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
Dean Walter T. Sumner, one of Chicago's most prominent ministers and the
chairman of the recent Vice Commission, declared that each year the men
who visit the many haunts of vice in Chicago spend $60,000,000! He also
declared that of this amount, over $16,000,000 goes to the vice lords!
"TOO LATE TO TURN BACK"--CRIES WOMAN.
Before closing we wish to give a concrete example of the tenacious power
of the life of shame once it has fastened its fangs in the heart and body
of its victim. We tell the story so that every girl in this country may
know that once enslaved there is scarcely any redemption.
In one of the most notorious resorts in the South side levee district,
lost to all self-respect and shame, is a certain prostitute who drags her
wornout body about, selling it to vice victims night after night.
That woman is the daughter of an alderman of the city of Chicago!
Four years ago she was the idol of a happy home, the pet of a loving
father and the darling of a happy mother. Today she is a drunken, depraved
creature.
Her father has done everything in his power to rescue her. With his own
political power he has obtained permission from the vice masters to take
his daughter from her infamous prison.
That woman has looked at her father and cried out:
"It is too late! Society would spurn me and I would have to flee away.
Besides my body is wrecked and could not live without the intoxicants and
drugs I can feed it here."
The father offered her $10,000 a year as an allowance if the girl would
leave her evil ways. Again she refused because she knew in the depths of
her heart that the shackles welded long ago could never be broken, and
that the poison eating through her blood could never be purged out.
If this girl with every possible influence brought to bear to save her was
beyond salvation, what of the thousands who, even if they would, cannot
move hand or foot to escape the death waiting for them but a few years
away?
That is the story of the prostitute. It is not a story of the woman
considered as an entity, deprived of her relative existence; it is the
story of the slave as a commercialized being existing solely for the
enrichment of the Directorate of Ten of the Vice Trust and not because she
is needed to serve the passions of men.
THOUSANDS ENTER THE "LIFE" YEARLY.
And yet in the face of this staggering truth, thousands of women yearly,
enter upon the life of death. They go to fill the polluted beds and
chambers of horrors from which the gaunt, skeleton form of Death has just
crept noiseless, bearing away the victims whose terms of earthly service
in the interests of hell were at an end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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