The letters quoted above were obtained by Miss Niblo, a missionary, from the intended victims, and were published by the editor of the Freeport Evening Standard, July 31, 1907.
A very young girl who just escaped this tiger's claws wrote this letter of inquiry and gratitude:
"—— Street.
——, Illinois, August 8, 1907.
Rev. Ernest Bell:
Dear Sir:—Could you tell me if Neil Jaeger is in the bridewell yet or has he been released? I am a girl that he tried to persuade to go away with him, but he did not succeed in getting me to go. You have my heartiest congratulations for capturing such a wretch.
Yours Truly,
———"
There are hundreds of such smooth scoundrels occupied all the time in replenishing the dens of shame in Chicago. They travel, to our positive knowledge, as far as Ohio and Tennessee and in all the nearer states. Fathers and mothers and brothers of girls, and the girls themselves, should be ceaselessly vigilant against these murderous deceivers. They always profess to be in some legitimate business and are apt to transact some honest deals as a blind. Every city that keeps up a red light district breeds these destroyers of girls. Every divekeeper employs such agents, and the principal is worse than the employee.
Mrs. Charlton Edholm, in her book "Traffic in Girls," writes the following confession made to her by a converted bartender: "Mrs. Edholm, I believe I am a converted man now, and that the Lord Jesus Christ has accepted me and I will dwell with him forever, but when I realize how many girls I have sent to houses of shame, I wonder if God ever can forgive me, and I would give my life if I could undo it.
"When I was a bartender for years in a saloon with wine rooms, these procurers used to come there, and often I've seen one of these men bring a beautiful girl to the ladies' entrance, and of course he would try to get her to drink wine or beer, but oftentimes having been brought up in a Christian home, or having signed the total abstinence pledge in the Sunday school,—for you W. C. T. U. women have done so much for the children by having temperance taught in the day schools and Sunday schools,—and she would refuse to touch the wine or beer, then he would wink at me, and I knew that meant an extra dollar for me, and I would drop a little drug into whatever that girl had to eat or drink, and in a few moments she would be unconscious and that fellow would have a carriage drive to the door, that girl would be placed in it and driven straight to a haunt of shame; he would receive his twenty-five or fifty dollars, and that girl would be as surely lost as if the earth had opened and swallowed her. Hundreds of times I've done this, and, Mrs. Edholm, do you think God can forgive me?"
Young men, and older men, who patronize houses of shame should be made to see and feel that all this hellish traffic goes on at their instance and at their expense. The keepers and procurers are the paid agents of the men who foot the bill. Every dollar, with the burning name of God upon it, that any man spends there makes him a stockholder in the white slave market and a partner in the traffic in girls. The men who support the hideous business are the ultimate white slave traders, and when their hired men, the divekeepers and procurers, come to judgment and condemnation, the men who supported them in crime will be arraigned beside them and punished with them.