Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade

by Unknown

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 struggle 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 protective 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 innocence, her trusting faith in humanity in general, her ignorance of the underworld and her loneliness and perhaps homesickness, 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 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 the 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 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.

One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character. And it is hardly too much to say that a week does not pass in Chicago without the publication in some daily paper of the details of a police court case in which the ice cream parlor of this type is the scene of a regrettable tragedy. The only safe rule is to keep away from places of this kind, whether in a big city like Chicago or in a large country town. I believe that there are good grounds for the suspicion that the ice cream parlor, kept by the foreigner in the large country town, is often a recruiting station, and a feeder for the "white slave" traffic. It is certain that this is the case in the big city, and many evidences point to the conclusion that there is a kind of free-masonry among these foreign proprietors of refreshment parlors which would make it entirely natural and convenient for the proprietor of a city establishment of this kind, who is entangled in the "white slave" trade, to establish relations with a man in the same business and of the same nationality in the country town. I do not mean to intimate by this that all the ice cream and fruit "saloons" having foreign-born proprietors are connected with the "white slave" traffic—but some of them are, and this fact is sufficient to cause all careful and thoughtful parents of young girls to see that they do not frequent these places.

In this article it is of course impossible to more than hint at the protective measures which conscientious parents of girls should employ in order to make the way safe for their daughters. There can be no doubt that Judge Lindsay of Denver, Judge Mack of Chicago, and Mr. Edward W. Bok of the Ladies' Home Journal, are right in insisting upon greater frankness between parents and children and that every child should have a sex education at home instead of being compelled to pick it up from contaminating sources on the street and at school. And I may add that the world owes a debt to these men who have handled this delicate and difficult problem in a practical as well as a powerful manner; and I feel impelled to add that, in face of the horrifying disclosures brought to me in the form of legal evidence, every boy and girl of high school age should be taught something of the awful physical as well as the moral consequences which lurk behind allurements of the life in which the "white slave" is the central figure. These things cannot be presented in the public prints, but the father who keeps close to his boy and the mother who is a companion to her daughter may reveal these things, in the home, in a way which may save almost untold suffering. And to such parents I would say that the investigations of the United States District Attorney's office in Chicago have brought together, as legal evidence, a mass of facts as to sanitary conditions in the districts where the "white slaves" are kept, which are horrifying and scarcely capable of exaggeration.

CHAPTER V.

A WHITE SLAVE CLEARING HOUSE.
A WHITE SLAVE'S OWN STORY.

The most conspicuous work of United States Attorney Sims against the white slave traders in Chicago was the arrest and indictment of a notorious French trader and his wife, Alphonse and Eva Dufour. The federal grand jury voted five indictments against each of them. They spent six weeks or so in Cook county jail, when they gained their liberty on bonds of $26,500, which they immediately forfeited and fled to Paris, in August, 1908.