Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
History
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
Prostitution
Paris, the capital of such kings and the scene of such debauchery,
became the source and headquarters of the world-wide white slave trade
of the present time. With the spread of legitimate commerce to every
part of the world, the long experienced traders in women sought a
world-wide market for girls. There is not a civilized country which has
not been exploited by the traders, alike as a hunting ground for victims
and as a market in which to sell them.
All Europe, North America, Panama, South America, Egypt and other parts
of Africa, India, China and Japan are the fields of operation of these
atrocious men and serpentine women.
By no means all the traffickers are French. Many are Jews, many are
Italians and Sicilians, some are Austrians, Germans, English, Americans,
Greeks. But it is Paris that has made vice a fine art, and has made the
white slave trade a wide-spread systematized commercial enterprise.
It is as true as it is lamentable that the beautiful city on the banks
of the Seine, the center of fashion and of art, gained the shameful
reputation of being the capital of the white slave trade, and deserved
it, "by merit raised to that bad eminence."
In recent years the French government and people have felt keenly the
reproach of this condition, and have been foremost in efforts to
suppress the abominable commerce.
WHITE SLAVERS IN INDIA.
In 1893, during my missionary service in India, a clique of white slave
traders was discovered in Calcutta. They were found to be trafficking
not only in European girls whom they could lure to India, but also in
little native girls, as young as nine years. There was great indignation
in the capital and throughout India when these criminals were exposed
and arrested.
The laws of India were at that time inadequate to punish them, but an
old statute was found under which the Viceroy could deport undesirable
aliens. So these wretches, too abominable to be endured in heathendom,
were shipped back to Europe.
Those were the first white slave traders of whom I, a young missionary,
had ever heard. Last year in Chicago a French trader told me that he had
been in India, and I could not but wonder whether he had been deported
from Calcutta or Bombay and made welcome in Chicago. The United States
government soon afterward put him out of his wicked business.
Rev. Dr. Homer C. Stuntz, formerly of Calcutta, now of New York, told me
of a frightened European girl who nervously rang his doorbell in
Calcutta late at night. She had been deceived into going to India by
false promises made to her by the hunters of girls. Learning their real
purpose just in time, she fled from them, and inquiring the way to a
missionary, she was directed to Dr. and Mrs. Stuntz, with whom she was
safe, and thankful a million times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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