Crime -- Illinois -- Chicago; Police corruption -- Illinois -- Chicago; Political corruption -- Illinois -- Chicago
It gathers in recruits from the overflow of the assignation houses, which
are scattered over this city in astonishing profusion. They are found in
boulevard castles and in back alley huts. They do not differ in character
from those of all cities. Through them come the cast-off women, who,
having satisfied the temporary infatuation of their seducers, find
themselves victims of false promises, and the graduates from homes wrecked
by the discovery of their daylight intrigues. So relentless a warfare is
waged upon these private, and in some instances most exclusive, resorts,
by the lynx-eyed police, that in the year 1897, nineteen keepers of such
places were arrested! Some improvement is noticeable in their suppression
from the fact that in 1894 seventeen, in 1895 five, and in 1896 fifteen
keepers were arrested! Interference with this style of accommodation is,
therefore, possible in Chicago, at or about the time of the arrival of the
millennium!
Singular to say there are moralists who assign the prostitute a position
of usefulness in modern civilization. One of the most distinguished of
English writers, in tracing the effects of Christianity upon mankind and
its beneficent influences in social life, says: "Under these circumstances
there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most
mournful, and, in some respects, the most awful upon which the eye of the
moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to
speak, who counterfeits, with a cold heart, the transports of affection,
and submits herself as a passive instrument of lust, who is scorned and
insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed for the most part to disease
and abject wretchedness, and an early death, appears in every age as the
perpetual symbol of the degradation and the sinfulness of man. Herself the
supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of
virtue. But for her the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would
be polluted, and not a few, who in the pride of their untempted chastity
think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of
remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are
concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame.
She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fade, the external
priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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