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
Again: The results of this legal work and of the explanations of the
conditions uncovered in my former article have brought to me a
gratifying knowledge of the practical and most effective rescue work
being done by Rev. Ernest A. Bell of the Illinois Vigilance
Association, of which Rev. M. P. Boynton is the president. These men
and many of the settlement and slum workers of Chicago with whom I have
come in contact are not only specialists in this field, but they are as
devoted as they are practical. More perhaps because of the urgent
assurances of the Rev. M. P. Boynton, Mr. Bell and others that giving to
the public a statement of actual conditions has been of a great service
to them in their hand to hand fight than to any other reason, I am moved
to make another statement.
When the editor of the Woman's World urged me to write of "The White
Slave Traffic of Today," I felt that I had an official knowledge of
facts which the fathers and mothers of the country had a right to know
in order to prevent the possibility of their daughters falling victims
to the most hideous form of human slavery known in the world today. This
consideration moved me to put aside my strong personal feelings against
appearing in print in connection with a subject so abhorrent. Many
results of that article have made me glad that I did so--and those
results have also contributed to overcome my antipathy to a further
pursuit of that subject. But in following this topic as I now do, I
shall again emphasize the fact that I wish to say what seems to be
needful in as unsensational a way as possible, and that I also wish to
do that from the viewpoint of a public prosecutor who has, in the
ordinary discharge of his duties, encountered this appalling situation,
and not at all from the standpoint of the sentimentalist.
So far as the matter of sensationalism is concerned, that may be
disposed of in the simple statement that the naked recital, in the most
formal and colorless phraseology, of the facts already brought to light
by the "white slave" prosecutions are in themselves so sensational that
the art of the most brilliant orator, or the cunning of the cleverest
writer, could not add an iota to their sensationalism. And it may as
well be said here that it is quite impossible to even hint in public
print of the revolting depths of shame disclosed by this investigation.
Behind every word that can be said in print on this topic is a word of
degradation of which the slightest hint cannot be given.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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