How terrible a story this is, involving two families, two cities, two states. What exposure could be more horrible than that a boy of sixteen, scarcely more than a child, takes a child of sixteen to another city and receives money for leaving her in a place of infamy?
But what must the father and mother of such a boy and the father and mother of such a girl, think of themselves and the way they have discharged their duty in bringing up their children?
And what must our cities think of themselves while they maintain red light districts to promote such crimes?
In winter the dance halls and in summer the amusement parks, and all the year long theaters and drinking resorts of all kinds, are very dangerous for young girls. At one time the superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls, at Geneva, found that eighty-seven per cent of her girls attributed their first wrong steps to temptations such as these.
Every good man and woman must do his or her whole duty against the hideous traffic in girlhood. Preachers, editors, teachers, physicians and rulers, being natural leaders of the people, have very great responsibility. But all else will follow if this end be gained—Parental Efficiency.
We close this chapter with the splendid editorial of Forrest Crissey in Woman's World for August, 1909.
SUMMER: THE SILLY SEASON.
Did you ever notice that, as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circumspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the butterfly nature within her is given wing, inward and outward restraints drop from her almost as inevitably as her cold weather clothing, and she lets herself dance along on the soft breeze of sentiment with the lightness and freedom of a bit of thistledown.
This odd Summer bewitchment might be immensely funny were it not for the fact that its consequences, in thousands of cases, are serious, not to say tragic. The comic papers depend upon this dog-day epidemic of silliness as an unfailing source of excruciatingly amusing jokes and pictures. Summer resort and seashore flirtations—what would the "comics" do without them when the mercury creeps high in the slender tube of the thermometer?
In the language of the sportsman, the Summer is everywhere recognized as the "open season" for the hunting of hearts and the pursuit of romance. The girl who is her own chaperone and protector allows herself a latitude of unconventionally in the period of Summer outings, of vacations and excursions, of moonshine and frolic, which she would not think of permitting herself at another season. Romance is in the air, and even the careful and well-reared girl finds herself under its spell.