"Justice.—'It is a hard case, Mary, but stealing is stealing, and I shall have to send you up for twenty days.'
"And so Mary is sent to the Penitentiary on Blackwell's Island for twenty days (and sometimes for a longer period), wearing the 'stolen' clothes; and the hag of a keeper goes back to her den and tells the other girls of Mary's fate, satisfied to give the shabby garment, in which the victim was attired, in exchange for the 'moral effect' of the girl's conviction and imprisonment on those who are still in her clutches.
"Justice Dowling, we believe, never convicts a girl of theft under such circumstances, but gives her accuser such a scoring down in open court as sends her back to her den in rage and shame."
WHERE THE WOMEN COME FROM.
Let no one suppose that these women entered upon such wretched lives voluntarily. Many were drugged and forced into them, but the majority are lost women who have come regularly down the ladder to this depth. You can find in these hells women who, but a few years ago, were ornaments of society. No woman who enters upon a life of shame can hope to avoid coming to these places in the end. As sure as she takes the first step in sin, she will take this last one also, struggle against it as she may. This is the last depth. It has but one bright ray in all its darkness—it does not last over a few months, for death soon ends it. But, oh! the horrors of such a death. No human being who has not looked on such a death-bed can imagine the horrible form in which the Great Destroyer comes. There is no hope. The poor wretch passes from untold misery in this life to the doom which awaits those who die in their sins.
O, parents, look well to your children. Guard them as you have never guarded them before. Make home happy and bright to them. Encircle them with love and tenderness. Weigh well your every act and word, for you may learn some day, when it is too late, that your criminal carelessness has been the cause of your child entering the path which leads inevitably down to hell.
The keepers of these dens use every means to decoy emigrant girls into their dens. As we have shown in another chapter, they frequently succeed. Mr. Oliver Dyer, in the article from which we have just quoted, relates the following, which will show how this is done. We merely remark that this is perhaps the only case in which the helpless victim has been rescued:
"In the month of February, 1852, Isaac W. England, Esq., formerly the city editor of the New York Tribune, subsequently the managing editor of the Chicago Republican, afterwards editor-in-chief of the Jersey City Times, and now the managing editor of the New York Sun, was returning to this city from Liverpool in the emigrant packet ship New York, in which he had taken a second cabin passage, for the purpose of learning practically how emigrants fared in such vessels.
"Mr. England did this with a view to exposing the atrocities then practiced upon emigrants, and which he afterwards did expose, in the columns of the Tribune, with such effect as to be largely instrumental in the fundamental regeneration of the whole emigrant business, and the creation of the Castle Garden Commission.
"Among the passengers in the second cabin of the packet ship was a handsome English girl, some nineteen years of age, from near Mr. England's native town. The fact that the girl came from near his native town led Mr. England to feel an interest in her, and he learned that she was coming to America to join her brother, then living near Pottsville, in Pennsylvania.