There is no standing still in any phase of life—good or evil. There is no stationary point in vice. The beginnings are eternally different; the endings of the Scarlet Women are eternally the same.
These women just described, can scarcely be called White Slaves in the proper sense of that term. They are “slaves,” but they brought the slavery upon themselves.
The Summer excursions on the lake in large pleasure boats where vice can revel without fear and where young boys and girls without any restraint fall into sins that lead to terrible social evils, are another primary “feeder” for the “redlight” districts. The city asleep does not realize the fact that the “moonlight” excursions on the waters of Lake Michigan start a hundred girls on the road to ruin and the prostitute’s grave in one night!
And this is the first chapter of the women dressed in scarlet tonight.
Above these women like an ominous shadow is Man and His Lust! Man and his insatiable passions! Man who reckons not the destruction he sows about him, the homes he robs of precious ones, the broken-hearted mothers and fathers sent to an early grave because he inoculated some innocent child with his venom.
To fit our descriptions, somewhere, you can find in the “redlight” districts a woman who will stand up and say:
“That is my story.”
In one night in the South side “redlight” district in a visit to eight houses, twenty-one girls were found who stated that soulless men, who made capital of their ignorance of the world and its ways, robbed them of their virtue while they were under the influence of their first drink, or stole their virginity after they had promised to marry them.
THE DAILY LIFE OF A PROSTITUTE.
But to return to the scarlet woman as she is today. Here is the routine life of the prostitute in the levee district: