True, there are good women, here and there, making earnest effort to "rescue" some of this miserable horde; and here and there one is gathered into some house of refuge, and is helped to give up her evil life. But even there, are the hopes held out before them such brilliant hopes? One goes back to her old home and her mother, and is thenceforward a marked creature among all the people who have known her, doomed to cold avoidance or impudent familiarity. One succeeds in getting work, of some menial kind, and must live a life of utter subjection of self and utter abnegation of pleasure, or will be suspected that she has a secret longing for the old life. Many hide themselves in convent walls, knowing what kind of welcome the world would have for them if they went forth. If they could look over those walls, and could be gifted with some far-seeing vision, they could see the men who helped them to become criminals, abroad and at ease, riding or driving in the free sunlight, bending over jeweled fingers or whispering pretty nothings into dainty ears, as much approved by all the world as though their records were as pure as snow. Servitude or convent walls for one, even after she has repented; the world and its gaieties for the other, to whom remorse is unknown. No doubt the woman should be punished, and her punishment should be as great as her sin has been; but one would like to see the man who was guilty, equally with her, at least avoided a little; at least made to know that there were circles of society sufficiently refined to shut him out.
"The first stone." Many of these women have fallen through their adoring love for men, for whom they would willingly have given life itself, and would have counted it well lost. Wretched, sinful women, no doubt, but is that any less a prostitution which leads a woman to marry a man she does not love, whose very presence is repulsive to her? Yet that is done every day, to the music of the wedding march, with all the world there to see. If there be any justice in heaven, the unfortunate who falls through love is less a criminal than is the silk-robed bride who became a prostitute under the holy cloak of marriage.
The first stone! The workers of all our large cities have among them hundreds of girls who are doing their faithful best to earn an honest living; who work long hours and endure fatigue, and wear poor clothes, and surrender all girlish pleasures for the simple right to exist. Once in a while comes a lull in business, and scores of these girls are turned off. The employer makes no effort to learn how they will live, meanwhile. "Am I my brother's keeper?"—the old cry, many times repeated in these latter days. How subtle, how alluring are the temptations that come in the weeks and months of idleness; how inexorable seems the choice held out to these helpless working girls—starvation or infamy. It takes so long to starve, and life, after all, is sweet; so they make their choice, shirking from death while age is still so far away, and hope is bounding in the pulses; and having so chosen are shut out from hope forever more. Yet there are items in the society columns of the morning papers only too often, which, if the truth could stand out through the flattering lines, would tell how this or that fashionable girl has sold herself for money, her mother standing by well-pleased, and all her five hundred friends sending presents to commemorate the occasion. There was no bitter hunger urging her to the sacrifice—there was not the slightest excuse or necessity for it in any way. Which was the greater prostitution?
And yet, women who have sinned these gilded sins of society, or who have at least condoned the offense in their friends and intimates, unite in shutting the fallen unfortunate away from light and hope; and women of blameless life and pure name stretch welcoming hands to men who have helped to recruit the army of the fallen and make them outcasts and pariahs in the earth.
An outworn theme, doubtless; but there is enough in it still to thrill the heart and bring tears to the eyes. It is well for the world that a Christian, even in a book, has stood up among men and told them of their crimes, and has told it face to face, in the old Apostolic way; for we have come upon a Christianity, in these latter days, which is silent when the Magdalene is brought out for stoning if it casts no stones itself. New Orleans, La., November 14.
* * * SALMAGUNDI.
Bishop Wilyum Doane hath an abiding place at Albany, N. Y., a village on the Hudson where the peons of the political bosses most do congregate to leg for bribes. In his recent annual address to the clergy the Bish. lamented bitterly that the American "jingo" was provoking dear patient Christian England to put on her war-paint. "The English press," quoth he, "has been most patient." Yea, it hath—in the optic of ye animal yclept the hog. For two years past nearly every English paper, large and small, has systematically insulted Uncle Sam—has belched upon him all the feculent bile it could rake from its putrid bowels, all the moldy mucus it could snort from its beefy brain. Even the press of Canada—that Christ-forsaken land of bow-legged half-breeds which continues to lick the No. 7 goloshes of old Gilly Brown's leavings because it lacks sufficient sand to set up for itself—barks across the border like a mangy fleabitten fice yawping at a St. Bernard. But Doane would have America swallow it all—just as the Thibetans swallow pastiles made of the excrement of their Dalai Lama. The Bish. evidently has John Bull's trademark branded on the rear elevation of his architecture. So Hingland is growing blawsted tired of our Hawmewikan himpudence. Aw! Vewy likely, don-cherknow. But we shoved it down the old harlot's throat twice with the business end of a bayonet, and we'll fill her pod again with the same provender whenever she passes her plate. Doane ought to amputate his ears and send them to the British monarch to be used as door-mats.
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My old friend, Major-General Whistletrigger Vanderhurst, of the Amazonian Guard, minister plenipotentiary of the Gal-Dal News, has just run a superb "scoop" on all his contemporaries. He rustled out one morning all by his lone self and discovered that prosperity had arrived—that every Texan afflicted with chronic hustle hath greenbacks to burn, and blue yarn socks galore stuffed to the bursting point with "yellow boys," while ye farmer simply slings the silver dollar of our sires at marauding blackbirds. Whistletrigger turns up his patrician nose at all "pessimists" and broadly intimates that the man who hasn't a new silk cady, seventeen pair o' tailor-made "pants," a silken nightshirt and sufficient provender in his pantry to run a Methodist camp-meeting for a month, would starve to death in a Paradise whose springs run Pomery Sec, and whose trees grew pumpkin pies, hot weinerwurst and pate de foie gras. Texas, according to this Columbus of prosperity, is a veritable Klondyke bowered with roses instead of imbedded in snowbanks—a place where every financial prospect pleases and only the popocrat is vile. But I note with pained surprise that the farmers are still selling middling cotton below six cents, buying bacon and wearing pea-green patches on the bust of their blue jeans two-dollar hand-me-downs; that I can hire all the common labor I want at 75 cents a day despite the advance in flour; that scores of mechanics are idle; that there is no longer a wage rate in any trade; that the streets are full of able-bodied beggers, while merchants offer me 2 per cent a month for the use of a little money. I note that in every Texas city realty is being cast upon the bargain counter, while great newspapers are cutting down the pay of their employees. There's prosperity and prosperity. Perhaps Whistletrigger has been talking to the agent of some mortgage company or to Colonel Hogg—who's making so much money compromising railroad cases with the Chollie Boy Culberson administration and suppressing prize-fights for $2,500 fees that he really cannot afford to serve Texas in the United States Senate.
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