It is notable, and a commendable fact that the government, through its agents and courts, is accomplishing results that will, it is hoped, forever crush this awful business, and drive the keepers of these cess-pools of vice and shame into the sea of everlasting ignomy.
The sole aim in writing upon the White Slave subject is to definitely call the attention of the men and women of the United States, and especially those of the larger cities, to the vicious, and thoroughly organized white slave traffic of today, and its attendant, far-reaching, horrible results upon the young man and womanhood of our land. During a constant investigation, covering several years’ time in the central slum districts of Chicago, I have gained much actual knowledge of the questions of poverty, drink and prostitution among the lost men and women of this great city. Have become personally acquainted with very many of them, visiting them, listening to their heart stories and growing to know much of their inside lives and have learned a real tender interest and pity for them in their remorseful, helpless, hopeless condition. Statistical references have been taken from the writings of United States District Attorney Sims, Ernest A. Bell, Judge John R. Newcomer, Clifford G. Roe and others engaged in prosecuting and reform work, all of whom I thank earnestly and wish well in what they are accomplishing for good where it is so desperately needed in this submerged underworld of our city.
After these years of experience, and after having visited in various capacities, disguised, etc., many of the worst haunts of vice and houses of prostitution in Chicago, I personally came to this conclusion: There is small chance for a girl, once having been sold into or entered upon a life of prostitution, to ever escape therefrom. Invariably she is kept in debt to her masters, excessive bills for parlor clothes, board, dentistry, laundry and all conceivable expenses are kept charged up against her. She is under constant threat of personal violence and blackmail in every form (her owners securing, whenever possible, some knowledge of her home and friends and continually holding this knowledge as a dagger over her), and then there are the ever-present whoremasters and madams with drugs and drinks and bolts and bars, guarding every possible avenue of escape with blows and curses and brutality beyond conception. Very few young girls enter a life of prostitution voluntarily, and few, once entering, ever escape.
The recent examination of more than two hundred “white slaves” by the office of the United States District Attorney of Chicago has brought to light the fact that literally thousands of innocent girls from the country districts are every year entrapped into a life of hopeless slavery and degredation because parents in the country do not understand conditions as they exist and how to protect their daughters from the “white slave” traders who have reduced the art of ruining young girls to a national and international system. I sincerely believe that nine-tenths of the parents of these thousands of girls who are every year snatched from lives of decency and comparative peace and dragged under the slime of an existence in the “white slave” world have no idea that there is really a trade in the ruin of girls as much as there is trade in cattle or sheep or the other products of the farm. If these parents had known the real conditions, had believed that there is actually a syndicate which does as regular, as steady and persistent a “business” in the ruination of girls as the great packing houses do in the sale of meats, it is wholly probable that their daughters would not now be in dens of vice and almost utterly without hope of release excepting by the hand of death.
It is only necessary to say that the legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: That the white slave traffic is a system—a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific ocean, with “clearing houses” or “distributing centers” in nearly all the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is $15.00 and that the selling price is generally about $200.00—if the girl is especially attractive, the white slave dealer may be able to sell her for $400.00 or $600.00; that this syndicate did not make less than $200,000 last year in this almost unthinkable commerce; that it is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims; that the man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as “The Big Chief.”
Judge John R. Newcomer of Chicago, said before the National Purity Congress at Battle Creek, Michigan:
“Within one week I had seven different letters from fathers, from Madison, Wisconsin, on the north, to Peoria, Illinois, on the south, asking me in God’s name to do something to help them find their daughters, because they had come to Chicago and they had never heard from them afterward.
“If you mean by the 'white slave’ traffic the placing of young girls in a brothel for a price, it is undoubtedly a real fact, based upon statements that have been made in my court during the past three months by defendants, both men and women, who have pleaded guilty to that crime, and in a sense it is both interstate and international.
“Not one, but many shipments, of which I have personal knowledge, based upon testimony of people who have pleaded guilty, many shipments come from Paris and other European cities to New York; and from New York to Chicago and other western points; and from Chicago as a distributing point to the West and Southwest; and on the western coast coming into San Francisco and other ports there. No, it is a real fact; and it is something that we have got to take notice of, and something that, while it may have been developed largely during the past ten years, the national government itself has recently taken notice of its existence.”
Mr. Clifford G. Roe, formerly Assistant State’s Attorney, who has prosecuted very many cases against the traffickers in women, said before the union meeting of ministers called to consider the white slave traffic, at the auditorium of the Young Men’s Christian Association, February 10, 1908: