It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing
the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own
evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred
thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New
York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a
million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or
eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and
children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the
world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an
everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I
have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in
New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who
have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have
another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of
the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with
children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work
in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to
the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket
stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more
prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will
inevitably be.
Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I
visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and
one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for
the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously
referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson
describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the
gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the
bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that
she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened
to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of
bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror--abortion
mixtures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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