TONS OF GRAFT.
Doubtless tons of graft have been taken from the red light districts, and doubtless more tons will be taken by perjurers and traitors in public office. No one knows this better than honest officials—for there are many such, men who keep their oath of office and conscientiously guard the great public interests of which they are trustees and not traitors.
But the evil lies deeper than corrupt officials, and cannot be eradicated by the most faithful officials only—even if all were such. Under our form of government officials are the people's agents and must do what their masters, the sovereign people, require them to do.
The responsibility is therefore the people's. Why do the sovereign people of our American cities love to have it so? Why do they approve the red light districts, the white slave market, the traffic in women and girls? Or disapprove too mildly to abolish them?
THE LIE IN THE PEOPLE'S MINDS.
Lecky, the historian of European morals, lent his great name to a great delusion, when he attempted in a passage too well known, to garland the prostitute as the protectress of pure women. Edwin Arnold, the paganizing English poet, put Lecky's folly into verse, writing a sonnet in praise of the harlot as the purest of all women—a sort of devil's compliment to our wives and mothers.
This immoral and repulsive idea has a considerable place among educated men and among the plain people. I was grieved to hear a physician quote Lecky's false and immoral statement before the Physicians' Club of Chicago. The managing editor of one of our decent and moral morning papers quoted Lecky in a short talk I had with him.
When the educated and moral are so deceived, what can we expect of the ignorant and immoral? The devil's dogma, that prostitution is a protection to virtue, is thrust upon us continually by the vilest men and women, and by those who create, promote and exploit vice. This creed is assiduously preached by divekeepers and madams throughout the world. Thereby they have their wealth, for thereby honest people are deceived into tolerating these enemies of the human race—destroyers of youths and maidens, of innocent wives and guilty husbands, of cities, civilizations and nations.
SIN IS NOT A BLESSING.
The prostitute will be a blessing to good women when Satan is actually transformed into a holy angel—but not till then. While the hideous caricature of womanhood is responsible by her diseases for one-fourth or more of the surgical operations upon innocent wives—operations made necessary by disease which their husbands bought of the prostitute, perhaps years before marriage—we cannot regard her and her criminal male partners as anything less than the red-handed slayers of good women. While the eye doctors attribute one-fourth of blindness, particularly of helpless babies, to the same source, we cannot quote except to condemn, this sophistry that makes the worse appear the better cause and garlands the woman whose pursuit is death itself, suicide and murder in one.