Her book is a terrific arraignment of the conditions which make such a tragedy possible. Respectability and indifference are personified scathingly in the monumental aunt, deaf to the world voices of agony. All society is arraigned as the Elder Sister storms at her aunt, “sitting massive, calm, with a power of inert resistance.” Her bewildered answer to the mad cry for help,—“It isn’t possible, this is England,”—sounds strangely natural to us. It is the burden of so many recent New York editorials, “such things don’t happen”!—and that in our land where the record of the Chicago Immigration League tells of 1,700 girls between the railroad terminals of New York and Chicago alone, reported lost in one year. Thus wails the Elder Sister,—“So old and unbelieving, I felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began.... She rose, O! but slowly;—slow, stiff and ponderous. I felt in her all the heaviness of acquiescence since time began.”
Thus is the unbelievable apathy of society pictured! Thus Miss Robins touches lightly, pitifully on the problem of a girl’s handicap in the lack of preparation for life. What a picture she gives of the sheltered girl—“Such a little thing, my not knowing how to telephone, yet it might cost my mother her life.” Again this motive is sounded when the daughter is begging her mother for knowledge about her experiences, and the great gray danger—“It is not the kind of thing you need ever know,” answers the mother with fatuous finality.
Nor does she make our heart bleed for girlhood alone, but for manhood, as that blood-curdling conversation, unparalleled in literature, is gasped out between the Man and the Elder Sister as they crouch in the shadow in that ghastly room in what he himself tells her is “one of the most terrible houses in Europe.” Here we see manhood disfigured, draggled beyond recognition, sitting in the dust and ashes of a charnel house. How sodden the words fall from his lips as depraved and perverted manhood defends itself. “This is a commonplace in the world, in every capital of every nation on earth. Bishops, old ladies, imagine you could alter these things.” “Human nature—human nature,” muses the Elder Sister, “like the tolling of a muffled bell.” Thus are the wickedest, most deadly of the world’s platitudes on this subject uttered in this glaring scene of abnormality, so that automatically they are given the lie.
The unbelieving will say, “But how is it possible that we do not hear oftener of such cases?” Two elements especially conspire to suppress such knowledge, both based on a false attitude towards women. First the double standard of morals which holds men’s purity so much lower than woman’s; second, the unjust attitude towards women reflected in the press which is more likely to seize upon a disappearance story in such a way as to make it reflect upon the girls’ character rather than to acknowledge it a possible case of abduction or white slavery.
As I write, Miss Robins sends me letters which she has recently received from people interested in her book. One speaking of the “awful traffic that is going on” tells how two girls, daughters of a clergyman, have disappeared on their journey home from school and have never been heard of since.
A letter from Miss Robins herself adds the following to her remarks on her book. “Of all the official people I consulted, not one of these experts doubted my story, and all had known similar cases. We do not need to be told that the people to whom these things happen, if they are refined and sensitive, are not eager to make known their ruin. The natural impulse is to cover the horror from every eye, even to deny it.”
“If you will consult the findings of your own commissions you will see that in America ‘no girl of any class is safe.’”
I myself know at first hand an appalling number of cases—wives, women of standing, college girls on journeys, young girls on their way to boarding school, and working girls trapped and sold. In Rose Livingston’s mail in the last few weeks have come heartrending letters from parents for help in finding their lost daughters. A letter I read yesterday from a doctor’s wife in Indiana was so terrible in the lingering pathos with which the mother dwelt on the beauty and sweetness of this lost daughter that I handed it back without reading to the end.
In connection with Miss Robins’ letter, I offer the following quotation from a paper by Stanley Finch of the Federal Department of Justice where he speaks of the operation of the Federal White Slave Traffic Act. “The number of complaints and prosecutions is rapidly increasing.... Such crimes are more numerous than was first believed possible.... It has become evident that thousands of people[[11]] in practically all parts of the country were violating the law.... [We found] girls were being transported in such interstate and foreign commerce solely for the purpose of prostitution and were being treated as mere articles of merchandise for the profit of those who handled them and who were willing for the profit involved to sacrifice both the bodies and the souls of their victims.... As we extend this work [of federal prosecution] throughout the country the awful interstate trade in women and girls for immoral purposes which for years has been going on almost without let or hindrance, has now become a very dangerous occupation.... The practices of people engaged in the white slave traffic involves in a considerable number of cases the actual physical detention of women and girls against their will in this vilest form of involuntary servitude.”
Would that there were space to reinforce these remarks by New York newspaper headlines dealing with such cases for the month of March 15 to April 15.