The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the WorldHarland, Robert O.
History
The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the World
Harland, Robert O.
Chicago (Ill.) -- Moral conditions; Prostitution -- Illinois -- Chicago
Her face is white. Her eyes are like those of a hunted deer. Her hands
tremble.
It is her first night!
The fiendish brute induces her to take the drink. You see her take
another. She seems suddenly to become stupid.
"Come on, it is about time to go, Kid," you hear the man say.
The young girl lurches into his waiting arms.
That night another victim is claimed by the monster!
Somewhere a little, gray-haired mother prays that her daughter may be
protected from the sins of a great city.
There is an unfathomable abyss waiting for that girl, a chasm in the
depths of which lurk torture, sin, disease and death.
In that cafe all is levity and enjoyment. It is a living in the present, a
forgetfulness of the past, a shutting of the eyes to the terrors of the
unborn future.
In one night while the music pleases the senses, while song brings an
ephemeral joy, while drink quickens the pulse, while the atmosphere lulls
the conscience to sleep, innocent young girls, barely out of school, are
inoculated with the poison of forbidden fruit.
Every year, hundreds of young girls, undefiled and pure, drift into the
wickedest city in the world, are carried away by the glare of the "Great
White Way" and the sensuous lures of the dazzling cafes and the Bohemian
pleasures, and become unconsciously, the recruits of the great absorbing
Vice Trust.
As we pass from this cafe,--the type of hundreds of others,--note the
attractive pictures on the wall,--pictures of popular actresses, actors,
prizefighters and men of the world of sports.
The girl who a year ago knew comparatively nothing of the world outside of
her harmless, narrow sphere, can point to the pictures and give you the
names with dangerous accuracy. They are now a part of her Bohemian world.
She boasts today of familiarity with them.
Late in the night, or to speak accurately, at early dawn, the cafes empty
their drunken revelers into the streets. In pairs they stagger away, some
to houses of assignation, others to the disorderly hotels where they live,
and still others to the "redlight" districts of the city, of which we
shall soon speak.
That is the cafe evil of today. It is the outward threads of the enmeshing
web of the insidious and poisonous spider-Vice. Once trapped, redemption
is scarcely possible.
Two hundred department store girls, according to a reform association's
statistics, take the first downward step each year, in these cafes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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