The general public must be made to realize the enormous extent and serious character of these diseases. They cause one-seventh of the suffering of the human race, and in cities more than one-seventh. Physicians have heretofore concealed the truth from the public, but now are foremost in telling it.
When a girl is induced to take up an immoral life she is quickly infected with the diseases that go with that misconduct, and is dead while she lives and a source of death to others. A physician whose former duty it was to inspect depraved women in Paris said to an audience of young men in a vice district of Chicago that ninety-five in a hundred of those women were walking pest-houses.
The victims of the loathsome commerce in girls are first ensnared, then enslaved or at least exploited, inevitably infected with the loathsome disease and all the time compelled to make money for their wicked masters. Constantly they are spreading the pestilence to the men and youths who patronize them and then pass on the plagues to their present or future wives and children.
The red light districts, like a lake of fire, are perpetually engulfing unwary and unprotected girls, along with the wilfully depraved. They are misled by crafty women and villainous young men with smooth manners and false tongues, on promises of light work, big pay, fine clothes, jewels and great happiness. The route to the abyss is commonly by way of dance halls and amusement resorts of all kinds having drinking attachments. The girl who drinks puts herself at the mercy of the young man in whose company she may be. The girl who dances is in very great peril, and she puts young men with whom she dances under greater temptation than herself.
Soon after the fatal plunge a girl becomes immodest, indecent, lawless, homeless, a victim and distributer of vile diseases. When the plain people know the horrors of the white slaves and the black plagues, the sane plain people will demand the destruction of the white slave market and the extirpation of the black plagues.
The committee of seven physicians, appointed by the Medical Society of the County of New York, after elaborate investigation reported that 225,000 persons were treated in New York City in the year 1900 for the diseases caused by vice. The majority of these were immoral men and immoral women, but a large and deeply wronged minority consisted of virtuous wives and children of all ages.
HALF A MILLION BLIND.
Any medical professor can tell any inquirer that there are at least ten or twelve thousand blind in the United States today, whose blindness dates from a few days after birth and was caused by disease which their mothers contracted innocently from their guilty husbands—who in most cases supposed themselves cured before marriage.
Dr. Neisser, of Berlin, who in 1879 isolated the germ that causes ophthalmia of the new-born, a vice germ, after careful investigation throughout Germany concludes from the statistics that there are thirty thousand blind in Germany from this cause. If the same proportion would hold throughout Europe, there are two hundred thousand blind in Europe from this cause—more than the three armies engaged at Waterloo.
But to be very conservative, let us cut the figures in two, and we have still one hundred thousand sightless persons, blind from babyhood, in Europe alone. Including America, and adding Asia, Africa and the islands of the South Seas, we shall find in the world half a million persons blind or one million sightless eyes, from this pestilent germ—at which many young men laugh as no worse than a cold and which is on sale all the time in every immoral resort in the world.