While this perverted or enslaved creature that Lecky and Arnold would glorify drives herself and her criminal patrons to suffer locomotor ataxia, necrosis of bone and brain, or incurable insanity at public expense in our asylums, we will give her no garland, except apple blossoms—of the apples of Sodom.
GOOD WOMEN ARE NOT PROTECTED BY BAD.
Nor do hundreds of brothels illegally legalized in a city protect virtuous women, maidens and little girls from bestial assault. On the contrary, good women are a thousand times safer where no such hells exist to manufacture degenerates. The men who consort with vile women lose their respect for all women, and by their base fellowship inflame infernal fires which are the utmost menace to all good women.
We have had in Chicago numerous recent illustrations of the way in which police-protected houses of infamy save good women and girls.
A few weeks before the murder of Mrs. Gentry, Constantine applied at the rooming agency of the Young Men's Christian Association for a room. The secretary marked on his application "sporty" and did not send him to any good woman's home to room, but to a lodging house of men only. By some means he came to room at the Gentry home and repaid hospitality by murdering his hostess. The "sporty" man associating with harlots, loses his respect for good women, and may murder them if they resist his wicked will.
In September one block from our outrageous "levee," where one thousand and fifty ruined women are constantly at the service of ten thousands of vile men—one block from these protectresses of good women and young girls, more than a thousand protectresses!—a thirteen-year-old girl was lured to a room and brutally assaulted. The police officer, Lieut. White, who arrested the criminal, and was himself roughly handled in the discharge of his duty, confirmed this report when I inquired of him face to face. Captain McCann told me he arrested a divekeeper for assaulting his own stepdaughter.
Do the dives protect women and girls from crimes like these? Do they not rather manufacture the degenerates who commit these crimes?
WORST ENEMIES OF THE HUMAN RACE.
Harlots and their patrons are the worst enemies in every way that good women can have. If there were any virtue in vice, if black were white or even speckled, doubtless the supreme book of morals, the guide of the race, would have some word in praise of moral rottenness—some few lines in prose or verse in laudation of lewd women. But the whole Bible keeps the distinction sharp and clear between black and white, between virtue and sin.
Until the public intelligence and conscience are trained to abhor vice as a destroyer of families and nations—more insidious and more ruinous than even the liquor traffic—a soft, foolish, wicked indulgence will be granted to the red light districts, and the white slave markets which they constitute and are. We must call most urgently upon all guides and rulers of the people to make incessant war upon the loathsome criminals who prey upon young women and young men. They are the worst enemies of the human race. They drink the heart's blood of mothers and eat the flesh of their daughters. They people hospitals, alms-houses, lunatic asylums and dissecting rooms. They blast innocent wives and blind helpless babies. They enslave by force, threats or craft thousands of weak women and innocent young girls.