I am losing money every day she is gone. ' ' 
 There was a quarrel over the girl, during which some people 
 from the outside were attracted to the house by the commo- 
 tion. Citro, becoming frightened, fled down the street, and 
 as he ran threw the revolver, with which he tried to shoot the 
 father of the barber during the quarrel, over a fence into 
 a coal yard. After running two blocks, he was caught and 
 arrested. Upon these facts this procurer, Citro, alias Kelly, 
 was prosecuted and found guilty under the new pandering 
 law in Illinois, and received a sentence of one year 's imprison- 
 ment and a fine of five thousand dollars. The poor old father 
 and mother, distressed and heart-broken, were in court dur- 
 ing the trial with their arms around each other, sobbing with 
 joy because their little girl had been found. Pizza, the owner 
 of the place, was indicted by the state grand jury, but escaped 
 to Italy. This case is only one of the hundreds which might 
 be told to show how the girls leave home upon the promise of 
 securing employment and are in this way procured for places 
 of ill-repute. 
 
 The methods employed to entice young women are quite 
 similar, but as to the particulars each case varies to some
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Eoe. 125 
 
 extent. After the girls are once within the resort, the stories 
 are about the same. Their street clothes are seized and parlor 
 dresses varying in length are put upon them. They are 
 threatened, never allowed to write letters, never permitted 
 the use of the telephone, never trusted outside the house 
 without the escort of a procurer, until two or three months 
 have elapsed, when they are considered hardened to the life 
 and too ashamed to face parents and friends again. If they 
 should ask some visitor to the house to help them, would he 
 care to expose his name to the police, as he would have to, 
 by reporting the matter ? "Would he want his friends, or the 
 folks at home to know that he had visited such a place ? No ; 
 he would let the girl get out the best way she could; even 
 though he might promise to help her. Girls are told of or 
 perhaps have witnessed others who tried to escape, have seen 
 their failure and punishment, and are thereby cowed into 
 submission. They are always held upon the pretense of being 
 indebted to the house, and this indebtedness has long been 
 the backbone of the white slave system. From the time the 
 girl is first sold into the house she is constantly in debt. First, 
 for the money the owner gave to the procurer for her, next, 
 for her parlor clothes, then for the money her procurer bor- 
 rows from the owner on her as his property, goods and chattel. 
 The bonds of slavery are thus fastened upon these poor mor- 
 tals by a system of debt and vice that the people of this great 
 country little realized existed until lately. 
 
 Fighting against this slave trade under the archaic Illinois 
 laws was quite disheartening because it was almost impos- 
 sible to get more than a fine upon the charge of disorderly 
 conduct. The laws were so full of loop-holes that the traders 
 laughed at the idea of being prosecuted. However, in Illi- 
 nois, at least, we have choked the laugh. The features once
 
 126 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 wreathed in smiles begin to show the lines of worry and fear, 
 for a new law called the Pandering Act has been passed. 
 This went into force July 1st, 1908. The new law is good, 
 but experience has shown where improvement is necessary. 
 Without exception, in cases I have tried, certain wholesome- 
 minded jurors have said after concluding the case, that the 
 penalty was too light for the first offender. It should be 
 made more severe. Therefore an effort is now being made 
 to make the first offense punishable by imprisonment in the 
 penitentiary from one to ten years. Then, also, there should 
 be a new law covering the bringing a female person of any 
 age into the state or taking her out of the state for immoral 
 purposes. The age limit should be omitted from the present 
 Illinois law, which does not punish those bringing girls over 
 the age of eighteen into the state. While other states are 
 sending for copies of the Illinois pandering and other white 
 slave laws, the state legislation will soon be uniform upon 
 this subject. The United States government should be alive 
 to the situation also. At present it has only the immigration 
 laws regulating the importation of immoral women to fall 
 back upon. A Federal law under the inter-state and foreign 
 commerce act should be passed at once. The Federal Govern- 
 ment has better and more effective machinery for getting at 
 the facts in the foreign and inter-state traffic in girls than 
 have the various states. Commerce consists in intercourse 
 and traffic, including in these terms the transportation and 
 transit of persons and property, as well as the purchase, sale 
 and barter of persons and property and agreements therefor. 
 A Federal law might be enacted as follows: 
 
 " Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives 
 of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that 
 whoever shall procure, entice or encourage any female per-
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Roe. 127 
 
 sons to leave one of the states of the United States of America 
 to go into any other state in the United States of America 
 for the purpose of prostitution or to become an inmate of a 
 house of prostitution or to enter any place where prostitution 
 is practiced or allowed, or shall attempt to procure or entice 
 any female person to leave one of the states of the United 
 States of America to go into any other state for the purpose 
 of prostitution, or to become an inmate of a house of prosti- 
 tution or to enter any place where prostitution is practiced or 
 allowed, or shall receive or give, or agree to receive or give 
 any money or thing of value for procuring or attempting to 
 procure any female person to leave one of the states of the 
 United States of America to go into any other state in the 
 United States of America for the purpose of prostitution or 
 to become an inmate of a house of prostitution or to enter 
 any place where prostitution is practiced or allowed, shall, 
 in every case, be deemed guilty of a felony, and on conviction 
 thereof be imprisoned not more than ten years and pay a fine 
 of not more than ten thousand dollars." 
 
 Under the recent Federal decisions what can prevent the 
 enactment and enforcement of such a law making the traffic 
 in women illegal ? Of course, offenses committed solely within 
 the state could not be reached by the Federal Government. 
 
 Other needed legislative regulations concerning the white 
 slave traffic, such as laws against the procuring system and 
 the indebtedness system, have been set forth in other articles 
 in this magazine. However, besides these laws it will be nec- 
 essary in each state to create a commission in the various cities, 
 other than the police department, which shall keep a complete 
 record of all houses of ill-fame and their inmates. A public 
 bureau of information should be established by law where 
 parents and friends could easily learn the whereabouts of
 
 128 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 girls who have not been heard from, and this bureau should 
 have the names of every inmate of a disreputable house. 
 Such a commission should have power to inquire carefully 
 into the life of every girl. Statements should be made under 
 oath, and the right to ascertain whether or not these state- 
 ments were true should be given the commission. Thereby 
 the infected spots in every part of the country could be cov- 
 ered, and every girl and woman in immoral places could be 
 accounted for. The fact that this has not been done hereto- 
 fore has greatly aided the slave traders because their success 
 is accomplished by secrecy. Let us drag the monster, white 
 slavery, from under ground and let the light of day show upon 
 it, and then we shall have gone a long way towards extermina- 
 tion of this traffic. 
 
 That secrecy is maintained as to who the girls are and where 
 they are from is evidenced by one of the many letters I have 
 received, of which the following is a copy. 
 
 Chicago, III., July 13, 1908. 
 Mr. Clifford G. Roe, 
 
 Deai' Sir: Did you receive a letter from my mother, Mrs. 
 
 Effie , from Eloise, Mich. If so, I wish you would come 
 
 and see me so I can tell you everything. I have not been out 
 of the house for three months. I have not got any clothes 
 to wear on the street because I owe a debt. I wish you could 
 come and see me and I can tell you everything then. I am a 
 White Slave for sure. Please excuse pencil. I had to write 
 this and sneak this out. Please see to this at once and help 
 me and oblige, 
 
 Viola . 
 
 2001 Armour Avenue.
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Roe. 129 
 
 With people passing back and forth on the street and in 
 and out of the house every day it seems astonishing that girls 
 can be kept as slaves. However, the above appeal for help 
 tells the story, not alone of the writer, but of the thousands 
 of girls whose lives are being crushed, the minds depraved, 
 and the bodies diseased by outrageous bondage. It was dis- 
 covered that Viola had been given a fictitious name; all ave- 
 nues of communication with the outside world were cut off, 
 and she had lived in constant fear of being beaten if she let 
 anyone know who she was. At last, through a ruse, she suc- 
 ceeded in getting letters to her mother and myself, which 
 brought about her rescue and the return of the girl to her 
 mother, who is an invalid in the Wayne County Hospital at 
 Eloise, Michigan. 
 
 The owners of the resort where she was held were brought 
 before the bar of justice and the judge in sentencing them 
 said: "The levee resort keepers are murdering the souls of 
 girls and women by binding them with ropes of illegal debt ; 
 this practice must be wiped out." 
 
 The next question which confronts us is what shall we do 
 with the girls after they are liberated from the houses ? Some 
 have parents, some are ashamed to go back home, while others 
 are diseased. Certainly it seems a pity to turn them out and 
 let them battle against the prejudice of a "past life." Homes 
 and institutions for girls are often filled or the doors are 
 barred against fallen women. The solution of the problem 
 is a home for white slaves in every large city in the country. 
 
 Such a home should be well equipped with a hospital to 
 cure disease contracted in disreputable houses, and then there 
 should be schools in the institute for training the girls for 
 useful lives, where sewing, cooking, music, art, and other
 
 130 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 things are taught. In this way the girls would be fitted to 
 earn honest and wholesome livelihoods when they go out to 
 face the world. 
 
 Letters are sent me from all parts of the continent asking 
 what can be done to help the white slaves. My answer is, 
 form organizations everywhere to fight this traffic. Through 
 these organizations educate the girls in the rural communi- 
 ties to be careful how they are enticed or persuaded to go to 
 the cities. Demand proper legislation, write the senators and 
 representatives about it, in all places see that the laws in .re- 
 gard to disorderly resorts are enforced, that the foregoing 
 proposed commission is established and help build homes for 
 training the girls for better lives. 
 
 What mockery it is to have in our harbor in New York 
 the statue of Liberty with outstretched arms welcoming the 
 foreign girl to the land of the free ! How she must sneer at 
 it and rebuke the country with such an emblematic monument 
 at its very gate when she finds here a slavery whose chains 
 bind the captive more securely than those in the country from 
 which she has come ! 
 
 "What a travesty to wrap the flag of America around our 
 girls and extol virtue and purity, freedom and liberty, and 
 then not raise a hand to protect our own girls who are being 
 procured by white slave traders every day! 
 
 Some ministers have said that the subject is too black to 
 present to their congregations. It is a problem, they said, 
 for the public authorities and slum workers, not a question 
 for the high-minded citizen. It is the hope that the readers 
 of this magazine, who are church members, will suggest that 
 their pastors aid in the struggle against white slavery, and 
 that through them, people everywhere may be awakened to a
 
 The Story of Clifford G. Eoe. 131 
 
 realization of its importance. No social problem is too un- 
 clean for the people to take hold of when the cause undermines 
 the fairest heritage in life, our homes. For, after all, the 
 home is the social unit and the very foundation of all govern- 
 ment.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 More About the Traffic in Shame. 
 
 By Mrs. Ophelia Amigh, Superintendent of the Illinois 
 Training School for Girls. 
 
 One of the most disheartening things in the work of pro- 
 tecting innocent girls and restoring to useful lives those who 
 have been betrayed from the path of right living is the blind 
 incredulity of a very large part of the public. There are 
 hundreds of thousands of women in the homes of this country 
 who know as little of what is going on in the world, so far 
 as the safety of their daughters is concerned, as so many 
 children. They are almost marvelously ignorant of the ter- 
 rible conditions all about them — and all about their children, 
 too. 
 
 Of course, their blindness to these awful actualities makes 
 them more comfortable, for the time being, than they could 
 possibly be if awake to the perils which beset the feet of 
 their daughters and the daughters of their friends and neigh- 
 bors. But there is no permanency to this sort of peace — 
 and thousands of mothers of this class are annually brought 
 to their senses and recalled to earth by discovering that their 
 own daughters have made the fatal misstep and have passed 
 under the brand of the pariah. The awakening of such 
 parents comes too late, generally, to do much good. Not al- 
 ways, but in a majority of cases. Many, many times after 
 I have related to a casual woman visitor the simple details 
 of a typical "case" brought here to the State Home, the caller 
 
 132
 
 More About the Traffic in Shame. 133 
 
 has exclaimed: "How terrible! I didn't dream that such 
 things were going on in the world ! ' ' 
 
 Now, if you had something of great value which needed to 
 be protected day and night, would you select for such a task 
 a blind watchman? or one who was firmly possessed of the 
 idea that there was really no danger, no occasion for watchful- 
 ness ? Certainly not ! There is nothing in the world of such 
 priceless value to a father or a mother as the honor, the purity, 
 the good character of a daughter. No parent will possibly 
 question this statement. And still there are many thousands 
 of parents entrusted by Providence with the safe-keeping 
 of this priceless treasure who are themselves in the position 
 of discharging that great responsibility with closed eyes, with 
 dull ears and with a childish belief that there is no real peril 
 threatening the safety of their daughters! These parents 
 do not live on earth, their heads are in the clouds and their 
 ears are filled with the cry of " 'Peace! Peace!' when there 
 is no peace." 
 
 As one whose daily duty it is to deal with wayward and 
 fallen girls, as one who has to dig down into the sordid and 
 revolting details of thousands of these said cases (for I have 
 spent the best part of my life in this line of work) let me 
 say to such mothers : 
 
 In this day and age of the world no young girl is safe! 
 And all young girls who are not surrounded by the alert, 
 constant and intelligent protection of those who love them 
 unselfishly are in imminent and deadly peril. And the more 
 beautiful and attractive they are the greater is their peril! 
 
 The first and most vital step for the protection of the girls 
 who walk in this path of pitfalls is to arouse the sleeping 
 watchman who are, by reason of their parenthood, responsible 
 for the safekeeping of their daughters. This is why the
 
 134 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 "White Slave" articles by Hon. Edwin W. Sims and others, 
 ■which have been published in the "Woman's World," have 
 done great good. They have stirred to a sense of alarm thou- 
 sands of parents who were asleep in a false sense of security. 
 If they accomplish nothing beyond this they will fully have 
 justified their publication. 
 
