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
We present in this book photographs of "Daisy," who died the day these
words are penned. One picture shows her at seventeen in her beauty,
"young and so fair." Another shows her dying in the poorhouse before she
is twenty, after one year of sinful indulgence and one year of lingering
death. The third shows her coffin, if the photographer is successful in
snapping it tomorrow as the hearse leaves the undertaker's rooms, for
her friends are too ashamed to give her burial from their home. These
and all the others in this book are actual photographs, correctly named
and in no way made up or misrepresented. The story of Daisy is told over
their signatures, by Rev. W. E. Hopkins, formerly a missionary in India,
now pastor of the Baptist church at West Pullman, and a worker in The
Midnight Mission; and Miss Belle Buzzell who has been for many years a
worker in the slums and prisons of Chicago. Miss Buzzell's picture is
seen beside the bed of the dying girl. It was "Daisy's" own expressed
desire that her death might be life to other girls by its warning.
THE STORY OF "DAISY."
We found her one day in March in the venereal ward at Cook County
Hospital. She was unconscious, and it was five weeks before she could
tell us her story. One of those great blue eyes was sightless. One hand
was crippled. Her lower limbs were paralyzed. She was dying--dying of
the horrible, loathsome, putrefying disease of the life of shame.
Poor child! This was the work of but one year of this life and she was
not yet twenty years old. During that miserable year of sin, she was ill
but recovered sufficiently to resume the service of lust. Then came the
break and for long weary months she lay helpless in the resort amidst
the revellings of her stronger companions and their consorts--ghastly
haunt of the women whose way ends in death.
The madam was kind to her, Daisy told us, and during the long illness at
the hospital and later at the poorhouse she visited her frequently,
bringing flowers and fruit and supplying her with money for the little
delicacies which the county forgets to provide. But she, too, is a woman
of sorrow. She is much better than her business and did not mean that
her parlor should become a death-chamber. When we told her tonight of
Daisy's death she broke down in an agony of tears and for an hour cried
out her story of shame, of heartbreak, of regret and remorse, and of
longing for home and a worthy life. Yet she is bound for the present
and we pray for her deliverance from this partnership with hell, and
hope that Daisy's death may be as the touch of the Divine Spirit that
shall restore in her the marred image of an exalted Christian womanhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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