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
Harlots and their patrons are the worst enemies in every way that good
women can have. If there were any virtue in vice, if black were white or
even speckled, doubtless the supreme book of morals, the guide of the
race, would have some word in praise of moral rottenness--some few lines
in prose or verse in laudation of lewd women. But the whole Bible keeps
the distinction sharp and clear between black and white, between virtue
and sin.
Until the public intelligence and conscience are trained to abhor vice
as a destroyer of families and nations--more insidious and more ruinous
than even the liquor traffic--a soft, foolish, wicked indulgence will be
granted to the red light districts, and the white slave markets which
they constitute and are. We must call most urgently upon all guides and
rulers of the people to make incessant war upon the loathsome criminals
who prey upon young women and young men. They are the worst enemies of
the human race. They drink the heart's blood of mothers and eat the
flesh of their daughters. They people hospitals, alms-houses, lunatic
asylums and dissecting rooms. They blast innocent wives and blind
helpless babies. They enslave by force, threats or craft thousands of
weak women and innocent young girls.
Their horrible flesh market and slave pen is the red light district,
where they are illegally exempted from the criminal prosecutions that
their crimes deserve. This favor to criminals is itself criminal. The
men who have lifted up their hands to God, upon taking the oath of
office, have an appalling responsibility when they exempt the most
odious criminals from the laws which they are sworn and paid to enforce.
The sovereign people, who indulge these officials in their palpable
neglect of duty and malfeasance in office, have a fearful
accountability.
Property owners and their agents, who rent buildings for immoral use,
are perhaps guiltiest of all, having no motive but greed. In Los
Angeles, the aroused citizens put the Italian millionaire, who owned the
"crib" district and was exploiting girls therein, on the chain gang and
abolished the "crib" district. On the other hand, in Chicago we have
seen property of Yale University become the vilest of dives, to the
grief of President Hadley and the shame of his agents in this city.
The old Roman Senator, who believed that Rome and Carthage could not
both be great, kept crying "Delenda est Carthago" until Carthage was
blotted out. So let us keep crying, "The Levee must go!" until the
police-protected white slave market is destroyed. Above all, in our
struggle against this most infamous slavery, let us never forget the
very early flag of the Revolution, the Pine Tree Flag, now preserved in
Independence Hall, with its deathless motto, WE APPEAL TO GOD.
E. A. B.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE FAILURE AND SHAME OF THE REGULATION OF VICE.
"When the Law fails to regulate sin, and not to take
it utterly away, it necessarily confirms and
establishes sin."--John Milton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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