A FRIGHTENED GIRL.
I have seen with my own eyes a young girl under seventeen years of age, a member of Immanuel Baptist Church, running like a frightened gazelle, to her home near Twenty-second street, to avoid insult on the public streets, from the thousands of young men who are encouraged to throng that district for immoral purposes. She ran to her home for this reason for three or four years. I lifted my hat in reverence to such a girl. But, Oh, how I felt the shame of the city and of the churches near her home, that permitted conditions that put a good girl to tests like this. I afterward talked face to face with her mother.
GRAFT INEVITABLE.
Segregation as practised, colonizes and fosters vice, maintains a white slave market under executive protection, and provides an overwhelming temptation and facility for graft. Bribeless government cannot exist for any considerable time where these facilities for corruption are so assiduously maintained. It is not in politicians, or anybody else, to resist temptation when the temptation itself is protected and cherished.
Nothing is said by our officials, or by the high priests of segregation, about corraling immoral men into segregation districts. It is therefore not segregation of vice, but only an attempted or pretended, and never a complete or successful cornering of depraved women. There are wide open resorts on more than twenty streets outside of the big "levee." Segregation as practised is not a restriction of vice so much as it is a practical license to lawbreakers to wreck human lives and blight the homes of the people, by corrupting husbands and sons and taking captive wives and daughters. You would be astounded to learn how many ruined women are wives who have been allured to sin.
A MAELSTROM FOR YOUNG MEN.
Into the red light districts, so long as they remain, men and youths from the whole city and the whole world are irresistibly drawn, if only by curiosity. The "levee," blazing with electric lights and floating in liquor, is regarded by thousands of visitors as one of the chief sights of Chicago.
When the Shriners, a Masonic order, held a convention here, their red fezzes and Arabian symbols were seen by hundreds in the "levee" towards midnight. Not all, perhaps not very many of them, were there for a vile purpose. They were simply inspecting one of Chicago's pet institutions—not the cattle market at the stockyards, but the white slave market in the "levee."
Cattle men from Texas and Montana come with their carloads of cattle to Chicago, and having disposed of their stock and received their money, many of these men hurry to the "levee," of whose attractions they have heard a thousands miles away. Thus the immorality and diseases of the "levee" are spread over the land.
So far from being an efficient restriction of vice, a red light district is the greatest advertisement the horrible trade can have—and is just what it desires. Every divekeeper and madam in Chicago and every other city, delights in segregation as practised by our rulers, who have sworn to the Almighty and contracted with the people to enforce the laws—and draw their salaries upon this contract and this oath.