One afternoon last summer Captain Wood of the Twenty-second street police station, who has always taken splendid care of our missionaries, told me that Jesus did not try to destroy the "levee" in Jerusalem, but forgave the repentant woman who washed his feet with her tears. That evening a Jew who was born and brought up in Jerusalem came to help us in our street meeting. I asked him publicly if there is any "levee," that is, a vice district, in Jerusalem. He said that the Arabs would not tolerate one such house of shame but would burn it down before morning.
Mr. Archibald Forder, for seventeen years a pioneer missionary in the interior of Arabia, says that among the Arabs this vice is unknown—"and a great big UNKNOWN it is."
Rev. Dr. Spencer Lewis, for many years a missionary in China, said when he preached with us in midnight Chicago, that even heathen China, which is very impure, does not obtrude vice as does Chicago.
In New York City Mayor Low broke up the "tenderloin" some years ago, and though vice is shamefully abundant and flagrant in that metropolis, the city government no longer gives the white slave traders a practical license to commit their crimes, by setting apart a portion of the city where they may operate with impunity.
In Philadelphia, when three of us conferred with Mr. Gibboney, secretary of the Law and Order Society, concerning a proposed exploration of a questionable district, one of the questions immediately raised was how we might gain our liberty if arrested in a raid on an immoral resort which we might be investigating. This was a vital and serious question, in Philadelphia. There vice is a thousand times too abundant, but it is contemptible, suspicious, secluded and afraid.
In Chicago our politicians have set apart several districts for the traffickers in slaves. The traders in girls are public, bold, defiant. They feel clean, almost virtuous, after the city hall and a deluded preacher or two have given them an immunity bath—provided only the fiction of segregation is preserved.
MAYOR A COWARD.
Mr. Gibboney called the former mayor of Philadelphia a coward, because the mayor expressed his desire to segregate vicious resorts, but not in his own neighborhood—but among the poor and helpless. Let the advocates of segregation in Chicago propose to put these resorts on Michigan avenue and Prairie avenue, where certain advocates of this shameful policy live, or in the vicinity of Mayor Busse's residence. Then we can at least believe in their sincerity and manliness. But as it is, they curse the children of the poor by protecting these resorts in districts where the poor must live.
Former State's Attorney Healy asked former Mayor Dunne why the Italian, Jewish and negro children near Twenty-second street have not the same right to a decent environment as Mayor Dunne's own children in Edgewater. Why have not the little children on Archer avenue the same right to grow up in a decent neighborhood, that the little girl has who puts her arms around Mayor Busse's neck and calls him "Uncle Fred"?