On the street, on the street,
Still I walk with weary feet;
Lonely 'mid the city's din,
Sunk in grief, and woe, and sin;
Far from peace, and far from home;
No one caring where I roam;
No kind hand stretched forth to save;
No bright hope beyond the grave;
Feeble, faint, with weary feet,
Still I wander, "on the street."
CHAPTER VIII.
MORE ABOUT THE TRAFFIC IN SHAME.
By Mrs. Ophelia Amigh, Superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls.
One of the most disheartening things in the work of protecting innocent girls and restoring to useful lives those who have been betrayed from the path of right living is the blind incredulity of a very large part of the public. There are hundreds of thousands of women in the homes of this country who know as little of what is going on in the world, so far as the safety of their daughters is concerned, as so many children. They are almost marvelously ignorant of the terrible conditions all about them—and all about their children, too.
Of course, their blindness to these awful actualities makes them more comfortable, for the time being, than they could possibly be if awake to the perils which beset the feet of their daughters and the daughters of their friends and neighbors. But there is no permanency to this sort of peace—and thousands of mothers of this class are annually brought to their senses and recalled to earth by discovering that their own daughters have made the fatal misstep and have passed under the brand of the pariah. The awakening of such parents comes too late, generally, to do much good. Not always, but in a majority of cases. Many, many times after I have related to a casual woman visitor the simple details of a typical "case" brought here to the State Home, the caller has exclaimed: "How terrible! I didn't dream that such things were going on in the world!"
Now, if you had something of great value which needed to be protected day and night, would you select for such a task a blind watchman? or one who was firmly possessed of the idea that there was really no danger, no occasion for watchfulness? Certainly not! There is nothing in the world of such priceless value to a father or a mother as the honor, the purity, the good character of a daughter. No parent will possibly question this statement. And still there are many thousands of parents entrusted by Providence with the safe-keeping of this priceless treasure who are themselves in the position of discharging that great responsibility with closed eyes, with dull ears and with a childish belief that there is no real peril threatening the safety of their daughters! These parents do not live on earth, their heads are in the clouds and their ears are filled with the cry of "'Peace! Peace!' when there is no peace."
As one whose daily duty it is to deal with wayward and fallen girls, as one who has had to dig down into the sordid and revolting details of thousands of these sad cases (for I have spent the best part of my life in this line of work) let me say to such mothers:
In this day and age of the world no young girl is safe! And all young girls who are not surrounded by the alert, constant and intelligent protection of those who love them unselfishly are in imminent and deadly peril. And the more beautiful and attractive they are the greater is their peril!