THE DEMI-MONDE.
Reader, did you ever try to estimate the malign influence upon society of one single fallen woman? Did you ever endeavor to calculate the evils of such a leaven stealthily disseminating its influence in a community? Woman, courted, flattered, fondled, tempted and deceived, becomes in turn the terrible Nemesis—the insatiate Avenger of her sex! Armed with a power which is all but irresistible, and stripped of that which alone can retain and purify her influence, she steps upon the arena of life ready to act her part in the demoralization of society. As some one has remarked, "the lex talionis—the law of retaliation—is hers. Society has made her what she is, and must now be governed by her potent influence." Surely the weight of this influence baffles computation! View it in shattered domestic ties, in the sacrifice of family peace, in the cold desolation of once happy homes! See the eldest son and hope of a proud family, educated in an atmosphere of virtue and principle, who has given promise of high and noble qualities. He falls a victim to the fashionable vice, and carries back to his hitherto untainted home the lethal influence he has imbibed. Another and another, within the range of that influence, suffers for his lapse from moral rectitude, and they in turn become the agents and disseminators of fresh evils.
This promiscuous association is tacitly regarded as a necessary evil, the suppression of which would produce alarming and disastrous effects upon the community at large. The passions, indolence, and the love of dress and display are the main agents in producing the class of women we have under consideration. It is a vulgar error and a popular delusion, that the life of a fallen woman is as revolting to herself as it appears to the moralist and philanthropist. Authors of vivid imagination love to portray the misery that is brought on an innocent and confiding girl by the perfidy and desertion of her seducer. The stage presents the picture with all its accessories of light, color and morbid emotion. The pulpit takes up the theme and howls its evangelical horrors, picturing those women as being a continuous prey to "the long-beaked, filthy vulture of unending despair." Women who in youth have lost their virtue, often contrive to retain their reputation, and even when this is not the case, frequently amalgamate with the purer portion of the population, and become, to all outward appearance, good members of society.
The love of woman is usually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to sacrifice all she holds dear for his gratification. Actuated by a noble self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our social system.
The crime of prostitution can be witnessed in New York in every phase in which it invites or repels the passions of men. There are the splendid parlor houses distributed in the most fashionable parts of the city; there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the miserable basements where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity, divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios. The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive arsenals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most becoming shade over the inmates, while the pictures on the walls usually suggest resplendent sensuality. Many of these gilded palaces are patronized by prominent citizens, officials in the government, state and civic employ. Many of them, already married, keep mistresses in these establishments, while others are content to be recognized as "lovers" of the inmates. Many of the country merchants who periodically visit New York insist on being taken the "grand rounds," as it is termed, before they will order goods or attend to business at all. The salesmen in our leading houses are expect to be posted, and to act as escorts sad chaperones in this wine-guzzling tour. Indeed, so much is this disgraceful feature recognized in some large business houses, that the proprietors make an allowance to their salesmen for this purpose.
The proprietresses of these houses are all impervious to shame, and carry on their trade with the sole ambition of realizing money. Many of them have summer establishments and suburban villas at the watering-places, and carry on their nefarious business at Saratoga, Long Branch, Coney Island, Newport and Cape May during the summer mouths. Many of them own handsome equipages, in which, gorgeously attired, with liveried menials, they show themselves in Central Park to the envy of the virtuous and honest of womankind. It is in the places kept by these women, where the inmates are usually handsome young girls between the ages of fifteen and thirty, that the precocious and well-to-do young men of this city fall an easy prey to vice, and become in time the haggard and dissolute man of the town, or degenerate into the forger, the bank defaulter or the swindler.
The bar and basement brothels, profusely scattered over the lower portions of the city, present the most miserable phase of this disgusting evil. Nearly all these places are kept by men, though nominally under control of their mistresses and wives, who are generally hideous specimens of womanhood, and whose features present the traits of sensuality, cruelty and avarice as clearly expressed as if traced there by Belial himself. The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and other places of public resort, and loud in appearance as they are obscene in talk, are, in the estimation of every self-respecting man, eminently fitted by Lucifer for laboring in the State-prison quarries for the term of their natural lives.
The inmates of these basement brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth. Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or brought there by their seducers. Unsophisticated and unacquainted with life in a great city, without money or friends, they have been entrapped and compelled to submit to a life of shame by the coarse words and frequently the brutal violence of their captors.
Between the two extremes of unfortunates already described, there is another class nomadic in their habits. Some of these are street-walkers, some frequent dance houses like The Allen's, Billy McGlory's, Owney Geoghegan's and Harry Hill's, while others circulate around such up-town, west-side houses as the French Madame's, the Haymarket and Tom Gould's. They usually live in furnished rooms, in houses owned by wealthy and respectable citizens, let to them by agents who lease them at exorbitant rents, paid in advance. In both the eastern, western and central portions of the city they may be found occupying rooms on the same floors with respectable families. These women seldom conduct the prey that they have allured to their home, but to some assignation house or fourth-rate hotel, of which there are a large number scattered over the city.
Most of this class of unfortunates have a "lover"—a gambler or pimp, who occupies their room and assumes the role of husband and protector for the nonce, with the privilege of spending the girl's blood money in drink or dissipation, and unmercifully beating her when he feels inclined that way. The pair call this place their home, and as they are shiftless in their habits, and careless of sickness, they are frequently in a condition of chronic impecuniosity and are thus liable to be "fired out" by the heartless agent. Many of these girls, from their association with vicious society, become thieves, and ply their light-fingered privateering while caressing their victim. It is a favorite dodge of some of the more comely and shapely of this class, especially the frequenters of such places as Gould's, the Haymarket, the French Ma-dames, the Star and Garter, and the Empire, to ask gentlemen on whom they have been unavailingly airing their becks and nods and other fascinations to put a quarter into the top of their hosiery "for luck." They usually get the quarter, and sometimes the man as well.