 But it is evident that they will also result in the enactment 
 of much needed legislation, of laws which will make it easier 
 to convict and punish those who live from this foul traffic in 
 the shame of girls whose natural protectors are asleep in this 
 false sense of security. Of course, practically every state has 
 some laws against that traffic — but I do not know of any state 
 in which the laws now on the statute books are adequate to 
 deal with the situation as it should be dealt with. 
 
 One of the things which comfortable and trusting parents 
 seem to find especially hard to believe is the point upon which 
 both United States District Attorney Sims and his assistant, 
 Mr. Parkin, have placed so much stress — the existence of an 
 active and systematic traffic in girls. There is no safety for 
 the daughter of any parents who are not awake and alive 
 to the actuality of this fact ! 
 
 It is one of the satisfactions of my life to reflect that I 
 have been one of the agents in sending a dozen — perhaps 
 more — persons to the penitentiary for participating in this 
 traffic. 
 
 The dragnets of the inhuman men and women who ply 
 this terrible trade are spread day and night and are manipu- 
 lated with a skill and precision which ought to strike terror 
 to the heart of every careless or indifferent parent. The 
 wonder is not that so many are caught in this net, but that 
 they escape ! I count the week — I might almost say the day — 
 a happy and fortunate one which does not bring to my at-
 
 More About the Traffic in Shame. 135 
 
 tention as an officer of the state a deplorable case of this kind. 
 
 Just to show how tightly and broadly the nets of these 
 fishers for girls are spread, let me tell of an instance which 
 occurred from this institution: 
 
 This girl, whom I will call Nellie, is a very ordinary looking 
 girl and below the average of intelligence, but as tractable and 
 obedient as she is ingenuous. She is wholly without the 
 charm which would naturally attract the eye of the white 
 slave trader. 
 
 Because of her quietness, her obedience and her good dis- 
 position, she was, in accordance with the rules of the institu- 
 tion, permitted to go into the family of a substantial farmer 
 out in the west and work as a housemaid, a "hired girl" — 
 her wages to be deposited to her credit against the time when 
 she should reach the age of twenty-one and leave the Home. 
 
 She had been in her position for some time and was so quiet 
 and satisfactory that one Sunday when the family were not 
 going to church the mistress said : 
 
 "Nellie, if you wish to go to church alone you may do so. 
 The milk wagon will be along shortly and you can ride on 
 that to the village — and here is seventy-five cents. You 
 may want to buy your dinner and perhaps some candy. ' ' 
 
 "When Nellie reached town and was on her way past the 
 railroad station to the church, the train for Chicago came in, 
 and the impulse seized her to get aboard, go to the city and 
 look up her father, whom she had not seen for several months. 
 She went to the city and had hardly stepped from the train 
 into the big station when she heard a man's voice saying: 
 "Why, heUo, Mary!" 
 
 Instantly — foolishly, of course — she answered him and re- 
 plied : 
 
 "My name's not Mary, it's Nellie."
 
 136 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 "You look the very picture," he responded, "of a girl I 
 know well whose name is Mary — and she's a fine girl, too! 
 Are any of your folks here to meet you ? ' ' 
 
 "No," she answered. "My father's here in the city, some- 
 where, but he doesn't know I'm coming. I've been working 
 out in the country for a long time and I didn't write him 
 about coming back." 
 
 Her answers were so ingenuous and revealing that the 
 man saw that he had an easy and simple victim to deal with. 
 Therefore his tactics were very direct. 
 
 "It's about time to eat," he suggested, "and I guess we're 
 both hungry. You go to a restaurant and eat with me and 
 perhaps I can help you to find your father quicker than you 
 could do it alone." 
 
 She accepted, and in the course of the meal he asked her 
 if she would not like to find a place at which to work. "I 
 know of a fine place in Blank City, ' ' he added. ' ' The woman 
 is looking for a good girl just like you." 
 
 "Yes, I'd be pleased to get the place, but I haven't any 
 money to pay the fare with," was her answer. 
 
 "Oh, that's all right," he quickly replied. "I'll buy your 
 ticket and give you a little money besides for a cab and other 
 expenses. The woman told me to do that if I could find her 
 a girl. She'll send me back a check for it all." 
 
 After he had bought the ticket and put her aboard the 
 train going to Blank City, he wrote the name of the woman 
 to whom he was sending her, gave her about $2 extra and then 
 delivered this fatherly advice to her: 
 
 "You're just a young girl and it's best for you not to talk 
 to anybody on the train or after you get off. Don't show 
 this paper to anybody or tell anybody where you're going. 
 It isn't any of their business, anyway. And as soon as you
 
 More About the Traffic in Shame. 137 
 
 yet off the train you'll find plenty of cabs there. Hand your 
 paper to the first cab driver in the line, get in and ride to 
 Mrs. A 's home. Pay the driver and then walk in." 
 
 Believing that she was being furnished a position by a re- 
 markably kind man, the poor girl followed his directions 
 implicitly — and landed the next day in one of the most no- 
 torious houses of shame in the State of Illinois outside of 
 Chicago. How she was found and rescued is a story quite 
 apart from the purpose which has led me to tell of this in- 
 cident — that of indicating how tightly the slave traders 
 have their nets spread for even the most ordinary and unat- 
 tractive prey. They let no girl escape whom they dare to 
 approach ! 
 
 It may be well and to the point to add, however, that two 
 other girls who had been in the care of the State Home were 
 found to be in the same house to which the girl had been 
 lured, and they were also recovered. 
 
 Almost at the beginning of my experience I received a 
 penciled note which I have kept on my desk as a stimulus to 
 my energies and my watchfulness along the line of checkmat- 
 ing the work of the white slavers. It is very brief and terse 
 — but what a story it tells! Here is a copy of it — with the 
 substitution of a fictitious name : 
 
 "Ellen Holmes has been sold for 
 $50.00 to Madam Blank's house at 
 Armour Avenue." 
 
 The statement was true — and the man who sold her and the 
 woman who bought her were both sent to the state penitent- 
 tiary as a penalty for the transaction ! 
 
 Another fact which the public finds hard to believe — espe- 
 cially the public of mothers — is that girls who are lured into
 
 138 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 the life of shame find it impossible to make their escape, and 
 that they are prisoners and slaves in every sense of the word. 
 I recall one instance of a girl from a good home who had 
 fallen into the hands of a white slave trader and been sold 
 to a house in the red-light district. Her people were frantic 
 over her disappearance and made every possible effort to 
 locate her, but without success. Several months after the ex- 
 citement and publicity aroused by her disappearance died 
 away, a newsboy who had delivered papers at her home — ■ 
 which was in a very good residence district of the city — hap- 
 pened to be passing along a cross street of the red-light section 
 — just On the fringe of it, in fact. Suddenly he heard a tap 
 on the window, looked up and saw the anxious face of the 
 lost girl. Then she disappeared. 
 
 Knowing the story of her strange disappearance, he hurried 
 straight to her home and told of his experience. Instantly 
 the father secured officers and the little newsboy led the 
 posse back to the house, in the window of which he had caught 
 a glimpse of her face. They raided the place and rescued 
 the girl. The story of the terrible treatment which she had 
 received cannot be told here. It is enough to say that she had 
 been held as a captive, imprisoned as much as any inmate 
 of a penitentiary is imprisoned, and that if the friendly news- 
 boy had not happened to pass as he did, the window from 
 which she was looking out, she would undoubtedly be there 
 to-day or in some other similar prison of shame through the 
 process of exchange. 
 
 One other matter in this connection needs to come in for 
 clear and decisive emphasis; the fact that the runaway mar- 
 riage is the favorite device of the white slaver for landing 
 victims who could not otherwise be entrapped. These alleged 
 summer resorts and excursion centers which are well ad-
 
 More About the Traffic in Shame. 139 
 
 vertised as Gretna Greens, and as places where the usual legal 
 and official formalities preliminary to respectable marriage 
 are reduced to a minimum, are star recruiting stations for the 
 white slave traffic. I have never seen this point brought out 
 with any degree of clearness in any article, and I earnestly 
 urge all mothers to give this statement the most serious con- 
 sideration, and never to allow a daughter to go to one of these 
 places on an excursion or under any pretext whatever, unless 
 accompanied by some older member of the family. And even 
 then there is something unwholesome and contaminating in 
 the very atmosphere of such a place. 
 
 Do you think that I overstate the perils of places of this 
 kind ? Of these gay excursion centers, these American Gretna 
 Greens? I hesitate to say how many girls I have had under 
 my care who were enticed into a "runaway marriage" at 
 these places — and then promptly sold into white slavery by 
 the men whom they had married, the men who married 
 them for no other purpose than to sell them to the houses of 
 the red-light district and live in luxury from the proceeds 
 of their shame. 
 
 Let every mother teach her daughter that the men who 
 proposes an elopement, a runaway marriage, is not to be trust- 
 ed for an instant, and puts himself under suspician of being 
 that most loathsome of all things in human form — a white 
 slave trader! 
 
 For the Protection op Girls. 
 
 From 8,000 to 10,000 male parasites live on money taken 
 in by the 25,000 or 30,000 women of evil lives in Chicago, 
 according to an estimate by Clifford G. Roe, Assistant State's 
 Attorney. If this parasitism could be stopped these men
 
 140 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 would lose one motive for luring inexperienced girls into the 
 white slave market. 
 
 A method of putting an end to this evil is outlined in a 
 bill pending in the state legislature. It provides that any 
 person who lures a girl into slavery and receives money, sup- 
 port or maintenance from her shall be deemed guilty of a 
 felony and on conviction shall be sent to the penitentiary for 
 one or more years. 
 
 A companion bill makes it a felony, punishable by impris- 
 onment for one year or more, up to ten years, to detain a 
 girl in an evil resort or pay or cancel any debt or obligation. 
 The passage of this bill would assist materially in the rescue 
 of some of the 4,000 or 5,000 recruits, three-fourths of them 
 country girls from the middle west, estimated to be drawn an- 
 nually into disorderly houses in this city.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Added Proof op the Crime. 
 
 In this chapter we give the story as told by a Chicago news- 
 paper, The Tribune: 
 
 1 ' One year ago Chicago stood before the world accused and 
 shamed as the greatest white slave mart in America. To-day 
 the situation is changed. Chicago now stands forth as the 
 scene of the greatest battle in the world between the forces 
 for good and the white slavers, and it is doubtful if ever in 
 the history of civilization was waged such a fight as is being 
 fought in Chicago to-day for the preservation of the city's 
 good name and against the unspeakable traffic in girls known 
 as white slavery. 
 
 The city is roused. Its sensibilities at last have been 
 touched. For the first time since the beginning of anti-vice 
 crusades the decent forces of the community, from govern- 
 ment officials to private citizens, from specific reform associa- 
 tions to church bodies, have risen in response to the signal of 
 alarm sounded by the leaders. The total reform force of the 
 community has been set in motion. Chicago has awakened. 
 The knell has been sounded, and the infamous white slaver, 
 canker sore on the face of modern civilization, is to be hunted, 
 and fought, and prosecuted to his death. 
 
 "Not alone for the sake of the white slaves themselves, but 
 for the sake of civilization," is the motto of the new cru- 
 saders, and this is the motto that has been adopted by the 
 varied but consolidated army that will fight shoulder to 
 shoulder until white slaving in Chicago is a thing of the past. 
 
 141
 
 142 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Real Representatives Compose "Akmy." 
 
 The forces that make up the army are as representative of 
 Chicago as a metropolis, as an Illinois city, and as a big part 
 of the United States as, perhaps, could be gathered together. 
 Here is a list of them up to date: 
 
 B'nai B'rith society, Adolph Kraus, president; Clifford G. 
 Roe, attorney. 
 
 Chicago Association of Commerce. 
 
 United States District Attorney Edward W. Sims. 
 
 State's Attorney John E. W. Wayman. 
 
 Illinois State Bureau of Labor. 
 
 All Chicago churches. 
 
 Commercial club. 
 
 All reform bodies. 
 
 Hundreds of private citizens who have volunteered to act as 
 detectives in running down white slavers. 
 
 These are the forces for good. Arrayed against them in 
 sullen battle, foully fighting for continuance of the terrible 
 conditions that make their existence possible, are the white 
 slavers — the "owners" and sellers of the unfortunate enslaved 
 girls, the keepers of unnamable resorts, proprietors of tough 
 saloons, the boss politicians to whom these people and places 
 are a power in time of election and a source of rich graft 
 the year round, and lastly the unspeakable male vermin who 
 hang around the fringes of the red lights and live on the 
 pitiful pittances that fall from the tables of unfortunate 
 women. It is a fight between the decent element and the foul 
 beings who squirm and toss in the slime of the underworld. 
 It is a fight between the good and the unspeakably bad. And 
 for once the good starts out with the determination to stay in 
 the fight till the evil is wiped from the face of the earth.
 
 Added Proof of the Crime. 143 
 
 Slaves Bought and Sold in Chicago. 
 
 1 ' It means simply this, ' ' said Attorney Clifford Roe, ' ' Chi- 
 cago at last has waked up to a realization of the fact that 
 actual slavery that deals in human flesh and blood as a market- 
 able commodity exists in terrible magnitude in the city to- 
 day. It is slavery, real slavery, that we are fighting. The 
 term 'white slave' isn't a misnomer or a sensational term con- 
 jured up by sensational newspapers. The words describe 
 what they stand for. The white slave of Chicago is a slave 
 as much as the negro was before the Civil War, as the African 
 is in the Belgian districts of the Congo ; as much as any people 
 are slaves who are owned, flesh and bone, body and soul, 
 by another person, and who can be sold at any time and place 
 and for any price at that person's will. That is what slavery 
 is, and that is the condition of hundreds, yes, of thousands, 
 of girls in Chicago at present. 
 
 "It seems preposterous to think of girls, young, innocent 
 girls, girls of any kind, to be bought and sold like cattle in 
 the city, but it is too late to regard the matter in a skeptical 
 light. The thing exists. The trade in girls in Chicago is as 
 firmly established in its own dark, underground way as the 
 trade in beeves out at the, stockyards. One thousand women 
 annually needed to supply the demands of the city. A part of 
 these come through the natural channels of the misfortunes 
 that have produced their kind since the world began ;but a 
 great part are put into life through the terrible slavery. 
 
