THE QUESTIONS UNANSWERED.
Where do these thousands of women come from?
What are their varied pasts?
Who are their mothers and fathers?
What strange circumstances brought them here?
Who is accountable to God for this wholesale slaughter in women’s souls?
Those are questions that come to the mind when one enters any den of infamy in any of the four “redlight” districts of Chicago.
Every one of these questions has a thousand answers. The solutions to these social problems are as numerous as the women who create the problems.
These women come from every city in the United States, from the farm houses of God-fearing farmers, from the gabled cottage of little country towns, from the hovels of the poor of the great city and from the palaces of the rich of the same city.
They come from across the great ocean:—from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and every nation you can name.
Thirty-three per cent of the women in the “redlight” districts of Chicago are the victims of the most pernicious vice system known to history. They are the victims of the much-talked of and much-discussed White Slave Traffic.
It is not our purpose in this chapter to treat of this cancerous, moral growth. It is of such vital importance in a story of crime and vice and graft that we will dissect and analyze it in a distinct chapter. We are obliged for the sake of our narrative to name it here.
This portion of the vice population is the women who have been lured by a thousand satanic means to a life of shame and sin, and once steeped in the atmosphere give up all hope or attempt to regain a lost social standing, a new moral conscience or a clean body.