What is the result? Thousands of half-baked romances ending in Gretna Green marriages are the invariable harvest of this season of Summer silliness; marriages which bring suffering and bitter repentance and a tragic climax in the divorce courts—if they do not come to a worse ending.
Wherever the prow of an excursion boat pushes its way through the waters, wherever crowds of young people mingle in the pursuit of pleasure, there are hatched the romances which spell heartbreak and unhappiness. Every Summer furnishes thousands upon thousands of these cases. They are "down in the books"—one entry in the books at the Gretna Green, the runaway marriage headquarters, and the other in the divorce courts.
But there is another and a darker side to this matter of Summer silliness. Not long ago, in the Woman's World, Mrs. Ophelia L. Amigh, superintendent of the Illinois State Training School for Girls, at Geneva, Illinois, warned our readers that the runaway marriage is a favorite trick of the White Slaver. Mrs. Amigh knows what she is talking about when she says this. The White Slaver haunts the excursion boat, makes love to the girl whose head is turned with silly notions about romantic courtships and marriages; he takes her to a Justice of the Peace or a "marrying parson" of the excursion resort type, and a ceremony is performed. Then they go to the big city and she is sold into a slavery worse than death! This sounds sensational, but it has happened so many times that it is a tame and threadbare tale to those who know the dark things of metropolitan life, the black and ugly secrets of the Under World.
Mothers should wake up to the fact that of all times daughters most need their strongest warnings and their most devoted care during the season of Summer silliness, of vacations and excursions, of unconventional meetings with young men under the easy familiarity of fun and frolic and a general "good time." And to the girl who has no mother at hand thus to warn her; take it from us that as your own chaperone you must recognize the silly season as your period of special peril, as the time when it is insidiously easy to relax your vigilance, to let down the protecting bars of strict social conventionality and to give yourself a little latitude in the matter of "harmless flirtation."
The only safe way is to be just a little more particular about the acquaintances you form during the silly season than at any other time.
E. A. B.
CHAPTER XX.
CHICAGO'S WHITE SLAVE MARKET—THE "LEVEE."
It is no pleasure to me to impeach my city, but it is false patriotism to allow the crimes of one's own country to go without rebuke. We are responsible for the evil that we have power to abolish. It is the duty of a patriotic preacher to lash the sins of his people till they are lashed out of existence.