 "A syndicate for the procuring, enslaving and sale of 
 young girls exists in the city. Tt has scores of slaves in its 
 toils, as helpless as the slaves in Africa. There are scores of 
 'independent' slavers, unspeakable beings who own outright 
 a woman and live on her earnings. They sell her when, where
 
 144 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 and how they please. They own her. Can anything more 
 horrible be imagined ? 
 
 Crusade Planned for Big Fight. 
 
 "These are the conditions that the present crusade is organ- 
 ized to fight. It will not be a spasmodic crusade. It has been 
 planned for a long time, and organized along the lines that 
 experience has taught us will bring the results desired. 
 These results are nothing more nor less than to put every 
 white slaver in prison to rescue the hundreds of poor girls 
 whose slavery is a disgrace to the community and to civiliza- 
 tion, and to make it impossible for pandering and white slav- 
 ing to exist here. In short, to wipe white slavery off the face 
 of the earth, so far as Chicago is concerned at least. 
 
 "It will be a long fight and a hard one. By virtue of 
 the power over his subjects, and his inhuman treatment of 
 them, the white slaver is a hard man to find and harder to 
 convict. His victim often is so ignorant as not to be aware 
 that her slavery is illegal. Sometimes she is loath to have 
 the life she is leading exposed. And always she fears the 
 brute who brought her to her awful condition. But now that 
 the city has been awakened the task is easier. An adequate 
 pandering law gives us a weapon. "We will have the aid of 
 hundreds of good citizens who will furnish evidence, besides 
 our own corps of secret service men who will work from our 
 office, and the courts will assist us to the limit of their ability. 
 The doom of the white slaver in Chicago has been sounded, 
 and with his going Chicago will have rid itself of a foul sore 
 that has shamed its reputation as a civilized community."
 
 Added Proof of the Crime. 145 
 
 "Average Citizen" Blind to Conditions. 
 
 The magnitude of this evil, and the realization that the 
 term "white slavery" actually means flesh and blood slavery 
 of womankind, comes as a shock to the average citizen. Slav- 
 ery is considered an attribute to the dark ages. Modern en- 
 lightenment has no room for it in its economy. This country 
 could not bear the spectacle of black folk enslaved in the 
 South, and the most terrible civil war in all history was the 
 result. And yet here in Chicago the good citizen, his wife, 
 and his sons and daughters ride down town on the street cars 
 with never a thought of the fact that ere he reaches down 
 town his way will take him within pistol shot of dens where 
 women, white of skin and civilized of mind, are kept in slav- 
 ery under conditions much worse than that of the slave quar- 
 ters before the war. 
 
 Not nice, is it ? Apt to make one sniff and turn to subjects 
 more pleasing? Quite true. But it is this disposition of the 
 public to turn from the subject with disgust, to refuse to dirty 
 its well-kept fingers with so foul a problem, even though it 
 flourish in our back yards, that has made it possible for the 
 horrible traffic in woman-flesh to exist and to grow and 
 flourish. 
 
 "This office," said United States District Attorney Ed- 
 ward Sims, "has always known that white slavery existed. 
 It is slavery. It is a plain case of women being bought and 
 sold and held in captivity and slavery. For a long time, how- 
 ever, so little has been said of the problem that it has been 
 impossible to bring the public to realize the proportions of 
 this terrible disgrace. "What we have said about white slavery 
 has been disbelieved or discountenanced on many grounds. 
 But even if the innocence of a white slave herself is not estab-
 
 146 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 lished the law holds guilty the person who holds her in cap- 
 tivity. 
 
 Regime Intolerable to Civilization. 
 
 "Even admitting that a woman goes into this life of her 
 own will, the time comes when she wishes to leave it, 
 or wishes to go to another resort. But, under the white slave 
 regime she is held in one place, held by force, beaten and 
 threatened with death if she continues in her rebellion. She 
 is told that she is in debt to the house. If she insists in her 
 rebellion she may be sold bodily to another resort. The un- 
 fortunate victims of white slavery in Chicago are passing from 
 one owner to another for cash considerations, exactly as were 
 the black slaves of the South. She is a human chattel. It is 
 a condition too foul for words." 
 
 Can it be true? asks the citizen who is wont to regard all 
 of Chicago as pretty much civilized. 
 
 It can. Give heed to the story of one Caterina Bressi, 19- 
 year-old Italian girl, who came to visit Chicago as the guest 
 of a Mrs. Santina Pezza, a countrywoman of the girl's resid- 
 ing in lower State street. Mrs. Pezza advanced the girl $100 
 to pay for her transportation to this city, and in New York 
 she was met at the dock by two men who informed her that 
 they had been sent to accompany her as a guarantee of her 
 safe arrival at her destination. Six months later Attorney 
 Sims raided a house at 461 State Street and found Miss 
 Bressi as an inmate, suffering from long razor cuts on her 
 face and neck. The story that the girl told in Mr. Sims' 
 office subsequently almost passes belief.
 
 Added Proof of the Crime. 147 
 
 Girl Held in Absolute Slavery. 
 
 Her slavery began in New York, where the men placed her 
 in a house of bondage and kept her for a while. In a few 
 weeks she was taken to Chicago under guard and placed in 
 a cheap resort for negroes and Italians at 407 South Clark 
 Street. Here she was held in absolute slavery under unprint- 
 able conditions. She begged for her release and was informed 
 that she was in debt $400 to Mrs. Pezza. The girl worked 
 until this was paid. Then she was told bluntly that she was 
 a slave, that she would be held as such until the end. 
 
 Then the Bressi girl tried to run away. She was caught at 
 the door by one of the male attaches of the place, knocked 
 down like a steer in the pen, and while she lay helpless she 
 was slashed about the head with a razor, one cut being ten 
 inches long and destroying one of her eyelids. After thus 
 having convinced her that it was dangerous and impossible 
 to escape once she was in the slaver's clutches, the girl was 
 carried upstairs, her wounds were roughly sewed up, and 
 after that she was sent to the county hospital for care, being 
 threatened before going that if she did not explain to the 
 authorities that she had got her injuries in an accident she 
 would be killed. 
 
 The girl got well. She was turned out of the hospital as 
 recovered. At the door two men were waiting for her. 
 She was not to gain her freedom. They carried her back 
 to the resort on State Street, from the hospital to a place 
 of prostitution, and there she remained until Mr. Sims' raid- 
 ers found her. But for the raid this girl still would be a 
 slave, if she were alive ; and there are hundreds such as she, 
 held under just as brutal circumstances, panting for the air 
 of freedom, in the different vile sections of the city.
 
 148 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Ochsner Case Typical op Owner. 
 
 Take the ease of the infamous Joseph Ochsner, a typical 
 case of an "owner" of a slave who was exposed and caught. 
 There are hundreds of Ochsners in the city, men who ' ' own ' ' 
 a woman, who place her where they please and live off her 
 earnings. 
 
 Joseph Ochsner was a German who had learned his un- 
 printable trade in the old country. The trade was ruining 
 and selling girls. In appearance he was the stolid, respectable 
 German citizen of the middle class ; in reality he was a fiend. 
 In time the Berlin police grew suspicious of him and his ac- 
 tivities, and it was hinted to him that he had better leave 
 the country. He left, but before going he managed to insinu- 
 ate himself into the affections of a young girl of good family, 
 and in the end he persuaded her to elope with him, on the 
 promise that they would be married as soon as they reached 
 America. 
 
 They came to South Chicago. Then Ochsner, with a bru- 
 tality seldom equaled even in his own class, at once took the 
 trusting and innocent girl to one of the lowest resorts in 
 the Strand district, removed her clothes, locked her in a 
 room and calmly informed her that she was his slave, that 
 she must stay in the resort until he saw fit to remove her, 
 and that all her earnings were to go to him. 
 
 In that resort the girl was kept in absolute slavery. She 
 was not allowed to leave the house, to write or receive a letter, 
 or to have any communication with the outer world. For 
 months she remained thus enslaved. Then she managed to 
 have a letter mailed to her parents in Germany, the authori- 
 ties of this country were informed, and the result was her 
 release and the arrest and conviction of the infamous Ochsner.
 
 Added Proof of the Crime. 149 
 
 Root op the Evil the Parasite. 
 
 "Get rid of the parasite, the creature who places young 
 girls in resorts," says Adolf Kraus, of B'nai B'rith. "Place 
 him or her in prison and the root of the white slave evil will 
 have been destroyed." 
 
 But do these parasites prey on our own girls, on the girls 
 born and brought up in Chicago ? asks the skeptical citizen. 
 
 They do. The number of young Chicago girls who have 
 been trapped and doomed to a living death is appalling. One 
 case may suffice to illustrate the methods of a parasite "cut- 
 ting out" a slave for himself in this city. The case still is 
 fresh in the public mind. 
 
 Mary McConnell, age 16, met a good looking, well dressed 
 young man named Jacobson at a west side amusement park. 
 The young man conducted himself with great propriety, paid 
 for rides and other amusements, and at the end of the evening 
 begged for permission to call on the girl at her home. Per- 
 mission was given, and when Jacobson came he brought with 
 him a friend, Louis Brodsky. To complete the party Miss 
 McConnell called in a girl friend of her own age and intro- 
 duced her to Brodsky. A few nights later the party of four 
 went out for an evening's amusement. Then the young men 
 announced that they were desperately in love with the girls, 
 that they were rich, and that they wanted to marry them. 
 
 Innocent of Pitfalls of City. 
 
 The girls, young, inexperienced, and, like most Chicago 
 children of their age, untaught by their parents in the pitfalls 
 of the city, were overwhelmed at the thought of marrying 
 money and accompanied the two slavers to South Chicago, 
 where the marriage was to be performed. But here the dream
 
 150 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 ended. Instead of a minister, the party was met at the train 
 by Abe Weinstein, keeper of a South Chicago resort, and 
 Jennie Sanduskey, his housekeeper. The girls were taken to 
 the resort; they were imprisoned, their clothes stolen and 
 by brute force they were driven into the dismal life of a white 
 slave. 
 
 Their eventual escape brought about the arrest of Brodsky, 
 and Weinstein, all three of whom are now in the jail awaiting 
 trial. 
 
 Just one instance. The Brodskys and Jacobsons prowl the 
 city from end to end. No young girl not absolutely sheltered 
 by home and home influences is safe from them. The shop 
 girl on starvation wages, the factory girl on the same, are 
 their especial victims. Every day the parasites infest the 
 down town district; during the summer time the amusement 
 park is their stamping ground; and the harvest they reap is 
 plentiful both in numbers and damnation. 
 
 This is what the present crusade is planned to end. As one 
 French procurer of women in the city wrote to a friend in 
 Paris : 
 
 "Chicago is cursed with reform. There is no place for us 
 here. "We are being forced out of business. It is a city ac- 
 cursed by. reformers." 
 
 There have been other crusades against the evil. The evil 
 still exists. But here is a crusade that will not cease crusad- 
 ing until the last white slaver has been driven from the city 
 and the last unfortunate slave given the chance to accept the 
 tradition that this is ' ' the land of the free. ' '
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 A Slum "Worker's Story. 
 
 After we have added some facts from Rev. Earnest A. Bell, 
 Superintendent of the Midnight Mission in Chicago, we be- 
 lieve sufficient evidence will have been given to prove beyond 
 any question that this awful black traffic in white girls, which 
 has been allowed to go on for so many years, without an 
 effort to hunt the offenders, and mete out to them ample 
 punishment, should come to and end. Rev. Bell says: 
 
 ' ' However unwilling we may be to admit facts so shameful, 
 the undeniable truth is established beyond dispute that a 
 prodigious and appalling commerce in girls is a part of the 
 colossal business enterprise of our great modern cities. The 
 most hopeful present sign in the war on the white slave trade 
 is the sense of shame that honest business men feel over the 
 criminal use of capital and business methods to exploit the 
 young people of this and other nations. 
 
 The red-light districts, like a lake of fire, are constantly 
 ingulfing unwary and unprotected girls and boys, along 
 with the wilfully depraved. The fires of these burning mael- 
 stroms, the illegal vice districts, are kept up in an enterpris- 
 ing and systematic way by the business ability of the mon- 
 strous men who keep the houses of shame. No store on State 
 Street is better arranged to attract purchasers than the crimi- 
 nal resorts are arranged to attract victims of both sexes. 
 
 Until recently, business men and the plain people generally 
 could not believe that systematic commerce in women and 
 girls existed. Missionaries and prosecutors who sounded the 
 
 151
 
 152 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 alarm were thought to be suffering from an overheated imagi- 
 nation or possibly seeking notoriety and free advertising. 
 Business men and editors of great newspapers asked for facts 
 — plain, hard facts, without exaggeration or rhetoric. 
 
 Unhappily, it has been all too easy to bring forward the 
 frightful facts by the hundreds, demonstrating to every in- 
 quirer the existence of a white slave market, immense and 
 horrible. Earnest, shrewd men of affairs, bankers, merchants, 
 lawyers, judges, men who never allow their own imaginations 
 of the imaginations of other men to carry them away, now 
 know all too well for their peace of mind that our city is one 
 of the great centers of the most infamous traffic in the world. 
 
 However eager the missionaries may be to make an end of 
 sin, the lawyers and business men who are opposing the white 
 slave trade have no illusions about the speedy annihilation 
 of vice, however desirable such annihilation undoubtedly is. 
 "What these business men do seek to accomplish is to expose 
 and as far as possibly destroy the commercial exploitation of 
 the youth of both sexes to their destruction. The criminal 
 use of capital, real estate, business ability, and methods, in 
 order to spread ruin and pestilence broadcast through city 
 and country, can be checked and largely crushed if a few hun- 
 dred capable, decent men will invest time and money in the 
 righteous cause. 
 
