"Give us a district to ourselves," say all the dives with one mind, and our obliging executives forthwith bow down to them and do as they say, giving these detestable criminals permission to trample the laws in the sewers. "To hell with the laws" some of the divekeepers have said to our missionaries. Why not give murderers, thugs, thieves, gamblers, forgers, a district where they may break the laws, after an immunity bath at City Hall, as well as to the filthy offenders who promote even the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah, and invite upon Chicago the doom of those cities of the plain?
A divekeeper recently paid his first fine in twenty years. For twenty years this man had carried on his murderous trade without ever being made to feel even once that he is a criminal. What astounding privilege, in a city where many men have been arrested and fined for spitting on the sidewalk.
The French and Japanese importers of women have been amazingly exempt from punishment at the hands of our local authorities. The federal government has done its duty, as all the world knows. The work of Mr. Sims and his assistants at Chicago is affecting the whole nation and Canada for good. But why are the wild beasts who trade in girls immune from punishment at the hands of our city and state authorities?
We ought to say, and do say very heartily, that our authorities in Chicago are beginning to listen to the cry of the white slaves, native and foreign. Something has been done to punish procurers and such like reptilia who do not count in politics. But the divekeepers, the buyers and holders of women, have not been seriously disturbed, except by the national government.
SEGREGATION MAKES A SLAVE MARKET.
It is impossible to abolish brothel slavery and to license, either formally or practically, the slave market, the red light district. While the divekeeper enjoys the indulgence of the mayor and the police and of their masters, the citizens, he will keep his dive—and his dive must be restocked with new victims, to make money for him, all the time. These victims will be obtained, as heretofore, by procurers who travel city and country to trap them, and they will be imported from Europe and Asia as heretofore. To maintain a segregation district is to maintain a slave market, as things are.
Unless we make energetic and successful war upon the red light districts and all that pertains to them, we shall have Oriental brothel slavery thrust upon us from China and Japan, and Parisian white slavery, with all its unnatural and abominable practices, established among us by the French traders. Jew traders, too, will people our "levees" with Polish Jewesses and any others who will make money for them.
Shall we defend our American civilization, or lower our flag to the most despicable foreigners—French, Irish, Italians, Jews and Mongolians? We do not speak against them for their nationality, but for their crimes. American traders of equal infamy, to the shame of the American name, have stocked Asiatic cities with American girls.
On the Pacific Coast eternal vigilance alone can save us from a flood of Asiaticism, with its weak womanhood, its men of scant chivalry, its polluting vices and its brothel slavery. Bubonic plague in San Francisco and Seattle was alarming. Mongolian brothel slavery, the Black Death in morals, is more alarming.
On both coasts and throughout all our cities, only an awakening of the whole Christian conscience and intelligence can save us from the importation of Parisian and Polish pollution, which is already corrupting the manhood and youth of every large city in this nation.