THE PROSTITUTE AND THE BEER GRAFT.
It has been demonstrated that the graft yielded by prostitution direct is enormous. It has been shown how the disgraced and fallen women not only give up a share of the earning from their dying bodies, but also are compelled to assist in the collection of subsidiary graft.
But the Vice Trust has not finished with the picking of the bones and the sucking out of the marrow. There is still more to be taken for the price of sin and shame and misery.
The women who have the seeds of death in their bodies must be pushed and shoved swiftly to their dishonored graves. As they go they must yield more gold to the money lust of the vice lords. Gold must be their price even on the brink of the grave.
The Beer Trust must fatten on the last pieces of flesh and the last drops of blood!
There was the Kimona Trust; then the Laundry Trust, and now the Beer Trust.
In order to further its business and increase its income, these unfortunates must poison their already decaying systems with quantities of beer that would revolt even the average drunkard. They must inoculate themselves with the virus of slow death!
They must drink, drink, always drink!
As a lure and a bait to force these already underpaid wretches to fill themselves with the venom of the beer vats they are given a meaningless profit for every glass of poison they force a customer to buy.
They are obliged to drink with the customer in a spirit of good fellowship. Even after they are sick and drunk they pour the cheap, over-fermented liquor into their stomachs—for the sake of sociability and to appease the Vice Trust through its brewery graft.
The girls thus become the Beer Trust’s agents. The woman that is not a good “beer agent” in a house of ill fame, is either punished by being deprived of some privilege or her body bruised and discolored by a brute employed just for such purposes.
But we have demonstrated that subsidiary graft has reduced the ill-gotten gains of the women until there is scarcely anything left for them.