 It is no impossible task to drag a thousand dive-keepers, 
 procurers, renting agents, and grafting officials before the 
 bar of justice and put enough of them in cells to terrify 
 the whole infernal brood, making grafters and dive-keepers 
 inmates at Joliet. 
 
 It is not enough to punish the small fry. Unless the whole- 
 salers and principals are crushed we are trifling with the hor- 
 rible trade. The whole iniquity of giving a permit to those
 
 A Slum Worker's Story. 153 
 
 brutes to make commerce of girls is monstrous. The dive 
 breeds the procurers, and breeds the grafters; this is the his- 
 toric fact. We are not in earnest till we strike hard and often 
 at the principals in the hideous business. 
 
 It is quite within the power of a dozen business men and 
 one newspaper The Tribune, to inform all Chicago as to the 
 exact facts of the white slave trade and to expose every person 
 profiting by these crimes, including those hypocrites who live 
 in Hyde Park and Evanston on the earnings of ruined girls 
 in Chicago's underworld. 
 
 It is almost easy to alarm the plain people as to the hideous 
 consequences in the way of diseases that attend the traffic in 
 girls. Fifty thousand dollars in the right hands would make 
 known to our adult citizens that one-fourth of the blind are 
 blind because of the sins of their fathers, that one-fourth of 
 the women undergoing surgical operations suffer thus because 
 of the sins of their husbands, that about one-fourth of the 
 insane would be sane if this pestilent vice were abolished. 
 
 In India, where I was a missionary to the heathen some 
 years before I went to the savages of midnight Chicago, the 
 government pays a bounty to any one who brings proof of 
 having killed a man eating tiger or a deadly serpent. Let 
 our laws provide a bounty of $1,000 a head, to be paid to any 
 one who will cage up permanently the wild beasts, the dive- 
 keepers, who devour girls and young men in Chicago, and 
 with them the slimy snakes that those crafty scoundrels send 
 through the land to charm silly canaries to feed the cats and 
 dogs that live on girls."
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Why Girls Go Astray. 
 
 We are glad to give the version of United States District 
 Attorney Sims on this subject, "Why Girls Go Astray." 
 
 Mr. Sims says: 
 
 "Right at the outset let me say in all frankness that I 
 would never, from personal choice, write upon a subject of 
 this character. Its sensationalism is personally repellant 
 to me. On the other hand, no matter how carefully the public 
 prosecutor may preserve the legal viewpoint and the legal 
 temperament, his work may lead him into situations where 
 he feels that he cannot, in common humanity, withhold from 
 the public a knowledge of the things which he knows cannot 
 fail to be of actual protective benefit to many homes ; that to 
 withhold the facts and disclosures which have come to him 
 as an officer of the law would be to deprive the innocent and 
 the worthy of a protection which might save many a home 
 from sorrow, disgrace, and ruin. 
 
 Again: The results of this legal work and of the explana- 
 tions of the conditions uncovered in my former article have 
 brought to me a gratifying knowledge of the practical rescue 
 work being done by the settlement and the "slum" workers 
 of Chicago. They are not only specialists in this field, but 
 they are as devoted as they are practical. More, perhaps, be- 
 cause of their urgent assurance that giving to the public a 
 statement of actual conditions has been of a great service to 
 them in their hand-to-hand fight than for any other reason, I 
 am moved to make another statement. 
 
 154
 
 Why Girls Go Astray. 155 
 
 "When the editor of the "Woman's World" urged me to 
 write of "The White Slave Traffic of To-day," I felt that I 
 had an official knowledge of facts which the fathers and 
 mothers of the country had a right to know in order to pre- 
 vent the possibility of their daughters falling victims to the 
 most hideous forms of human slavery known in the world 
 to-day. This consideration moved me to put aside my strong 
 personal feelings against appearing in print in connection 
 with a subject so abhorrent. Many results of that article 
 have made me glad that I did so — and those results have also 
 contributed to overcome my antipathy to a further pursuit 
 of that subject. But in following this topic in a second 
 article I shall again emphasize the fact that I wish to say 
 what seems to be needful in as unsensational a way as pos- 
 sible, and that I also wish to do that from the viewpoint of a 
 public prosecutor who has, in the ordinary discharge of his 
 duties, encountered this appalling situation, and not at all 
 from the standpoint of the sentimentalist. 
 
 So far as the matter of sensationalism is concerned, that 
 may be disposed of in the simple statement that the naked 
 recital, in the most formal and colorless phraseology, of the 
 facts already brought to light by the "white slave" prosecu- 
 tions are in themselves so sensational that the art of the most 
 brilliant orator, or the cunning of the cleverest writer, could 
 not add an iota to their sensationalism. And it may as well 
 be said here that it is quite impossible to even hint in public 
 print of the revolting depths of shame disclosed by this in- 
 vestigation. Behind every word that can be said in print on 
 this topic is a word of degradation of which the slightest hint 
 cannot be given. 
 
 If there are any who are inclined to feel that the term 
 "white slave" is a little overdrawn, a little exaggerated, let
 
 156 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 them decide on that point after considering this statement: 
 "Among the 'white slaves' captured in raids since the ap- 
 pearance of my first article is a girl who is now about eigh- 
 teen years of age. Her home was in France, and when she 
 was only fourteen years old she was approached by a 'white 
 slaver' who promised her employment in America as a lady's 
 maid or companion. The wage offered was far beyond what 
 she could expect to get in her own country — but far more 
 alluring to her than the money she could earn was the picture 
 of the life which would be hers in free America. Her sur- 
 roundings would be luxurious; she would be the constant re- 
 cipient of gifts of dainty clothing from her mistress, and 
 even the hardest work she would be called upon to do would 
 be in itself a pleasure and an excitement. 
 
 "Naturally she was eager to leave her home and trust 
 herself to one who would provide her with so enriching a 
 future. Her friends of her own age seasoned their farewells 
 to her with envy of her rare good fortune. 
 
 "On arriving in Chicago she was taken to the house of ill- 
 fame to which she had been sold by the procurer. There this 
 child of fourteen was quickly and unceremoniously 'broken 
 in' to the hideous life of depravity for which she had been 
 entrapped. The white slaver who sold her was able to drive 
 a most profitable bargain, for she was rated as uncommonly 
 attractive. In fact, he made her life of shame a perpetual 
 source of income, and when — not long ago — he was captured 
 and indicted for the transportation of other girls, this girl 
 was used as the agency of providing him with $2,000 for his 
 defense. 
 
 "But let us look for a moment at the mentionable facts of 
 this child's daily routine of life and see if such an existence 
 justifies the use of the term 'slavery.' After she had fur-
 
 Why Girls Go Astray. 157 
 
 nished a night of servitude to the brutal passions of vile fre- 
 quenters of the place, she was then compelled each night to 
 put off her tawdry costume, array herself in the garb of a 
 scrub-woman and, on her hands and knees, scrub the house 
 from top to bottom. No weariness, no exhaustion, ever ex- 
 cused her from this drudgery, which was a full day's work 
 for a strong woman. 
 
 ''After her scrubbing was done she was allowed to go to her 
 chamber and sleep — locked in her room to prevent her pos- 
 sible escape — until the orgies of the next day, or rather night, 
 began. She was allowed no liberties, no freedom, and in the 
 two and a half years of her slavery in this house she was 
 not even given one dollar to spend for her own comfort or 
 pleasure. The legal evidence shows that during this period 
 of slavery she earned for those who owned her not less than 
 eight thousand dollars — and probably ten thousand dollars!" 
 
 If this is not slavery, I have no definition for it. 
 
 Let me make it entirely clear that the white slave is an 
 actual prisoner. She is under the most constant surveillance, 
 both by the keeper to whom she is "let" and by the procurer 
 who owns her. Not until she has lost all possible desire to 
 escape is she given any liberty. 
 
 Many — very many — letters have been received from parents 
 who read the first article on this subject in the September 
 issue of the "Woman's World." A considerable number of 
 them are from ministers of the gospel, from officers and mem- 
 bers of law and order leagues, woman's clubs and kindred 
 organizations. But there is a pathetic remainder which does 
 not come from the public-spirited servants of the common 
 good. These letters are from the fathers and mothers whose 
 fears and suspicions were aroused by the warning that the 
 girl who has left her home in the country, gone up to the 
 city and does not come home to visit, needs to be looked up.
 
 158 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Before me, as I write, is a letter from a father which is 
 a tragedy in a page. He begins the note by saying that the 
 warning has aroused him to inquire after his "little girl." 
 There is a pathetic pride in his admission that she was con- 
 sidered and uncommonly "pretty girl" when she left her 
 home to take a position in Chicago. Her letters, he states, 
 have been more and more infrequent, but that she does oc- 
 casionally write home, and sometimes encloses a small amount 
 of money. From the tone of the father's note it is evident 
 that, while he is a trifle anxious, he asks that his daughter 
 be "looked up" rather to confirm his feelings of confidence 
 that she is all right than otherwise. 
 
 A glance at the address where she was to be found left no 
 possible question as to the fate which had overtaken this 
 daughter of a country home. So far as a knowledge of the 
 girl's mode of life is concerned, no investigation was neces- 
 sary — the location named being in the center of Chicago's 
 "red-light" district. 
 
 However, the case was placed in the hands of a settlement 
 worker, and at this moment the girl is waiting, in a place 
 of safety, for the arrival of her father, who is on his way to 
 take her back to the mother and brothers and sisters who 
 have supposed that she was holding a respectable but poorly 
 paid position. They will, however, welcome a very different 
 person from the "pretty girl" who went out from that home 
 to make her way in the big city. She is pitifully wasted by 
 the life which she has led and her constitution is so broken 
 down that she cannot reasonably expect many years of life, 
 even under the tenderest care. What is still worse, the fact 
 cannot be denied that her moral fibre is much shattered and 
 that the work of reclamation must be more than physical. 
 
 The "white slaves" who have been taken in the course of
 
 Why Girls Go Astray. 159 
 
 the present prosecution have, generally, been very grateful 
 for the liberation and glad return to their homes. It has 
 been necessary — for their own protection as well as for other 
 reasons — to commit some of these unfortunates to various 
 prisons pending the trial of the cases in which they are to 
 appear as witnesses, and practically every one of them gives 
 unmistakable evidence that imprisonment is a welcome libera- 
 tion by comparison with the life of "white slavery." 
 
 Now as to the practical means which parents should use to 
 prevent this unspeakable fate from overtaking their daugh- 
 ters. ' They cannot do it by assuming that their daughter is 
 all right and that she will take care of herself in the big city. 
 In a large measure it seems impossible to arouse parents — 
 especially those in the country — to a realization that there is 
 in every big city a class of men and women who live by 
 trapping girls into a life of degradation and who are as in- 
 humanly cunning in their awful craft as they are in their 
 other instincts; that these beasts of the human jungle are as 
 unbelievably desperate as they are unbelievably cruel, and 
 that their warfare upon virtue is as persistent, as calculating 
 and as unceasing as was the warfare of the wolf upon the 
 unprotected lamb of the pioneer folk in the early days of the 
 Western frontier. 
 
 I cannot escape the conclusion that the country girl is in 
 greater danger from the "white slavers" than the city girl. 
 The perusal of the testimony of many "white slaves" enforces 
 this conclusion. That is because they are less sophisticated, 
 more trusting and more open to the allurements of those who 
 are waiting to prey upon them. 
 
 It is a fact which parents of girls in the country should 
 remember that the "white slavers" are busy on the trains 
 coming into the city and make it a point to "cut out" an
 
 160 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 attractive girl whenever they can. This "cutting out" pro- 
 cess (I use the technical term) consists of making the girl's 
 acquaintance, gaining her confidence and, on one pretext or 
 another, inducing her to leave the train before the main 
 depot is reached. This is done because the various protective 
 law and order organizations have watchers at the main rail- 
 road stations who are trained to the work of "spotting," and 
 quickly detect a girl in the hands of one of these human beasts 
 of prey. Generally these watchers are women and wear the 
 badges of their organizations. 
 
 But suppose that the girl from the country does not chance 
 to fall in with the "white slaver" on the train, that she 
 reaches the city in safety, becomes located in a position — or 
 perhaps in the stenographic school or business college which 
 she has come to attend — and secures a room in a boarding 
 house. No human being, it seems to me, is quite so lonely 
 as the young girl from the country when she first comes to the 
 city and starts in the struggle of life there without acquaint- 
 ances. All her instincts are social, and she is, for the time 
 being, almost desolately alone in a wilderness of strange hu- 
 man beings. She must have some one to talk to — it is the 
 law of youth as well as the law of her sex to crave constant 
 companionship. And the consequences ? She is sentimentally 
 in a condition to prepare her for the slaughter, to make her 
 an easy prey to the wiles of the "white slave" wolf. 
 
 The girl reared in the city does not have this peculiar and 
 insidious handicap to contend with. She has been — from the 
 time she could first toddle along the sidewalk — educated in 
 wholesome suspicion, taught that she must not talk with 
 strangers or take candy from them, that she must withdraw 
 herself from all advances and, in large measure, regard all 
 save her own people with distrust. As she grows older she
 
 Why Girls Go Astray. 161 
 
 comes to know that certain parts of the city are more dan- 
 gerous and more "wicked" than others; that her comings 
 and goings must always be in safe and familiar company; 
 that her acquaintanceships and her friendships must be scru- 
 tinized by her natural protectors and that, altogether, there 
 is a definite but undefined danger in the very atmosphere of 
 the city for the girl or the young woman which demands a 
 constant and protecting alertness. 
 
 The training is almost wholly absent in the case of the 
 country girl; she is not educated in suspicion until the pro- 
 tective instinct acts almost unconsciously; her intercourse 
 with her world is almost comparatively free and unrestrained ; 
 she is so unlearned in the moral and social geography of the 
 city that she is quite as likely, if left to her own devices, to 
 select her boarding house in an undesirable as in a safe and 
 desirable part of the city; and, in a word, when she comes 
 into the city her innocence, her trusting faith in humanity 
 in general, her ignorance of the underworld and her loneli- 
 ness and perhaps homesickness, conspire to make her a ready 
 and an easy victim of the "white slaver." 
 
