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.
THE FEEDERS OF THE “REDLIGHT” DISTRICTS.
The other portion of this crime colony reach the centers of vice through the thousands of channels which serve such purposes in the city of Chicago.
We have spoken of the cafe evil, the dance hall, the cheap theater and the vicious hotel. These are the major channels. Yearly, hundreds of girls go from one grade of badness to a lower, until there is nothing left but the house of ill fame in which to hide their shame, feed their passions and nourish their broken-down bodies.
The girl clerk in the department store tires of trying to live on her six dollars a week salary; grows envious of the women who have pretty clothes and costly jewelry, and sets about to sell her young body to buy the luxuries of life. The end is inevitably the house of prostitution.
Or it may be, that some depraved man, possibly her employer, lusts for her purity and with threats of discharge coerces her into sin. She never stops, it is a succession of falls to the last level of degradation.
Another, three years ago may have visited a Bohemian cafe to see the sights and taste the wine. She goes back again and again. Beyond her confines are the forbidden sins, luring and coaxing. She will taste of them, promising herself that she will go back to her former life and never venture into the pathways of sin again. The step is taken and the barrier erects itself behind her—she can never come back. Gradually she drifts down to the hell haunts and with recklessness as to the future, becomes an inmate of a dive.