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
They have become an essential element to the nefarious scheme of the Vice
Trust. Whip in hand they are the appointed lashers of the thousands of
lost women, beating them to urge them to work harder, faster, and thus
yield a return for their purchase price until the cold earth falls with
hollow sound upon the cheap casket purchased to hide away their shame and
sin in the ground.
The subsidiary trusts of the great Vice Trust have taken their toll. But
the unfortunate women, through their commissions, particularly on liquors,
have still some of the terrible wage drained from their bodies.
The trust must have the greater part of that. It is the duty of the
"cadets" to get it. They do.
They collect from the girls, take their share and turn over a large
percentage to the Directorate of Ten.
The trust has a strange reason for this. The trust considers the "cadet"
primarily as a parasite. That parasite must pay a price for existence. To
get it, he must compel the woman he controls to make more money.
In urging her to make more money he is boosting the graft in every
possible way.
There is a psychological connection between the "cadet" and his
prostituted slave-woman.
Inherent in the nature of every woman is the primitive instinct of the
mastership of man and obediance to it. In the good woman that obediance to
that subconscious instinct finds its expression in love and in strange
submission to his theories and practices of life where there exists no
moral conflict.
To be loved, to be cared for, to be desired, are the impulses developing
out of the conception of man's mastery.
In the lost woman, the instincts are the same; so, too, the impulses.
When a woman has fallen she never gives up her dream of a "one man" who
might love her, treasure her and protect her, until the eternal night
blots out the colors of the vision.
Failing to find a return love, the thousands of unfortunate women fall
victims to their own loves for men. Rather than lose even the hollow,
empty sham of love, rather than to miss the presence of a brute, they
submit to indignities, brutality and tortures that are indescribable.
It is the under current carrying the idea of Man the Master. The woman is
willing to be the slave.
Playing on this perverted instinct of the woman, the Vice Trust makes
capital of it. The "cadets" are brought in on the general plan of graft.
The "redlight" districts of the city are infested with these men,
fattening on their lost women.
Judging from the number of well dressed men of no apparent occupation who
hang about the saloons, resorts, poolrooms, cigar stores and other places
near the levees, there are more than 1,000 of these worms of the earth at
large, feeding on the city's great ulcer, flaunting their crimes in the
faces of our young men and young women of clean morals, and murdering
their women hirelings!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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