THE SHACKLES OF THE WHITE SLAVE.
Many a girl after a month of horror, revolts against the conditions confronting her; the terrors in her dreams of the future fill her soul with fear and she yearns for freedom once again.
The dreams, which the stories told her by the procurer aroused, have never materialized; she is as poor as she was before she was trapped into the life of shame; she is broken in spirit and in health.
Can she walk out a free woman?
No. She is a White Slave; the slavery is not just one of selling and purchasing; it is one of permanent bondage in ninety cases out of one hundred.
The man who trapped her has become her “cadet.” He is her “guardian” for her master. His word is law. She is a slave forever. She is treated brutally if she makes serious attempts at escape; she is even locked in a room and in some instances women have been tied hands and feet to bedposts.
She is at times drugged in order to make her forget her misery and her plans of escape. Every possible precaution is taken to prevent her release from bondage.
Her procurer in dull times, may take her from one house and resell her for a new price. She is thus bartered as a dead commodity instead of a woman of flesh and blood.
There is nothing in human history that is so filled with horror as this. There is no deeper stain on the annals of this nation than the crimson stain of White Slavery.
It is the evil that cries daily to Heaven for vengeance. Thousands of mothers lift their trembling arms and cry out to God to kill the monster that has eaten their daughters.
And this White Slave Trust, taking the money from these ill-fated women, turns part of its profits over to the magnates of the great Vice Trust,—to men who stand high in the world of politics, to men to whom we intrust the task of making our laws and administering them!
The law stands without and makes no effort to stem the tide of infamous traffic in women. Political leaders listen to the voice of a people’s protest, sham a “clean-up” and then send forth the word to the vice lieutenants to “lay low” for a short time. Within a few weeks, the monster creeps from his hiding place and feasts ravenously on the victims piled up and waiting for him.
We have shown the price of these pitiful victims of a vice system.
We are now ready to show how every form of vice in which woman stands as the central figure is protected by the police department at the command of the political lords and their friends, in order that they may derive a vast income from the human sacrifice.
CHAPTER VI.
Vice and Graft.
Police Collectors—The Prostitute’s Graft Price—The Kimona Trust—Laundry Trust—The Woman and the “Cadet”—Terrible Examples—To the Woman: Death—How About Your Daughter?
From the enemies of moral progress and from those who find it to their personal interest to exploit the shame of women and the crimes of men, the cry has been raised:—
Vice, segregated and otherwise, is absolutely essential in a large city. Passions must be given an outlet; lusts must be allowed to exhaust themselves.
That view, in the face of earnest study of the subject, is a pernicious fallacy.
Take away from man the open temptation; cleanse his paths of the thousand lures to evil; bar his coming in contact with the lost woman as far as it is possible and you will minimize vice to a marvelous degree.
It is on the fallacy and sophistry of the theory that passions of men must be satisfied, that Chicago today carries on its terrible exploitation of vice.
It is on that theory that the Vice Trust has built its superstructure, created its gigantic business, bartered its thousands of women for flesh-prices and harvested millions of dollars annually.
Vice exists under the conditions which we have depicted, because the Vice Trust—the all powerful coterie of police and politicians,—wish it.
The would-be municipal leaders, are the powers behind the city’s ignominy and shame!
Every evil that cries out in the big city, every crime that is committed in the day or in the night, every vice that is practiced to the ruin of human souls and bodies, does so because the Vice Trust commands it, because the Vice Trust waits for its monstrous returns from them.
Chicago’s four levee districts with the hundreds of resorts and the thousands of unfortunate inmates, furnish a tremendous capital to their owners, but the owners have a lease of vice existence from the political powers behind and above them, simply because these men and women pour into their coffers a constant stream of graft money.
The saloon evil, the cafe evil, the hotel, the dance hall, obscene theater evil, the “house of call,” “flat” and White Slave evil, pay a tribute of existence to the agents of the big alliance who have the political power to crush them out of existence if they so desired.
That is why we stand on the statement that if the CORRUPT POLITICIANS and their slaves and corrupt police officials were stripped of their power and sent to the penitentiary, Chicago could swiftly purge herself and become the City Beautiful in the most ideal meaning of the term.