Through information received from letters and many other ways, we are constantly on the lookout for the procurer. One said in a confession: "We use any method to get them. Our business is to land them and we don't care how we do it. If they look easy we tell them of the fine clothes, the diamonds and all the money that they can have. If they are hard to get we use knock-out drops." His words express the whole idea of the girl auctioneer, "any way to get them for sale."
Schools for manicuring, houses for vapor and electric baths, large steamboats running between the city and summer resorts, amusement parks, the nickel theaters, the waiting rooms in the depots and stores are all haunts and procuring places for the white slave trader. A Chicago girl only a short time ago wrote to one of the daily papers of her experiences on a steamboat going out of Chicago and at one of the nearby summer resorts.
Girls, look out for the pitfalls. Mothers and fathers, you can't afford to let your young daughters leave home with strangers unless you want to send them to ruin. You are unwittingly thereby aiding the white slave traders and aiding in your daughters' downfall. Train the daughters right at home, watch over them, and protect them and know where they are going and with whom they are going away. They are worthy of your greatest and kindest consideration. Do not be too anxious to make money, or for higher position in the social life at the expense of your daughter. Do not be over ready to cast off the burden of supporting your family by sending your daughter out to learn a livelihood at an early age, lest the price you get be the price of a soul.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE IN NEW YORK CITY.
There is no longer any doubt in the minds of the well informed that there exists a great white slave trade in the City of New York. In a recent report by General Bingham, police commissioner, he said: "This traffic is found to be of very large dimensions. There seems to be very slight difficulty in getting women into the country. The requirements of the immigration authorities are easily met by various simple subterfuges. The men who own these women are of the lowest class and seem to have an organization or at least an understanding, which is national or even international in scope. We cannot get these men. If we could the whole white slave trade would drop and the whole social evil be intensely ameliorated, because these men work a regular trust." In commenting on this statement of the police commissioner, Mr. George Kibbe Turner has the following to say in the June number of McClure's Magazine:
"If the interests of the prostitute are excellently safeguarded under the administration of the law by the magistrates' courts, the business of her political protector the cadet is doubly secure. At most he is only subject to a six months penalty as a common vagrant, but practically speaking he can never be arrested at all because the only valid evidence against him must come from the woman who supports him, who neither desires nor dares to protest against him. There are thousands of these men in New York City and their convictions do not reach a score a year. To this might be added that no local authority ever got these men and that the only successful prosecution of them and the only one they feared, has been that started by the federal authorities in Chicago and New York during the past two years. The local politician has as yet no influence with federal courts in favor of prostitution. He delivers no important part of the votes that choose the federal authorities."
General Bingham in an article in Hampton's Magazine for September, 1909, says that he might have accepted bribes during his first year in office, from gamblers, dive keepers and other criminals, amounting to $600,000 or even a million dollars. He thinks that the graft and blackmail of New York City amount perhaps to a hundred million dollars a year. He asks the question, Who receives the graft? and answers: "Patrolmen, police captains and inspectors, employees in city offices, city officials, politicians, high and low share in it. But while the uniformed policeman is getting tens or hundreds of dollars for 'protecting' a brothel, drinking or gambling resort, the city officials and politicians are getting their thousands and hundreds of thousands through graft-yielding contracts and franchises, in cash carefully conveyed, or in other emoluments rendered them in every case for betraying the public."
In the report of the Commission of Immigration of the State of New York, a commission created by the legislature of New York in 1908, the following statement is to be found regarding the white slave business in this State: