The End of the Way.
At about ten o’clock on Saturday evening, September 19th, I boarded a West Madison street car and, transferring north at Halsted street, alighted at Lake and walked west to L——'s saloon. I discovered in the wine and back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of perhaps fifty drunken, dirty men and women, young white girls, huddled in with the worst mob of negroes, whites and Chinese I have seen in Chicago’s slums, all cursing, drinking, singing and blaspheming in plain view and hearing of the street. I stopped a moment to make sure I was making no mistake in what I saw and then crossed the street to interview the dark-eyed little foreigner who at its door was boldly soliciting trade for the saloon and its adjacent evils just opposite. I walked down to Peoria and south on that notorious street. In the row of houses running from Lake to Randolph street there are approximately 300 white slaves, and diseased, crippled prostitutes of the lowest class, dumped from the city’s cleaner dives. And on that night it was almost impossible to push one’s way through the mass of men and boys—whites, negroes, Turks and Pollocks, gathered in front of these public abominations. At the corner of Randolph and Peoria streets several earnest looking men and women were holding a little gospel street meeting, and stopping with them, I counted during the thirty minutes I stayed there, six hundred and forty (approximately) men and boys stop in front of or enter this horrible flesh market. As I left the scene a young girl in a drunken, filthy condition, slipped out of an alley and followed me, asking me to help her, and as we sat on the steps of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, corner of Washington boulevard and Peoria street, she told me the worst, heart-breaking story of wrong and vice and ruin I have ever listened to. As I left that West Side levee of vice I knew I had seen prostitution at its lowest ebb and that out from these holes of horror finally went those awful alley women of the night to sell their souls to any young boy or drunken man who could give them a few cents or even the price of a drink of whiskey.
This girl was turned over to the Chicago Rescue Mission, cleaned and clothed and fed and pointed to Jesus Christ. Her story was investigated and found true and after receiving medical attention she was quietly returned to her country home.
Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent of the John Worthy School (which is the local municipal juvenile reformatory), reported that one-third of the street boys sent to him were suffering from the loathsome diseases and distempers of the red-light district, nor is this to be wondered at when we consider the fact that sexual commerce may be purchased almost anywhere in the South State street and West Side alleys for the remarkably low price of ten cents, or even a glass of beer or whisky from the gonorrheal and syphilitic denizens thrown out long ago from the better class houses of prostitution to live off the half drunken men and young boys to be found in swarms along South State, Halsted and South Clark streets. Almost invariably the street boy hunting these underworld sections of our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half rotten, yet painted vampires of the street whose only care or hope is a crust of free lunch and enough whisky or “dope” to drown for a time at least, the last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a few days longer within her wretched body, and the boy, having purchased for the small fee his own destruction, trails out again into the night and on into disease and crime and prison, and finally death.
The average parent of today has little idea of the temptations which constantly surround and beset the growing boy. I recall a case in Des Moines, Iowa, where a little degenerate girl of sixteen, caused the moral, and in several cases physical, ruin of five young boys, all this happening in an exclusive east side neighborhood and under the watchful care of honest parents and friends, so what must be the temptation thrown out to the young boys of our city when through block after block of our certain districts they must come in direct contact with those whose only mission is to ruin and debauch. It should be the direct object morally and politically, of every father and mother in this city to banish these human parasites—these leeches who suck the life blood of our boys—from Chicago’s streets.
Listen, father, mother, there are twenty-two thousand poor, dearly-beloved young girls growing up in our midst today who within five years must, under the present business system of white slavery, put aside father, mother, home, friends and honor and march into Chicago’s ghastly flesh market to take the place of the twenty-two thousand helpless, hopeless, decaying chattles who now daily behind bolts and bars and steel screens, satisfy the abominable lust of (approximately) two hundred and ten thousand brutal, drunken adulterers.
I believe, as I write, that the final solving of this reeking, hideous question lies in the moral and Christian teaching and protection of the growing girls of our land. I believe in a rigidly enforced law that keeps girls under legal age and unattended off the down-town streets at night after a reasonable hour. Harry Balding, the convicted white slaver, in his confession before Judge Newcomer and Assistant State’s Attorney Roe, says: “We would be sent out by resort keepers to work up some girls, for whom we were paid from $10 to $50 each, though the cash bonus was much more. The majority of them were girls we met on the street. We would go around to the penny arcades and nickle theatres and when we saw a couple of young girls we would go up and talk with them. I will say this for myself—I never took a girl away from her home; the girls I took down there I met in the stores or on the streets.” There is a league of masonry worldwide that makes it possible for a mason anywhere in trouble or distress, to raise his hand toward the heavens with a certain sign and if there be a brother mason within reach, that brother, no matter of what nationality, kindred or tongue, is sworn to give him all needed protection. Listen, father, mother, sister, listen brother! Today from beneath Chicago’s awful moral sewerage which has sucked their hearts and souls and bodies under, a thousand trembling hands are held up to high heaven, and to you for help, hands reeking with the blood on which some whoremonger has fattened; the hands though of your sisters and of mine, and I believe that here in Chicago, the greatest market for white slaves on the continent, should be formed a league that would become worldwide, of earnest, law-abiding men and women whose efforts united with those of the proper police, municipal and Federal authorities, would make it practically impossible for a girl to be sold into or compelled to lead an immoral life, and through whose influence such open public flesh markets as our “red-light” and levee district would be banished forever from Chicago streets. I believe in helping, God knows, with heart and hand and money, every fallen woman in our land whom there is the slightest chance to help in any way, but I believe first of all in using every known measure to keep our girls from falling. You and I live beneath the only flag in all the world that has never known defeat, and the very basic principle upon which that flag is builded is human liberty and human protection, and so by personal work, by song, prayer and by the power of the cross let us set ourselves to help these helpless ones in our midst until the angels shall take up the story of shame and bitterness and wrong and bear to all the world and to heaven itself the swift acknowledgement that you are your brother’s keeper.