 In view of what I have learned in the course of the recent 
 investigation and prosecution of the "white slave" traffic, 
 I can say, in all sincerity, that if I lived in the country and 
 had a young daughter I would go to any length of hardship 
 and privation myself rather than allow her to go into the city 
 to work or to study — unless that studying were to be done in 
 the very best type of an educational institution where the 
 girl students were always under the closest protection. The 
 best and the surest way for parents of girls in the country to 
 porteet them from the clutches of the "white slaver" is to 
 keep them in the country. But if circumstances should seem 
 to compel a change from the country to the city, then the
 
 162 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 only safe way is to go with them into the city ; but even this 
 has its disadvantages from the fact that, in that case, the 
 parents would themselves be unfamiliar with the usages and 
 pitfalls of metropolitan life, and would not be able to protect 
 their daughters as carefully as if they had spent their own 
 lives in the city. 
 
 One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes 
 up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor 
 is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This 
 is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit 
 stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where 
 young girls have taken their first step towards "white slav- 
 ery" in places of this character. And it is hardly too much 
 to say that a week does not pass in Chicago without the pub- 
 lication in some daily paper of the details of a police court 
 case in which the ice cream parlor of this type is the scene 
 of some girl's tragedy. The only safe rule is to keep away 
 from places of this kind, whether in a big city like Chicago 
 or in a large country town. I believe that there are good 
 grounds for the suspicion that the ice cream parlor, kept by 
 the foreigner in the large country town, is often a recruiting 
 station, and a feeder for the "white slave" traffic. It is 
 certain that this is the case in the big city, and many evidences 
 point to the conclusion that there is a kind of free-masonry 
 among these foreign proprietors of refreshment parlors which 
 would make it entirely natural and convenient for the pro- 
 prietor of a city establishment of this kind, who is entangled 
 in the "white slave" trade, to establish relations with a man 
 in the same business and of the same nationality in the coun- 
 try town. I do not mean to infer by this that all the ice 
 cream and fruit "saloons" having foreign-born proprietors 
 are connected with the "white slave" traffic — but some of
 
 Why Girls Go Astray. 163 
 
 them are, and this fact is sufficient to cause all careful and 
 thoughtful parents of young girls to see that they do not 
 frequent these places. 
 
 In this article it is of course impossible to more than hint 
 at the protective measures which conscientious parents of 
 girls should employ in order to make the way safe for their 
 daughters. There can be no doubt that Judge Lindsay, of 
 Denver, Judge Mack of Chicago, and Mr. Edward W. Bok 
 of the "Ladies' Home Journal" are right in insisting upon 
 greater frankness between parents and children and that 
 every child should have a sex education at home instead of 
 being compelled to pick it up from contaminating sources 
 on the street and at school. And I may add that the world 
 owes a debt to these men who have handled this delicate and 
 difficult problem in a practical as well as a powerful manner ; 
 and I feel impelled to add that, in face of the horrifying dis- 
 closures brought to me in the form of legal evidence, every 
 boy and girl of high school age should be taught something of 
 the awful physical as well as the moral consequences which 
 lurk behind allurements of the life in which the ' ' white slave ' ' 
 is the central figure. These things cannot be presented in the 
 public prints, but the father who keeps close to his boy and 
 the mother who is a companion to her daughter may reveal 
 these things, in the home, in a way which may save almost 
 untold suffering. And to such parents I would say that the 
 investigations of the United States District Attorney's office 
 in Chicago have brought together, as legal evidence, a mass 
 of facts as to sanitary conditions in the districts where the 
 "white slaves" are kept, which are horrifying and scarcely 
 capable of exaggeration.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 
 
 Assistant United States District Attorney Mr. Harry A. 
 Parkins, of Chicago, writing upon this subject, gives us more 
 facts to think about. We hope we shall not only think about 
 them but act, in regard thereto. Mr. Parkin says : 
 
 "What can be done about it? 
 
 There could be no legitimate excuse for exploiting the white 
 slave trade in the public prints without the definite and sin- 
 cere purpose of securing practical and substantial protection 
 against this terrible social scourge. Such is as surely the pur- 
 pose of this article as it has been that of the preceding articles 
 by Hon. Edwin W. Sims which have brought out a vast and 
 interesting volume of correspondence. 
 
 Many of these letters have been from fathers and mothers 
 aroused to anxiety about daughters who have been allowed to 
 seek a livelihood in large cities without suitable oversight 
 or protection. In some instances the worst fears of these 
 parents have been, by definite investigation, shown to be 
 all too well founded. 
 
 Others letters have come, by the score, from public 
 officials and public-spirited men and women who have 
 at last been stirred to a realization that there is 
 an actual, systematic and widespread traffic in girls 
 as definite, as established, as mercenary and as fiendish 
 as was the African slave trade in its blackest days. And 
 practically all these letters indicate that very few of those 
 who have been finally aroused to the enormity of existing 
 
 164
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 165 
 
 conditions have any clear idea of what should or may be 
 done to protect these daughters of our own people from the 
 ravages of the white slave traders. 
 
 A letter from the Mayor of a Connecticut city is typical 
 of the common misconception among cultivated and well- 
 informed public officials who have not given the legal phases 
 of the expression of the white slave trade especial and ex- 
 haustive study. The mayor writes: 
 
 "I should think that the Federal Government would have 
 to pass stringent laws providing a heavy penalty for all who 
 are engaged in this business. The law would then be the same 
 in all states and people could not escape from its provision 
 as they would if the states tried to take up the matter and 
 passed conflicting statutes. An organization might secure 
 the passage of such an act by the Federal Government, but 
 it hardly seems to me that it is necessary, more than to state 
 the facts, and have the members of Congress take immediate 
 action that would put an end to the whole matter." 
 
 "While it is probably true that the Federal Government has 
 power to prohibit the carrying of women from one state to 
 another for immoral purposes, that power has not yet been 
 specifically established by actual tests in court and that is 
 therefore, in a sense, undefined. On the other hand, the states, 
 under their police power, have a remedy in their own hands, 
 and it would seem both logical and natural that this power 
 be exercised in the protection of its own homes and daughters. 
 As a matter of fact, we have found literally scores of cases, 
 in our investigations relative to the importation from foreign 
 countries of girls destined for immoral bouses, where Ameri- 
 can born girls have been lured or kidnaped from a home in 
 one state and carried to some large city in another state, there 
 to be broken to the life of shame.
 
 166 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 The Federal investigations in Chicago and other localities 
 have clearly established the fact that, generally speaking, 
 houses of ill-fame in large cities do not draw their recruits 
 to any great extent from the territory immediately surround- 
 ing them. For obvious reasons the white slavers who are the 
 recruiting agents for this vile traffic prefer to work in states 
 more or less distant from the centers to which their victims 
 are destined. 
 
 In view of all this it must be clearly apparent that the 
 need of the hour is legislation which will make it as difficult 
 and dangerous for a white slaver to take his victim from one 
 state into another as it is for him to bring a girl from France, 
 or Italy, or Canada, or any other foreign country, to a house 
 of ill-fame in Chicago or any American city. Therefore, it is 
 suggested that if each State in the Union would pass and 
 enforce severe and stringent laws against this importation, 
 this terrible traffic would be dealt a blow in its most vulner- 
 able part. Such an enactment might well be worded as 
 follows : 
 
 "Whoever shall induce, entire or procure, or attempt to 
 induce, entice or procure, to come into this state, any woman 
 or girl for the purpose of prostitution or concubinage, or 
 for any other immoral purpose, or to enter any house of 
 prostitution in this state, shall, upon conviction, be imprisoned 
 in the penitentiary for a period of not less than one (1) nor 
 more than five (5) years and be fined not more than five thou- 
 sand ($5,000) dollars." 
 
 One of the strangest results brought about by the recent 
 white slave prosecutions in Chicago and the publicity which 
 they have received, has been the astonishment of thousands 
 persons, as evidenced by letters, at the fact that such a whole- 
 sale traffic is actually in existence. But what is still more
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 167 
 
 astounding, not to say discouraging, is the reluctance of 
 the other thousands to believe that many hundreds of men 
 and women are actually engaged in the business of luring 
 girls and women to their destruction, and that this infamous 
 traffic is being carried on in every state of the Union every 
 day of the year. 
 
 Perhaps the actuality of this awful avocation may be made 
 more clearly apparent to the innocent and unsophisticated 
 doubters whose awakening and moral support is needed, if 
 I cite one or two instances which have come to my personal 
 knowledge within the last few days. 
 
 In a comfortable farm home in a state bordering upon Illi- 
 nois is an uncommonly attractive young girl who has, almost 
 by accident, been delivered from the worst fate which can 
 possibly befall a young woman. Through secret service opera- 
 tions one of the most dangerous "procurers" of this country 
 was traced to the home in which this beautiful girl had been 
 adopted as a daughter. The white slaver had already in- 
 gratiated himself into her confidence and that of her foster- 
 parents, and arrangements had practically been made by which 
 she was to accompany him to Chicago, where he had a "fine 
 position" awaiting her. If he had not been located and his 
 character made known to the household at the time when this 
 was done, she would now be a white slave in a Chicago den. 
 
 Another case which has had a less fortunate termination 
 is that which involves the ' ' fake ' ' marriage, a subterfuge com- 
 mon in this wretched traffic. A young man made the ac- 
 quaintance of a handsome girl in the North Side district of 
 Chicago. He was polished and plausible and the parents of 
 the girl, who were ambitious for their daughter's advance- 
 ment, were apparently flattered that he should bestow his at- 
 tention upon her. "When, after very brief courtship, he pro-
 
 168 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 posed marriage, they offered no objections and even set aside 
 their own wishes when he suggested that he held prejudices 
 against being married by a clergyman and against having a 
 formal wedding. Consequently they went before a "justice 
 of the peace," who pronounced them man and wife — a "fake" 
 justice, who was merely a confederate of the white slaver. 
 They went at once to San Antonio, Texas, he having claimed 
 that he held a very profitable position in a large business 
 concern in that city. "When he arrived there the poor girl 
 had her awful awakening, for she was promptly sold into the 
 life of shame without hope of escape from its degrading servi- 
 tude. 
 
 Another very effective regulation which every state will 
 do well to adopt by enactment of its general assembly is that 
 making the premises leased or used for a house of ill-fame 
 liable for any and all fines against its lessee. 
 
 The following seems to me a desirable clause covering this 
 point : 
 
 "Whoever keeps or maintains a house of ill-fame, or a 
 place for the practice of prostitution or lewdness, or whoever 
 patronizes the same, or lets any house, room other other 
 premises for any such purpose, or shall keep a lewd, ill-gov- 
 erned or disorderly house to the encouragement of idleness, 
 gambling, drinking, fornication or other misbehavior, shall 
 be fined not exceeding one thousand ($1,000) dollars. When 
 the lessee or keeper of a dwelling house or other building is 
 convicted under this section the lease or contract for letting 
 the premises shall, at the option of the lessor, become void 
 and the lessor may have like remedy to recover the possession 
 as against a tenant holding over after the expiration of his 
 term. And whoever shall lease any house, room or other 
 premises, in whole or in part, for any of the uses or purposes
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 169 
 
 finable under this section, or knowingly permits the same to 
 be used or kept, shall be fined not exceeding one thousand 
 ($1,000) dollars and the house or premises so leased, occu- 
 pied or used shall be held liable for, and may be sold for, 
 any judgment obtained under this section. ' ' 
 
 Some enactment of this nature is particularly desirable for 
 two reasons: First, because actual experience has shown that 
 judgments obtained against keepers of such houses are diffi- 
 cult of collection and that the ones against whom the judg- 
 ments are obtained are remarkably resourceful in avoiding 
 punishment even after conviction. Second, it seems obvious 
 that when a property owner knows that his real estate is par- 
 ticularly available for houses of this character, he is, if un- 
 principled enough to do so, bound to encourage the use of 
 his premises for that which will bring him the largest money 
 returns. This puts him in the way of fattening upon the 
 wages of the social vice without incurring danger of punish- 
 ment. Naturally he becomes a friend of the traffic and ready 
 to aid and abet it wherever and whenever he can. Therefore 
 it seems to me he should no longer be allowed to escape the 
 penalties attached to those who engage in this infamous trade. 
 As the owner of the property on which unlawful acts are per- 
 sistently committed, and as a sharer in the unlawful profits of 
 those acts, he should be made to share also in its perils and 
 punishments. He should be made to feel that, as the owner of 
 the property used for the purpose of harboring fallen women 
 he is a link in the chain which draws innocent womanhood 
 to its doom and that he must suffer to the full proportion of 
 his guilt. Again, it is the first instinct of the lessee or keeper 
 of such a house, on coming in contaet with the law, to flee 
 and forfeit his or her bonds. By making the property itself 
 liable to forfeiture, absolute security against this kind of thing
 
 170 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 is established, thereby preventing many a miscarriage of 
 justice and of just penalties. 
 
 Since the beginning of the recent prosecutions in Chicago 
 a score of keepers, realizing their guilt and fearing prosecu- 
 tion have fled the country and have not yet been apprehended. 
 If both the Federal and the State governments had a law of 
 this kind the escape of these criminals would not have in- 
 volved a complete defeat of the law in their cases, for prosecu- 
 tion could have been brought against some person connected 
 with their establishments, and when a conviction was secured 
 the property occupied by them could have been closed out. 
 A statute of this kind, wherever enacted, can scarcely fail to 
 prove one of the most powerful and effective of all possible 
 weapons against the white slave traffic. And the smaller 
 the city, the more effective will this weapon be found — which 
 is only another way of saying that the larger the city the 
 larger the toleration of the social vice. 
 
 One of the greatest weapons in the hands of the white 
 slavers and of the keepers of houses of ill-fame to prevent 
 the escape of fresh recruits and to submerge them into hope- 
 less slavery is the system of indebtedness which is practiced 
 in these places. The one object of those concerned in the 
 subjugation of a girl who has become a victim of the wiles 
 of the white slaver is to break down all hope of escape from 
 the life of shame and bitterness into which she has been en- 
 trapped. Nothing has been found so effective a means to this 
 end as the debtor system. The first thing a girl is compelled 
 to do on being thrown into one of these houses is to buy an 
 expensive wardrobe at from five to six times its actual value. 
 To be more definite, I have in my possession bills rendered 
 against certain inmates taken from the dens. In these bills 
 stockings costing 75 cents have been charged at $3.00; shoes
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 171 
 
 costing $2.50 are charged at $8.00, and kimonos costing $4.00 
 are charged at $15.00. As the goods themselves were seized 
 as well as the bills for them, I am able to make this statement. 
 In every case I have found that the girl was compelled to 
 renew her outfit of finery whenever the keeper so dictated, 
 without regard to her need of it. Our investigations have all 
 shown that when a keeper imagined that a girl, an inmate, is 
 intending to leave the place either openly or secretly, a new 
 outfit is forced upon her at absurd figures and she is told 
 that she cannot leave until every cent of her indebtedness 
 has been wiped out, and that if she attempts to do so, they 
 will "put the law on her." In the dozens of cases which I 
 have examined there has not been a single one which has 
 failed to show evidence of this kind. I have in my possession 
 numerous copies of bills rendered against these wretched 
 women in which their costumes reach as high a figure as 
 $1,200 and even $1,500. This indebtedness system is mutually 
 recognized and enforced between the keepers of all houses; 
 in other words, no girl can leave one house and enter another 
 unless she is able to show that she leaves no indebtedness be- 
 hind her. 
 
 As this phase of business in the underworld is one of the 
 main props of white slavery it is well to go into it with defi- 
 niteness and to give examples which illustrate its operation. 
 
 In one of the recent raids a big Irish girl was taken and 
 held as a witness. She was old enough, strong enough and 
 wise enough, it seemed to me, to have overcome almost any 
 kind of opposition — even physical violence. She could have 
 put up a fight which few men, no matter how brutal, would 
 care to meet. I asked her why she did not get out of the 
 house, which was one of the worst in Chicago. Her answer 
 was: "Get out — I can't. They make us buy the cheapest
 
 172 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 rags and they are charged against us at fabulous prices; 
 they make us change outfits at intervals of two or three weeks, 
 until we are so deeply in debt that there is no hope of ever 
 getting out from under. Then, to make such matters worse, 
 we seldom get an accounting oftener than once in six months 
 and sometimes ten months or a year will pass between settle- 
 ments — and when we do get an accounting it is always to 
 find ourselves deeper in debt than before. We've simply got 
 to stick and that's all there is to it." 
 
 To frame an enactment which will knock this prop of in- 
 debtedness system out from under the white slave business 
 might appear to be a most difficult matter, and yet I believe 
 that the legislature which enacts a statute of which the fol- 
 lowing clause is the essential part will go a long way towards 
 accomplishing this most desired result. 
 
 "And whoever shall hold, detain, restrain, or attempt to 
 hold, detain or restrain in any house of prostitution or other 
 place, any female for the purpose of compelling such female, 
 directly or indirectly, by voluntary or involuntary service or 
 labor, to pay, liquidate or cancel any debt, dues or obligation 
 incurred therein or said to have been incurred in such house 
 of prostitution or other place, shall be deemed guilty of a 
 felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be imprisoned in the 
 penitentiary at hard labor for not less than two or more than 
 ten years." 
 
 There is only one other enactment which all legislatures 
 should be urged to pass, and that is one which strikes directly 
 at the white slave trader, the "procurer," the owner or the 
 ' ' fellow. ' ' Keepers of houses of ill-fame have discovered that 
 the hideous task or keeping the unwilling white slave in sub- 
 jection is much easier if a certain ownership of her is vested 
 in a man. In many cases this man is the one who is directly
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 173 
 
 responsible for placing the girl in the house, but this is not 
 invariably the case. When it is the case he receives not only 
 the lump purchase price down on the delivery of his victim 
 to the house, but he is recognized by the keeper as her owner 
 and master, the one to whom a certain percentage of her in- 
 come is paid and with whom all settlement of her accounts are 
 made. What is more important in the eyes of the keeper 
 is that this man is held absolutely responsible for the girl's 
 subjection, and if she attempts to escape he must cajole, 
 threaten or beat her into subjection. In one of the recent 
 raids I chanced to come upon visual demonstration of how this 
 peculiar demonstration of how this peculiar phase of white 
 slavery operates in actual practice. One of these "fellows" 
 was disciplining a girl whom he "owned" — and doing so by 
 the gentle process of forcing her against the wall with his 
 hands at her throat. 
 
 Some of these "fellows" "own" two or more, or perhaps 
 more, white slaves, and on the income of their slavery these 
 brutes live in luxury at expensive hotels, maintain expensive 
 automobiles and lead lives of luxury, idleness and dissipation. 
 
 While some states have statutes directly aimed at this sys- 
 tem, it has been found extremely difficult to secure convictions 
 against these most contemptible of all white slavers, for the 
 reason that all of the existing statutes, so far as I am in- 
 formed, make it necessary, at least by implication, for the 
 prosecution to establish the fact that they derive their entire 
 support from white slaves under their control — in other 
 words, it devolves upon the state to demonstrate that the man 
 on trial has no other visible means of support. As a conse- 
 quence, the defense set up is almost invariably calculated to 
 prove that the man on trial is a solicitor for a tailoring es-
 
 174 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 tablishment, a laundry or some other legitimate business en- 
 terprise. 
 
 In view of this fact, it seems to me an enactment drawn 
 upon the following lines would be effective: 
 
 "Any person who shall knowingly accept or receive in 
 whole or in part support, or maintenance from the proceeds 
 or earnings of any woman engaged in prostitution shall be 
 deemed guilty of a felony and on conviction thereof shall 
 be confined in the penitentiary not less than one (1) nor more 
 than three (3) years and fined not exceeding one thousand 
 dollars, or both, in the discretion of the court. ' ' 
 
 Not long since I was asked how many persons I supposed 
 Chicago contained who would come under a statute of this 
 kind and who ought to receive sentence under it. My reply 
 was this : 
 
 "Probably there are twenty thousand women in Chicago 
 to-day following the so-called profession of prostitution, and 
 it would seem to me, from the testimony obtained in the course 
 of the recent white slave prosecutions here that at least one- 
 fourth that number or five thousand, are supported in whole 
 or in part in this manner and would therefore come within 
 the meaning of such a statute." 
 
 "What is the quickest and most practical way by which I 
 may get action on the legislature of my own state?" 
 
 I would suggest the following methods: Find the names 
 of the men Avho represent your district in the general assembly 
 of your state and write to each one of them a letter sub- 
 stantially as follows: 
 
 "Hon 
 
 II Dear Sir: I am in hearty sympathy with the legislation 
 against the white slave traffic proposed by the "Woman's 
 World" and urge you to secure the passage of laws which
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 175 
 
 shall embody the clauses and enactment suggested in the en- 
 closed article clipped from that journal. 
 
 ''You surely will not question the worthiness or the need 
 of laws of this kind and I ask the further favor of a reply 
 from you indicating your attitude with regard to this most 
 important matter. 
 
 "Yours sincerely," 
 
 Also I would suggest that readers who are members of 
 churches or habitual attendants upon church services, take this 
 matter up with the pastors of their churches, each requesting 
 his or her pastor to confer with the other pastors of his com- 
 munity to the end of preparing a petition to be sent to the 
 representatives from that district in the legislature, urging 
 the passage of the enactments above suggested. If these pe- 
 titions are vigorously circulated they will receive the signa- 
 tures of practically the entire citizenship of every community 
 and will have a powerful, not to say compelling, influence 
 upon the representatives and state senators who receive them. 
 Women's clubs, law and order leagues, Christian Endeavor 
 Societies, Epworth Leagues, granges and farmers' institutes, 
 Young Men's Christian Associations, Young Women's Chris- 
 tian Associations and Women's Temperance Unions in every 
 city, village and hamlet of the country can also exert a power- 
 ful protection and practical influence in securing such legis- 
 lation as a protection against the ravages of the white slavers 
 by passing suitable resolutions of endorsement and sending 
 those resolutions to the men representing their several com- 
 munities in the great assembly of their state. While, as I 
 say, these memorials on the part of respected organizations 
 will do a useful work in shaping the course of legislation, this 
 will not take the place or do the work of the individual per-
 
 176 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 sonal letter, and every reader who is sincerely and earnestly 
 interested in securing such legislation as I have outlined will 
 miss the main stroke of influence if he or she fails to write 
 a personal letter to the men representing his or her district 
 in the general assembly of the state. 
 
 And whenever such a letter is written the various clauses 
 given in this article should be incorporated. 
 
 I cannot close this article without referring to the statement 
 made at the outset to the effect that many persons still re- 
 main unconvinced that the white slave traffic is a thing 
 widespread and actual existence; that it is the established 
 calling of hundreds of men to lure and kidnap innocent girls 
 into a life of shame and to sell them into houses of prostitu- 
 tion, where they are kept against their will in the most re- 
 volting of all human slaveries. 
 
 In my desk at this moment is a letter from which the follow- 
 ing is taken : 
 
 "There are in that house, No. , two girls by the names 
 
 of Annie and Edith. One has been there for two years and 
 
 is not allowed to go out of the house is not even allowed 
 
 to write to her own people, and whose mail is opened and 
 read before she is allowed to look at it. The other girl has 
 been there seven months and has never been out of the house. ' ' 
 
 This letter was written by one who knew the facts in the 
 case. 
 
 A very few days ago this pitiful case was, in an official 
 way, brought to my attention. A little German girl in Buffalo 
 married a man who deserted her about the time her child was 
 born. Her baby is now about eight or nine months old. Al- 
 most immediately after her husband ran away she formed the 
 acquaintance of an engaging young man who claimed to take 
 deep interest in her welfare, and in that of a certain girl
 
 Practical Means of Protecting Girls. 177 
 
 friend of hers. He persuaded them both that if they would 
 accompany him to Chicago he would immediately place them 
 in employment which would be far more profitable than any- 
 thing they could obtain in Buffalo. Supposing that the work 
 awaiting her was entirely legitimate and respectable the little 
 mother took her baby and, in company with the young man 
 and with her friend, came to Chicago. The next task of this 
 human fiend was to persuade this "child widow" that it would 
 be necessary for her to place her baby temporarily in a found- 
 lings' home in order that it might not interfere with her em- 
 ployment. This accomplished, he took the two young women 
 at once to a notorious house and sold them into white slavery. 
 Thenceforth this fellow has lived in luxury upon the shameful 
 earnings of these two victims. The young mother has at- 
 tempted by every means imaginable to escape from his 
 clutches and at last has importuned him into a promise to re- 
 lease his hold upon her on the payment of $300. She is still 
 "working out" the price of her release. It is scarcely too 
 much to say that she looks twice her age. 
 
 One other example from the current history of the white 
 slave trade as it is pursued to-day. Only a few nights since 
 a physician was calling professionally at one of the houses 
 of Chicago's "red light" district. Two men and a young 
 woman entered the door just before him and took seats at a 
 table. A glance at her fresh and innocent face was enough 
 to convince him that she was out of her element and probably 
 un aware of the character of her surroundings. Stepping 
 abruptly to the table, the physician looked the young woman 
 straight in the eye and asked : 
 
 "Madam, do you know that this is a house of prostitu- 
 tion?" 
 
 ' ' No, ' ' was the trembling answer.
 
 178 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 "Are you a woman of the street?" he persisted. 
 
 She flushed indignantly, but finally replied: 
 
 "No — I am a respectable woman and I supposed I was 
 being taken to a ladies' cafeV' 
 
 Her companions bolted for the door and made their escape. 
 The physician then called a policeman, who escorted the young 
 woman to her home and found her statements to be true — 
 that she was a respectable girl and had believed her "friends" 
 to be taking her to a respectable restaurant. 
 
 Tragedies of this kind are happening every day and all 
 over this country. It is time for the decent people of the 
 United States to wake up, realize what is going on in the 
 underworld and to take strong measures to protect their 
 daughters and their neighbors' daughters from the hands 
 of the most despicable and inhuman of all criminals, the white 
 slave traders.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Let Us Do Something. 
 
 We have given the extensive statements of these different 
 officers and experienced slum workers, even though there may 
 appear to be a repetition of some statements. We want the 
 reader to see that the reports of these reliable officers are 
 corroborative. 
 
 There is no end to cases that can be cited proving that this 
 horrible slave trade exists; and that it is the blackest, vilest, 
 most inhuman evil that was ever allowed to hide so long in 
 the towns and cities of a nation that pretends to be the 
 greatest civilized and best Christianized government on earth. 
 
 We deserve the greatest censure ever meted out to a peo- 
 ple for the tolerance of a great crime, if we do not vigorously 
 and speedily demand deliverance from the shame of being a 
 silent endorser of this infernal traffic in these girls. 
 
 If the government remains silent, and does not take imme- 
 diate steps to help abolish this crime, it will be an inexcusable 
 neglect that should call down upon the heads of our officers 
 the strongest condemnation ever heaped upon the heads of 
 indifferent, cowardly officers. 
 
 If a mine disaster occurs, or a ship sinks, or a fire breaks 
 out, killing a hundred victims, the papers at once spread the 
 news of the great accident ; and if necessaiy, relief funds are 
 raised, rescuers are set at work to recover the bodies and re- 
 lieve the distressed. This is just as it should be ; but it seems 
 strange that it is so difficult to arouse the public sympathy in 
 
 179
 
 180 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 behalf of our boys and girls who are being kidnapped into 
 these dens of vice. 
 
 Not less than one hundred thousand boys and men are vic- 
 tims of the saloon every year, and 60,000 girls go to destruc- 
 tion, disease and death every year through the brothels. 
 
 A victim of the saloon dies every four minutes by the tick 
 of the clock, and a girl in the brothel about every ten min- 
 utes, and these evils which kill more victims in our land 
 every year than war, pestilence and famine combined, is re- 
 corded as a necessary evil, and becomes a protected industry 
 of the government from which we derive revenue. 
 
 The people sleep on and do not seem to know or care 
 whether rescuers are kept at work or not, to save the bodies 
 and souls of these girls and boys. Rockefeller will give one 
 million dollars to fight the hook worm, but he, like all others 
 appealed to, will not give one hundred cents to fight the worm 
 of the still, and these demons in human shape who trap inno- 
 cent girls in these pits of hell and death. It will help mightily 
 in this fight for the suppression of the white slave trade, if 
 our officers and workers remember, that just as it is true that 
 so long as the saloon is allowed to remain open, it will slaugh- 
 ter its victims by the hundreds of thousands every year; so 
 it is also true that as long as the brothels are allowed to exist 
 there will be vile men who will catch girls to supply them. 
 Some of the cities license the brothels as a source of revenue, 
 and other cities collect regular fines, which amounts to the 
 same thing. 
 
 If there were no vice preserves, the strongest help to the 
 white slave market would be secured. As one has so well put 
 it— 
 
 "This case is thoroughly typical. Every girl stolen for vice 
 is taken to a vice preserve.
 
 Let Us Do Something. 181 
 
 There was an old king once, the fable tells us, who made 
 a law that thieves should go free but receivers of stolen goods 
 should die ; and when his people protested against the law, he 
 showed them that without holes into which to run with their 
 plunder, even the weasels will not steal. Close the slave 
 markets, and the white slave traffic ceases. Leave the slave 
 markets open, and you may enact as severe laws as you please, 
 and the state's attorney's office may put its honesty beyond 
 question — if that thing can be imagined in Chicago — and the 
 slave traffic will go on, more or less. 
 
 The slave traders will know that the American people 
 "mean business" on the day when we enforce the law that 
 forbids the existence of the slave market." 
 
 Any city, state or nation taking revenue from such sources 
 is as bad as the trappers themselves. It is a sentiment akin 
 to savagery, and ought to be protested against in terms strong 
 enough to end the crime. 
 
 Our decisions in such matters should be in favor of the 
 weak against the strong, for the subjects of injustice rather 
 than the officers in power who permit the evils which rob and 
 MIL 
 
 There should be something more than municipal and state 
 punishment to these traitors who deal in slave girls. The 
 business is carried on largely by gamblers, black-legs, hack 
 politicians and pimps, agents of the commercial pirates who 
 established the traffic, and who are carrying it forward to the 
 everlasting disgrace of the state and nation. 
 
 Under this odious and abhorrent traffic thousands of poor, 
 innocent girls are lured to this country, ruined and placed in 
 brothels under contract to end their blasted lives in nameless 
 horror. 
 
 The point above all others to take into account is that these
 
 182 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 girls are uniformly the children of poverty, the daughters of 
 the working class, and for this reason it is of grave signifi- 
 cance and its lesson should be graven deeply upon the hearts 
 of all the millions who toil. 
 
 It is not after all so very strange that a capitalist class 
 supreme court should legalize the white slave traffic, seeing 
 that the white slaves are all of the working class and a part 
 of the great bulk of human commodities in which capitalism 
 traffics to maintain its trust-blown power upon a foundation 
 of broken hearts and blasted lives. 
 
 The legalizing of the white slave traffic is a peculiarly vir- 
 ulent symptom of class ruled and class corrupted society. 
 
 If, as some claim, the government is powerless to act in this 
 matter, then governments have failed to be a proper protec- 
 tion to the lives of the people. 
 
 It is not a sensible conclusion to say the United States gov- 
 ernment cannot do anything about abolishing a hideous crime 
 such as this slave trade is. It can and shall be stopped.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Striking the Head op the Evil. 
 
 We appreciate to the limit, all these good, brave officers 
 have said, in regard to punishing the keepers of the dives, 
 and the owners of buildings, as well as the procurers, as a 
 means of helping to stamp out the evil ; but there is one phase 
 of the problem none have referred to, which to us seems as 
 highly important as any point of the question to be consid- 
 ered, and that is, that the deepest root of the evil is the exist- 
 ence of the public homes of shame. 
 
 Just so long as there are public brothels, many of them 
 licensed and protected by the city government the same as 
 saloons, just so long will there be a demand for a slave mar- 
 ket, and just so surely will there be traders and trappers and 
 innocent girls sacrificed to satisfy the greed of two-legged 
 vulturous animals, called men. 
 
 To insist that public houses of shame are necessary, is to 
 admit we are worse than beasts, and that we are far below 
 heathen nations in morality and purity. 
 
 To argue that if there were no places where men may go 
 at will to diseased women and buy sexual indulgence, is to 
 stamp our men with such odious characters, as ought to in- 
 spire every man with a spark of descency left in him to re- 
 sent such accusations which place him lower than the animals. 
 
 We have congressmen who will argue that the only way to 
 keep the ranks of our standing army filled, is to offer men 
 the indulgence of the saloon and brothel. An army made up 
 of men of such a character, are worth very little in the time 
 
 183
 
 184 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 of war. But this is not true; it is not the American soldier 
 who is clamoring for the post saloon and brothel, but the 
 beasts of men who wish to profit off the soldiers meagre allow- 
 ance, backed up by congressmen who have little wit and less 
 principle, and who go to Congress to make money for them- 
 selves and not to protect the welfare of the people. 
 
 The moral standards of many congressmen would not bear 
 microscopic inspection. There may be more truth than we 
 know in the statement of Mormon Smoots, who said: "The 
 only difference between me and some other congressmen is, 
 I own my wives and take care of them, and they do not." 
 
 If we wish to discourage prostitution and protect innocent 
 girls from slave traders, we must stop teaching that abomin- 
 able theory that homes of prostitution are necessary. Until 
 we do this, these infernal dens will demand and secure vic- 
 tims. 
 
 It is true beyond any question of doubt that the majority 
 of women who become inmates of brothels have been de- 
 cieved, lured or trapped. Some have trusted some unprin- 
 cipled man too far and her first act of shame begat her the 
 condemnation of the people around her, and the frowns and 
 slights, the withdrawal of friendship has cast her out and 
 hurled her down to ruin. 
 
 The man who ruined her can go on the same as ever, and 
 if he chooses, have his pick of the best girls in the town ; but 
 the victim of his passion and cowardly friendship must for- 
 ever be a scarlet woman. 
 
 Why should a man be given liberty to do wrong and retain 
 his reputation, and a woman be kicked down and out with the 
 first misstep she makes? 
 
 How long will our women help to encourage this double 
 standard of morals? The greatest objection to segregation of
 
 Striking the Head of the Evil. 185 
 
 the social evil is, that they propose to segregate the women 
 and allow the men to roam around at will. Men may go in 
 and out of the segregated district to spread low moral teach- 
 ing and bodily disease, but the women they visit must be kept 
 in these pens of vice like prisoners of shame. We should 
 teach that a man who visits a prostitute is not one whit better 
 than the prostitute, and that if one is a menace to decent so- 
 ciety, the other is also. 
 
 Many a girl will allow a young man who visits prostitutes 
 to sit in her home making love to her, and if she were to meet 
 the prostitute he spent his hours with the night before she 
 would not allow her dress to touch the garments of the un- 
 clean woman. 
 
 Women, get this fixed in your mind, and never forget it — 
 that the woman is just as worthy of your recognition as the 
 man who layed with her. Let us cease teaching the dangerous 
 doctrine that men should have the greatest liberty desired for 
 sexual indulgence, and not be condemned, but a woman must 
 be forever crushed to the ground in shame for even one mis- 
 take.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 Instructions to the Youth. 
 
 The Prodigal Daughter. 
 
 To the home of the father returning, 
 
 The prodigal weary and worn, 
 Is greeted with joy and thanksgiving, 
 
 As when on his first natal morn. 
 A robe and a ring is his portion, 
 
 The servants as suppliants bow, 
 ||:He is clad in fine linen and purple, 
 
 In return for his penitent vow. : 1 1 
 
 But ah! for the prodigal daughter, 
 
 Who has wandered away from the home, 
 Her feet must still press the dark valley, 
 
 And thro' the wild wilderness roam, 
 Alone on the bleak barren mountains, 
 
 The mountain so dreary and cold, 
 || :No hand is outstretched in fond pity, 
 
 To welcome her back to the fold. : 1 1 
 
 But thanks to the Shepherd whose mercy 
 
 Still follows the sheep tho' they strey, 
 The weakest and e'en the forsaken, 
 
 He bears on His bosom away, 
 And in the bright mansions of glory, 
 
 Which the blood of His sacrifice won, 
 ||:There is room for the prodigal daughter, 
 
 As well as the prodigal son. : 1 1 
 
 186
 
 Instructions to the Youth. 187 
 
 In order to safeguard our girls from this awful fate, we 
 need to do more than warn them of the existence of the 
 slave trade, and caution them how to avoid temptation in the 
 cities. They must be taught sex knowledge. 
 
 Our children and young people must have a better under- 
 standing of their physical selves. It is a crime against chil- 
 dren to bring them into this world by no will or petition of 
 their own, and then withhold from them the knowledge they 
 need to help them to know their bodies; its different pur- 
 poses, and how to care for them in order that they may have 
 the very best possible opportunity to grow up strong and 
 pure physically as well as mentally and spiritually. 
 
 No wonder children go astray ! The majority of parents tell 
 them nothing in regard to their bodies, and sexual knowledge ; 
 and many of them have the great misfortune to be born of 
 Godless parents, who leave them entirely ignorant of the 
 teachings of a Christian life. 
 
 Children from many of the very best families, however, are 
 not taught the great mysteries of their bodies, and when they 
 learn anything in the way of sexual knowledge, they must 
 pick it up from playmates on the street, or the school ground ; 
 and instead of having this knowledge accompanied with the 
 sweet, sacred sentiment that should surround it, they get the 
 impressions of low, sensual teachings from dwarfed minds and 
 vulgar thoughts. 
 
 It is pitiable beyond description, the number of children 
 that have ruined themselves by sexual self-abuse, and sexual 
 relations, because parents did not properly safeguard them, 
 and at the proper time, impart to them the sex knowledge it 
 was their right to have. 
 
 Many thousands have become nervous wrecks, and been ob- 
 liged to go on through life with dwarfed bodies and brains,
 
 188 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 because of this inexcusable neglect of parents to properly 
 warn and teach them about their bodies. 
 
 Not a few of the inmates of prisons, almshouses, reform 
 schools and charitable institutions owe their life of folly, 
 crime and failure to this great neglect. The time has come 
 when this false modesty of parents with their children on the 
 mystery of sex should cease. It is not only a failure of the 
 performance of duty on the parents, but positively a crime 
 against their own children, to thus rob them of the most im- 
 portant knowledge that can be imparted to them. 
 
 When the Bishop of London was in this country, he came 
 in contact with some of our good men and women who were 
 working along these lines of teaching, and on his return to 
 London began to arouse his people in regard to the great 
 danger and fearful results of withholding from their children 
 the proper instructions. The Bishop offered to place himself 
 at the head of a great moral crusade, the like of which has 
 never before been seen in England, that would seek mainly to 
 awaken the conscience of the parenthood of England, and 
 point out to every father and mother that the future moral 
 welfare of the United Kingdom rested in doing away with 
 the present false modesty, and in the frank and honest in- 
 struction of their children. 
 
 The Bishop said: "I am now convinced that the uplift- 
 ing of the morality of our people lies, above all and every- 
 thing else, in educating the children, rationally and morally. 
 I believe that more evil has been done by the squeamishness 
 of parents who are afraid to instruct their children in the 
 vital facts of life, than by all the other agencies of vice put 
 together. I am determined to overcome this obstacle to our 
 national morality. I have not the slightest hesitation in say- 
 ing that the right way has been found at last. Thousands of
 
 Instructions to the Youth. 189 
 
 men have asked me why they were not taught the danger of 
 vice in their youth, and I have had no reply to make to them. 
 I intend now, with God's help, to remove this reproach from 
 our land." 
 
 "There shall be plain talking," says the Bishop of Lon- 
 don; "the time has gone by for whispers and paraphrases. 
 Boys and girls must be told what these great vital facts of life 
 mean, and they must be given the proper knowledge of their 
 bodies and the proper care of them. No abstractions: the 
 only way now is to be frank, man to man." 
 
 It is not our intention to go into a lengthy detail of just 
 what the children and those in adolescence age, as well as 
 older ones shall be taught, but rather to try to arouse the 
 parents to realize the necessity of such teaching. There are 
 plenty of books meeting the entire situation that can be se- 
 cured. 
 
 It is a positive fact that little children of the most respect- 
 able parents are indulging in sexual relations as young as 
 six years of age. It is not at all uncommon for many of them 
 to commit this awful sin at eight years of age, and those ten 
 years old indulging is alarmingly large. 
 
 They do not understand the shame and wrong of it, because 
 no one has taught them the least bit in regard thereto. Some 
 impure playmate has taught them that by the act pleasure 
 can be created, and since their parents have never warned 
 them of the wrong and danger, they easily fall into the habit, 
 and as a result thousands of them ruin health ; stunt physical 
 and brain power and become moral degenerates. 
 
 Young girls often become mothers because they do not un- 
 derstand that pregnancy is the natural result of sexual indul- 
 gence. Boys in knee pants become fathers for the same reason. 
 We could cite cases of both kinds.
 
 190 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 The father should give special instructions to his boys at 
 the right age, telling them all about their sexual life and 
 warning them of the horrible results of abuse and illicit in- 
 dulgence. If the father will not, then the mother must. 
 
