Their horrible flesh market and slave pen is the red light district, where they are illegally exempted from the criminal prosecutions that their crimes deserve. This favor to criminals is itself criminal. The men who have lifted up their hands to God, upon taking the oath of office, have an appalling responsibility when they exempt the most odious criminals from the laws which they are sworn and paid to enforce. The sovereign people, who indulge these officials in their palpable neglect of duty and malfeasance in office, have a fearful accountability.
Property owners and their agents, who rent buildings for immoral use, are perhaps guiltiest of all, having no motive but greed. In Los Angeles, the aroused citizens put the Italian millionaire, who owned the "crib" district and was exploiting girls therein, on the chain gang and abolished the "crib" district. On the other hand, in Chicago we have seen property of Yale University become the vilest of dives, to the grief of President Hadley and the shame of his agents in this city.
The old Roman Senator, who believed that Rome and Carthage could not both be great, kept crying "Delenda est Carthago" until Carthage was blotted out. So let us keep crying, "The Levee must go!" until the police-protected white slave market is destroyed. Above all, in our struggle against this most infamous slavery, let us never forget the very early flag of the Revolution, the Pine Tree Flag, now preserved in Independence Hall, with its deathless motto, WE APPEAL TO GOD.
E. A. B.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE FAILURE AND SHAME OF THE REGULATION OF VICE.
"When the Law fails to regulate sin, and not to take it utterly away, it necessarily confirms and establishes sin."—John Milton.
"The law ought to make virtue easy and vice difficult."—Wm. E. Gladstone.
"They enslave their children's children, Who make compromise with sin."—James Russell Lowell.