However, the case was placed in the hands of a settlement worker, and at this moment the girl is waiting, in a place of safety, for the arrival of her father, who is on his way to take her back to the mother and brothers and sisters who have supposed that she was holding a respectable, but poorly paid position. They will, however, welcome a very different person from the “pretty girl” who went out from that home to make her way in the big city. She is pitifully wasted by the life which she has led and her constitution is so broken down that she cannot reasonably expect many years of life, even under the tenderest care. What is still worse, the fact cannot be denied that her moral fibre is much shattered, and that the work of reclamation must be more than physical.
The “White slaves” who have been taken in the course of the present prosecution have, generally, been very grateful for the liberation and glad to return to their homes. It has been necessary for their own protection as well as for other reasons—to commit some of these unfortunates to various prisons pending the trial of the cases in which they are to appear as witnesses, and practically every one of them gives unmistakable evidence that imprisonment is a welcome liberation by comparison with the life of “white slavery.”
Now, as to the practical means which parents should use to prevent this unspeakable fate from overtaking their daughters. They cannot do it by assuming that their daughter is all right and that she will take care of herself in the big city. In a large measure it seems impossible to arouse parents—especially those in the country—to a realization that there is in every big city a class of men and women who live by trapping girls into a life of degredation and who are as inhumanly cunning in their awful craft as they are in their other instincts; that these beasts of the human jungle are as unbelievably desperate as they are unbelievably cruel, and that their warfare upon virtue is as persistent, as calculating and as unceasing as was the warfare of the wolf upon the unprotected lamb of the pioneer’s flock in the early days of the Western frontier.
I cannot escape the conclusion that the country girl is in greater danger from the “white slavers” than the city girl. The perusal of testimony of many “white slaves” enforces this conclusion. This is because they are less sophisticated, more trusting and more open to the allurements of those who are waiting to prey upon them.
It is a fact which parents of girls in the country should remember that the “white slavers” are busy on the trains coming into the city, and make it a point to “cut out” an attractive girl whenever they can. This “cutting out” process consists of making the girl’s acquaintance, gaining her confidence and, on one pretext or another, inducing her to leave the train before the main depot is reached. This is done because the various protective and law and order organizations have watchers at the main railroad stations who are trained to the work of “spotting,” and quickly detect a girl in the hands of one of these human beasts of prey. Generally these watchers are women and wear the badges of their organizations.
But suppose that the girl from the country does not chance to fall in with the “white slaver” on the train, that she reaches the city in safety, becomes located in a position—or perhaps in the stenographic school or business college which she has come to attend—and secures a room in a boarding house. No human being, it seems to me, is quite so lonely as the young girl from the country when she first comes to the city and starts in the struggles of life there without acquaintances. All her instincts are social, and she is, for the time being, almost desolately alone in a wilderness of strange human beings. She must have some one to talk to—it is the law of youth as well as the law of her sex to crave constant companionship. And the consequences? She is sentimentally in a condition to prepare her for the slaughter, to make her an easy prey to the wiles of the “white slave” wolf.
The girl reared in the city does not have this peculiar and insidious handicap to contend with; she has been—from the time she could first toddle along the sidewalk—educated in wholesome suspicion, taught that she must not talk with strangers or take candy from them, that she must withdraw herself from all advances and, in large measure, regard all save her own people with distrust. As she grows older she comes to know that certain parts of the city are more dangerous and more “wicked” than others; that her comings and goings must always be in safe and familiar company; that her acquaintanceships and her friendships must be scrutinized by her natural protectors and that, altogether, there is a definite but undefined danger in the very atmosphere of the city for the girl or the young woman which demands a constant and protected alertness.
The training is almost wholly absent in the case of the country girl; she is not educated in suspicion until the protective instinct acts almost unconsciously; her intercourse with her world is almost comparatively free and unrestrained; she is so unlearned in the moral and social geography of the city that she is quite as likely, if left to her own devices, to select her boarding house in an undesirable as in a safe and desirable part of the city; and, in a word, when she comes into the city her ignorance, her trusting faith in humanity in general, her ignorance of the underworld and her loneliness and perhaps home-sickness, conspire to make her a ready and an easy victim of the “white slaver.”
In view of what I have learned in the course of the recent investigation and prosecution of the “white slave” traffic, I can say in all sincerity, that if I lived in the country and had a young daughter, I would go to any length of hardship and privation myself rather than allow her to go into the city to work or to study—unless that studying were to be done in the very best type of an educational institution where the girl students were always under the closest protection. The best and surest way for parents of girls in the country to protect them from the clutches of the “white slaver” is to keep them in the country. But if circumstances should seem to compel a change from the country to the city, then the only safe way is to go with them into the city; but even this last has its disadvantages from the fact that, in that case, the parents would themselves be unfamiliar with the usages and the pitfalls of metropolitan life, and would not be able to protect their daughters as carefully as if they had spent their own lives in the city.