THE FIRST STEP.
“Dearie, don’t be afraid of that. Really, it’s like a ‘soft’ drink. It won’t make you drunk.”
Again you turn on hearing that remark.
He is leaning over the table;—a gray-haired, fashionably dressed man. The young girl he is talking to, is not more than sixteen years of age.
Her face is white. Her eyes are like those of a hunted deer. Her hands tremble.
It is her first night!
The fiendish brute induces her to take the drink. You see her take another. She seems suddenly to become stupid.
“Come on, it is about time to go, Kid,” you hear the man say.
The young girl lurches into his waiting arms.
That night another victim is claimed by the monster!
Somewhere a little, gray-haired mother prays that her daughter may be protected from the sins of a great city.
There is an unfathomable abyss waiting for that girl, a chasm in the depths of which lurk torture, sin, disease and death.
In that cafe all is levity and enjoyment. It is a living in the present, a forgetfulness of the past, a shutting of the eyes to the terrors of the unborn future.
In one night while the music pleases the senses, while song brings an ephemeral joy, while drink quickens the pulse, while the atmosphere lulls the conscience to sleep, innocent young girls, barely out of school, are inoculated with the poison of forbidden fruit.
Every year, hundreds of young girls, undefiled and pure, drift into the wickedest city in the world, are carried away by the glare of the “Great White Way” and the sensuous lures of the dazzling cafes and the Bohemian pleasures, and become unconsciously, the recruits of the great absorbing Vice Trust.
As we pass from this cafe,—the type of hundreds of others,—note the attractive pictures on the wall,—pictures of popular actresses, actors, prizefighters and men of the world of sports.
The girl who a year ago knew comparatively nothing of the world outside of her harmless, narrow sphere, can point to the pictures and give you the names with dangerous accuracy. They are now a part of her Bohemian world. She boasts today of familiarity with them.
Late in the night, or to speak accurately, at early dawn, the cafes empty their drunken revelers into the streets. In pairs they stagger away, some to houses of assignation, others to the disorderly hotels where they live, and still others to the “redlight” districts of the city, of which we shall soon speak.
That is the cafe evil of today. It is the outward threads of the enmeshing web of the insidious and poisonous spider-Vice. Once trapped, redemption is scarcely possible.
Two hundred department store girls, according to a reform association’s statistics, take the first downward step each year, in these cafes.
It is the outside trap, with luring bait, set by the Vice Trust for the unsuspecting victims. The girls from out of the city are drawn to it for the pleasures of life because other avenues of enjoyment are not open to them. A conscious or unconscious emissary of the vice lords lures them to these cesspools, robs them of their senses by subtle intoxicants and destroys that same night their virginal purity. In a night they have fallen from the highest estate to the bottomless pit of a living hell; they have been stripped of their robes of innocence and clothed in the shameful, sinful, scarlet garb of the thousands of women who have fallen before them.
No mother, no father, who kisses a daughter goodbye as she leaves the fireside to plunge into the foaming sea of Chicago life, can be certain that the child of his or her flesh and blood will return to the fireside undefiled, pure of body and clean of heart, as long as those cancers fester and flourish in the city of Chicago.
We have treated of the girl problem and the cafe.
What of our boys?—you ask.
It is a sociological axiom that a nation’s integrity depends on its womanhood.
The depraved woman means the depraved man. Each night thousands of youths, full of physical strength, mental energy and ambition, seek recreation in the cafes. It is there they meet or take the lost women. It is there they wreck bright futures, sow the seed of crime, deaden their moral consciences, and contract fatal diseases and rush unthinking down the path that leads to ruin and to death.
Back of a murder, in which some young man of good parentage and of promising hopes figures as the principal, you can read the word “cafe.” It began there, it progressed, until its end meant the gallows in the court yard of the county jail.