New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction
His means are multitude. Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he
is there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, discontent
complaining for relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this
missionary, this "cadet," offering the quack salvation of his
temporal church. He knows and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish
sisters sent to work for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish,
the Germans, the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another
economic mill; the restless neurotic native-daughters untrained for
work and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when it
releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air; he is at
the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday
food handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around the corner
for the servant and the shop-clerk. He remembers that these are
girls too tired to do household work in their evenings, too untaught
to find continued solace in books; that they must go out, that they
must move about; and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants
and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies, the
dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where immigrants,
long before they learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they
call the American language, learn what they are told are American
dances: the whirling "spiel" with blowing skirts, the "half-time
waltz" with jerking hips. He may frequent the more sophisticated
forms of these places, may even be seen in the more expensive cafés,
or may journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.
Where training is as yet too strong or distress too weak to make
serve the offer of partnership, the promise of marriage usually
suffices. The thing is done, and once done, blows and starvation
perpetuate it with the ignorant, and threats of exposure and public
shame rivet the shackles on the more knowing. The former suffer for
their darkness; the latter are held the faster in proportion to their
previous respectability.
One has said that this church is established; in every city it
maintains its incestuous marriage to the state. It controls real
votes by the thousands and provides false ones by the tens of
thousands. It is a church that may be considered to exercise the old
ecclesiastical right of trying its own offenders in its own courts.
When the magistrates have not begun as slavers, when they own no
poor, but highly rented, houses, leased for prostitution, when they
do not even accept tithes from the traffic, it is still largely the
traffic that elects and can defeat them. What the Black Church owes
to the political powers for their protection, the political powers
owe to the church for its ballots.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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