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
As we went out I prayed God to give us a thunderbolt to alarm the people
of Chicago. We did not foresee the answer to this prayer, but I have
always felt that it was answered very quickly and in the following
manner:
Shortly after one o'clock on the morning of May 31, we entered a resort
on Dearborn street, whose former owner had come to me at midnight to
tell me that he had not had one happy minute since he took up that
terrible business and that he would quit it, which he did. In this place
among the half-dressed inmates we noticed a modestly gowned young
woman, sitting at a small drinking table opposite something that ought
to have been a man. The thing's name was Neil Jaeger; the girl's name
was Macdonald. I asked the girl if she were an inmate or leading a life
of that sort and she said no. She told me her true name and address and
lied only about her age, as Jaeger had taught her to say she was twenty,
when she was only sixteen, that he might sell her in the white slave
market. The keeper of the resort, convinced that she was under age, had
refused to deal with him. When I began to question the snake, it hissed,
"Mind your own business." I replied that this was my business, and asked
the detectives to investigate. Discerning quickly what it was that we
had discovered, they promptly locked the thing in an iron cage, like any
other wild beast. The girl was cared for. Her anxiety was expressed in
her words, "What will my mother say?"
At the trial of Jaeger before Judge Fake, he himself told brazenly how
he had brought this young girl from her own home in an Illinois town,
her mother supposing that she was going to work in Rockford. While the
girl was giving her testimony I heard the click of a camera, to my
sorrow--for we were doing our utmost to keep the girl's secret and to
send her quietly to her mother. More than half a million copies of her
photograph went out in the great daily papers of Chicago. When the truth
was known, other young girls told what they had escaped by the capture
and exposure of this reptile, for he was luring several of them to
Chicago, one of them only fifteen years old. About half a million pages
were published in the Chicago newspapers at this time against the
traffic in girls. Such, it seemed to me, was the thunderbolt, for which
I had prayed.
LETTERS OF A DESTROYER OF GIRLS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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