 Boys fourteen and sixteen years old frequent public 
 brothels. They have never been warned against these things, 
 thus when sexual desire becomes strong, they are easily led 
 by low companions into these dens, where they contract dis- 
 ease that in many cases causes them to become chronic lepers, 
 who go on spreading the disease as long as they live ; and in 
 many cases after offspring has been brought into the world, 
 bearing the marks of their father's crime, the mother must 
 have the knife applied, and give up a good share of her body, 
 as further propitiation for the youthful follies and sins of her 
 husband. 
 
 In many instances this is all due to the fact that parents 
 were too modest (?) or indifferent to properly teach their 
 children in regard to sex life and sins. Girls are allowed to 
 come to the age of puberty without any intimation of this 
 great change, and many are the pitiful results of this neglect. 
 
 The good father is intent on making of money to give his 
 wife and children social advantages and a happy home, and 
 is too busy to read and then impart his knowledge to his boys. 
 The mother is too busy with tea parties, whist and the dance 
 to spend any time reading books that will give her knowledge 
 along these lines. She often considers it more important to 
 have her daughter well dressed and out in society than to 
 spend a few quiet hours with her imparting the most im- 
 portant knowledge that she is ever to learn. 
 
 It is a horrible fact that in the so-called "Upper Classes" 
 of people, children receive very little more attention in the 
 matter of careful training: than do the children of the slums.
 
 Instructions to the Youth. 191 
 
 The greatest need of the hour is the arousement of the 
 parents. The home should become a better training school 
 than it now appears to be. We would suggest that parents 
 be more interested in their children and not quite so much 
 in the almighty dollar. Mothers should spend more time 
 with them, talking over these important matters. 
 
 They should know where the children are, and not allow 
 them to be out at nights alone, girls and boys playing around 
 in dark alleys together. "We could tell you of some terrible 
 things that happen in these alleys at night, among girls and 
 boys from eight to twelve years of age. Their parents sup- 
 pose they are indulging in innocent play ; but there are shock- 
 ing things going on. No mother who wishes to keep her chil- 
 dren free from vile attacks should allow her children to be 
 out playing around out of her sight after dark. We are 
 speaking from positive knowledge and beg parents, for the 
 sake of their children to heed the warning. We wish we 
 could cry from the house-tops so all would hear; spend more 
 time in the home with your children ! Keep them more closely 
 under your watchful care ! Teach them, warn them, against 
 sexual vice!
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 A Word to Girls. 
 
 Will the girls please suffer a word of kind, loving advice? 
 
 Oh, how many girls, as well as boys, get into trouble because 
 they refuse to listen to advice. 
 
 Don't make the mistake of thinking you know more than 
 your good fathers and mothers. Remember, they are older 
 and have had an opportunity to see the results of wrong- 
 doing. Some of them have suffered themselves and are speak- 
 ing out of sore experience. 
 
 So many poor, wretched girls are outcasts, white slaves; 
 and some are taking care of a child with no father to claim 
 it, because they thought they knew what was best for them 
 and would not listen to older, wiser heads. 
 
 The other day a very pitiful instance was brought to our 
 notice : A girl gave birth to twins ; she had no clothes to put 
 on them and had just enough money for a week's board. A 
 working girl, away from home, and among strangers. She 
 had once been a member of the church, but got to going to 
 dances; fell in with bad company and slowly drifted away 
 from the church with this awful result. 
 
 Right here girls let me remind you that, as some of these 
 federal officers state, the dance hall is just where many of 
 these vile men, who had just as soon ruin you as to look at 
 you, hang out. There are very few girls who visit the public 
 dance hall, that do not in the end come to grief. 
 
 The act of dancing tends to excite sexual feeling, and no 
 girl who wishes to make sure she will retain her virtue should 
 
 192
 
 A Word to Girls. 193 
 
 visit these public traps of sin. You cannot be too careful, 
 dear girls. Do not be afraid that if you are dignified and 
 reserved that young men will shun you and you may be de- 
 stined to be an old maid. 
 
 You might better live a single life than to meet the fate 
 which comes to thousands of girls every year. Remember that 
 the worthy, desirable young men, who will make good, kind, 
 clean husbands, are not looking for wild, boisterous girls, who 
 cheapen themselves by making free with young men of low 
 character. Such men search for sweet, modest, dignified girls. 
 
 When you are in the company of young men alone, do not 
 allow them to be too familiar with you and above all things 
 do not permit fondling or caressing. 
 
 No young man has any right to be fondling you, unless he 
 is bethrothed to you to become your lawful husband ; and then 
 let me warn you to be very careful not to allow too much 
 freedom, for in such cases as that, the first child has been 
 born too soon and a cloud overshadows the life of the mother 
 forever. 
 
 Remember girls, that while a man may do every thing that 
 is vile and mean, and reform and be respected and accepted, 
 a woman who blackens her name can never entirely erase the 
 marks. This is unfair and unjust, but somehow it is an es- 
 tablished rule. 
 
 Dancing, card playing, low theatres, all lead to bad com- 
 pany, impure thoughts and desires. To do these things is 
 playing with fire that burns out the virtue from the lives of 
 the majority who take the risk. The penalties are too heavy 
 for any dear, sweet girl to take chances on. You might better 
 endure a few jeers and sneers, if need be, than to do things 
 and associate with company that are so likely to sweep you 
 down the river of destruction and death.
 
 194 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 If you knew, dear girls, how young men discuss loud, bois- 
 terous girls; girls who indulge in coarse jokes and impure lan- 
 guage, you would be careful, and value yourselves a little 
 higher. A girl should never allow a young man to pass jokes 
 that have the least flavor of indecency. These things are often 
 a forerunner to greater liberties. A girl who respects herself 
 and has the right idea of propriety will not allow it. 
 
 Do not be afraid of offending a young man. If he is a 
 true, noble character, he will respect you all the more. If 
 he is a vulgar, unprincipled wretch, the sooner you are rid 
 of him the better. Do not be sitting up all hours of the 
 night with young men who have come only for the purpose of 
 having a fondling time, ready to coax you into sexual sin at 
 the first opportunity. If a young man attempts to turn the 
 light down, turn him out. No young man who respects the 
 girl he is with, or has good intentions toward her will do 
 such a thing; and a girl who properly respects herself will 
 not allow it. 
 
 If a man will not call unless he can take such liberties, you 
 are well rid of him. 
 
 These are plain words; every one true, and we warn you 
 because we love you and want to help save you, if possible, 
 from throwing yourself into the very jaws of sin and destruc- 
 tion. Thousands of girls are shut up in prisons and reform 
 schools to-day because they would not listen to the warnings 
 of good parents and kind friends. Many thousands more art 
 in rescue homes caring for babes, who brought their grief 
 upon themselves because they would not obey their parents 
 and do what was right. 
 
 You cannot play with fire and not get burned. Keep good 
 company ; avoid places where vile men and women congregate.
 
 A Word to Girls. 195 
 
 Go nowhere except to the places good parents tell you are 
 right. 
 
 Another word of caution. Do not many a man to reform 
 him. There is only one case in many thousands that works 
 out as you plan. Have nothing to do with young men who 
 drink. Demand of the young men who associate with you 
 the same standard of purity they ask of you. Stop giving 
 young men the license to do as they please and then be your 
 close companions just the same. 
 
 A good, decent, respectable young man, who values his rep- 
 utation and character, will not associate in any way with a 
 young woman of questionable character. What a pity it is 
 that our very best girls do not follow the same rule in their 
 choice of the young men they go with! Why do you value 
 yourselves less than young men value themselves ? 
 
 Think carefully about these things, girls, and you will be 
 less likely to go astray, or come to grief. You will be more 
 sure to avoid breaking the heart of that dear mother who is 
 laying awake nights and wetting her pillow with tears because 
 her daughter is disobedient, stubborn, willful; frequenting 
 places of sin and keeping low company. 
 
 These words come from a heart filled with love and pity 
 for you, hoping and praying that under the blessing of God, 
 they may save some poor girls from the rocks of destruction. 
 Do not be too much carried away with the love of dress. De- 
 sire for costly dresses and jewelry has lured many a girl to 
 her ruin and caused thousands to be easy prey for these White 
 Slave vultures. A working girl should not expect to dress as 
 well as daughters of men who are receiving a salary of many 
 thousands of dollars a year. 
 
 You will be much more respected and appreciated if you 
 dress becoming to your station, than if you overdo the matter.
 
 196 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 Remember good people are watching your action more than 
 your clothes. They will be far more favorably impressed with 
 you if you dress moderately, instead of gaudily. 
 
 Avoid reading trashy literature. Cultivate a desire of 
 high ideals. Be willing to spend a few sensible moments 
 learning about the problems of life, and facing its realities, 
 rather than to be wanting every moment of your time crowded 
 with fun. You will have to face these things sooner or later. 
 Try to be prepared somewhat for these problems when they 
 come. A young woman should always make an endeavor to 
 fit herself for the responsibilities of wife and motherhood; 
 then when the duties come, it will not be so difficult to meet 
 them. Follow this road and it will lead you to health and 
 happiness and make you a blessing to others.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 Advice to Young Men. 
 
 A few words of caution to young men may not be altogether 
 out of place in this humble book. It seems really more ap- 
 propriate for a man to advise young men, yet there are some 
 things to be said from a woman 's point of view. 
 
 First of all, what we have said to the young women along 
 the lives of purity applies to young men as well as women. 
 Learn about yourselves, your physical nature ; especially your 
 sexual life. If your father does not volunteer to give you the 
 knowledge you ought to have, ask him to tell you. Avoid sex- 
 ual sins. Keep your nature under control. Shun strong 
 drink as you would the most poisonous reptile that could 
 clutch your throat. 
 
 No young man can make a success of life these days and 
 drink alcoholics; especially since the manufacturing firms, 
 railway companies, banks, department stores, and all the in- 
 dustrial organizations and institutions are coming to put in 
 their rules : ' ' We will not employ men who drink intoxicating 
 liquors. ' ' 
 
 The use of these beverages will stand between you and 
 some desirable, well-paying position. Thousands of men who 
 would not listen to advice, but allowed themselves to be ruined 
 by strong drink, have said: "Tell the young men, the only 
 safe way is never to take the first glass." The power of ap- 
 petite for liquor is peculiarly strong and horrible. No young 
 man who wishes to make a success of life can afford to tampei 
 with it. It would be a good thing to let tobacco alone also. 
 
 197
 
 198 The Shame of a Great Nation. 
 
 It is an expensive habit and does no good, but frequently 
 great harm. While it cannot quite be true that it is as bad 
 as whiskey, yet it is bad enough and many are the physical 
 and mental wrecks due to its use. Anything that does you no 
 good had best be let alone. Anything that means thousands 
 of dollars in a life time, especially if an unnecessary indul- 
 gence, had better be let alone. It is thought by many of our 
 best medical and scientific men that the use of it often leads 
 to drink. 
 
 There is one thing which particularly burdens our hearts. 
 It is the way young men take advantage of a girl's love and 
 confidence, or her weakness, inducing sexual relations, and 
 then when there is offspring as a result of it, abandon her and 
 leave her to get along the best she can. 
 
 There is no punishment too great for a young man who 
 persuaded a good decent girl to give him her virtue, and then 
 desert her. He might far better go to the women who are 
 willing to sell their virtue as common merchandise, than to 
 cast a cloud of shame over the life of some innocent, sweet 
 girl. Men who have been guilty of this vile deed have some- 
 times had the experience of knowing how it feels to have some 
 other unprincipled fellow play the same dirty trick on a sis- 
 ter. Just as you felt like beating the life out of him, so others 
 have felt like giving you the same punishment. 
 
 It is scarcely possible to conceive a meaner man than those 
 who ruin and then desert girls. They should be classed along 
 with the "white slave traders." One has no more principle 
 than the other. 
 
 A good rule to follow is, treat every other girl and woman 
 as you would like to have other men treat your mother and 
 sisters. When you find you are becoming tempted in tlit 
 presence of women beyond self-control, go away for the time,
 
 Advice to Young Men. 199 
 
 until conditions are suppressed which would cause you to 
 persuade a girl to do wrong to give you a moment's pleasure. 
 If you are so unfortunate as to make the mistake then be 
 man enough to stay by the girl and help bear the shame and 
 responsibility. The world will respect you for it, and God 
 will bless you in return for your noble manliness. 
 
 In all ways strive after the good and shun the wrong. Re- 
 sist each temptation as it comes; keep away from saloons, 
 gambling dens and brothels. Remember that, "Whatsoever 
 a man soweth, that shall he also reap." You can not go out 
 to "sow wild oats" without reaping a harvest that will cause 
 you pain and sorrow and great loss in many ways. Be true 
 and good at any cost, and the rewards will well pay you for 
 the sacrifices, if it is really proper to call acts of manly re- 
 sistance of wrong sacrifices. 
 
 May God bless our young men, and cause every one who 
 reads these words to be inspired with noble purposes. May 
 every such one be determined to reach the heights of true 
 manliness, and so live that there may not be a man or woman 
 he is ashamed to look in the face, because of some great wrong 
 done them for his own pleasure and benefit. 
 
 "We earnestly beseech every reader of this book to try to get 
 it into as many homes as possible. By doing so you will help 
 the cause, and save many a girl from ruin. 
 
 Let all who can do so, kindly send a contribution for the 
 work. Remit to Mrs. E. N. Law, State Supt. of the work for 
 Pennsylvania, appointed by the American Purity Federation. 
 Address, Mrs. Law, 37 Hayne Ave., Detroit, Mich.
 
 Send for MRS. LAW'S book on 
 
 Parliamentary Law 
 
 Price, 25 cts., postpaid. 
 
 "Under the Shadow of a 
 Curse" 
 
 A GREAT TEMPERANCE STORY. 
 
 35 cts., paper cover; 50 cts., cloth, postpaid. Paper 
 covers given as premiums with all orders of this book 
 on the White Slave Trade, price $1.00. 
 
 If you want new, stirring, up-to-date temperance songs, 
 send for MRS. LAW'S 
 
 "Temperance Bells" 
 
 20 cts., manila cover ; 25 cts., linen, postpaid. 
 Cheaper by the dozen and larger lots.
 
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