"The foreign girls have a safeguard in early marriage. While unmarried and away from home, they usually live with families of their own nationality and are treated as members of the family. Italian girls are further protected by the severe standards of their parents; an Italian father will almost kill a daughter who has gone astray. I have found Russian, Jewish, and Italian girls innocent, very sweet and trustful.
"American wage-earning girls on the other hand present a different picture. While many of them find homes in private families or among friends, many others are rooming in houses where there is no one to look after them. Many of them have no sitting room in which to receive men friends and have to use their bedrooms for this purpose. Some girls speak of this necessity with regret and a serious realization of the situation. Such girls can live under such conditions and be safe. Others resent the implication that these conditions are dangerous, feeling that their own virtue is questioned. Others treat the matter flippantly.
"The men and women who are interested in girls for no good reason have no difficulty in meeting the American girls, working as they do in stores, offices, hotels and restaurants. I believe that the American girl is surrounded by more numerous and far more subtle temptations than is the foreign girl."
KITTY SCHAY.
(This story is clipped from The National Prohibitionist.)
Another of the horrid stories that have come to light in the work of the Law and Order League of Chicago is that of a young girl who may be known here as Kitty Schay. This girl was born in Milwaukee twenty-one years ago, and became an orphan when only four years old. She was brought up in the home of an aunt who seems to have been a good woman, but somewhat unfeeling, and was given little or no opportunity for education, going to work at any early age.
Seeking amus.e.m.e.nt and companionship that her home did not give her, the poor girl began to frequent the public halls where dances were given, under saloon auspices, and came to attract much admiration and secure many acquaintances because of her graceful dancing. These a.s.sociations led to late hours, and although the girl, under circ.u.mstances that made truthtelling likely, insists that she was guilty of no offenses against virtue, her aunt became angry with her and drove her from her home.
Thrust upon her own resources, the poor creature sought work, living in a cheerless furnished room, and found her a.s.sociations for companionship and pleasure at dances and in concert halls and in the back rooms of some of the numerous gin mills that flourish in the city of Milwaukee, with the approval and consent of so many of that city"s good people.
Thus she lived, comparatively blameless, amid perils and temptations, until one night she was introduced to a young woman who offered her a position in Chicago where she could earn "good wages." The winter was coming on. The child had no store of winter clothing and looked forward to the terrible days of December and January with dread. She realized that the scanty pay for which she worked would buy her little of what she needed, and when the temptress talked to her of what seemed to her fabulous pay she consented all too willingly.
Perhaps she did not inquire too closely into the character of the work to which she was going. She had begun to drink, indeed, she says she was partially intoxicated at that moment with drink that had been furnished her by the woman and a male companion. At least, she agreed to go, and at the depot in Chicago was met by a closed hack in which she was taken at once to one of the dives of Chicago"s greatest vice preserve where the police, to whom she glibly told the story that she had been instructed to tell, speedily enrolled her as a woman of the "underworld."
Then began two months of horror. Exposure to disease, unthinkable brutality, degradation never before dreamed of--these were her portion in a full cup; and the alluring prospect of pay that had baited the trap faded away and she received in return for all this nothing but the barest, scantiest living.
At length a frequenter of the place, in whom honest impulses were not wholly dead, moved by her sorrowful story, fought her way out of the dive and reported the case to the Law and Order League.
The police have sent the poor creature back to Milwaukee to what improvement of fate it may well be imagined. And the vice mills grind on, and the police are busy "registering" new victims.
SALVATION ARMY EXPERIENCES.
Some time ago a Chicago girl found herself orphaned and almost friendless; her aunt cared for her for a little while, but life was so unbearable there that she decided to try domestic service.
One of the best known department stores in this city was at that time running a Labor Bureau; the girl went there and in due time was presented to a pleasant-faced ladylike woman, who offered her employment as "parlor-maid."
The poor girl, with glad heart and bright hopes, set off for her new home; but before night fell she found that she had been sold into a slavery worse than death. Her pleadings and tears were all in vain, and it was some months later before an opportunity of escape presented itself. Then, while walking on Clark street with the keeper of the house, she suddenly espied a little group of Salvationists holding an open-air meeting. To the amazement and consternation of the woman with her, the girl not only paused to listen, but took her stand between two Army girls, saying, "You will take care of me, I know."
That night she slept in an Army Rescue Home, and stayed with us for some time. An operation, made necessary by the life she had been forced to live, ended her days; but she died in peace, confident that she was going to a world where sorrow and sin never can enter.
Captain G., a Salvation Army officer while doing house to house visitation in the "Red Light" district, was amazed to meet a woman who came from her own township in the Fatherland.
It was perhaps a sentimental feeling which prompted the woman so freely to speak to the officer in reference to her chosen life. She said that years ago she had been beguiled to this country by an advertis.e.m.e.nt, which promised a good home and good wages to suitable girls. She replied to the advertis.e.m.e.nt and in due time was met at a Chicago railway station by the parties with whom she corresponded; and a few hours later found to her horror, that her confidence had been betrayed and that she was an unwilling guest of a resort.
There seemed to be no way of escape; and as time went on she grew accustomed to it and concluded that as others were making money in such fashion, she would follow their example. For years she has maintained a disreputable house, and most of the girls who live in it were entrapped and snared from their country homes much after the same fashion as she herself.
A Canadian school girl started to make a visit to her married sister in New York State. The train reached its destination several hours late.
The sister, who had been waiting at the railway station for hours, had just returned to her home when the train arrived; thus there was no one to meet the little girl at the end of her journey.
A man who had been lounging around the railway station, stepped up and asked her whom she was waiting for. Innocently enough she told him the whole story, when he remarked that he had been sent by the sister to take her to her home. Stepping into a carriage they drove to a well appointed house; but in his haste to leave the station un.o.bserved, the man had forgotten to ask for the check for the child"s trunk.
Leaving the little one, he returned to the station where the married sister was frantically making inquiries in reference to the traveler and was told that no one, answering that description, had stepped from the train. However the trunk standing there with the child"s initials on it made her confident that her sister had arrived and, in some unexplained fashion, had disappeared.
While the controversy with the station-master was going on, a man came up to claim the trunk; and an innocent girl was thus saved from the hands of the procuress, for the house to which she had been taken proved to be a notorious house of ill-fame.
No steps were taken in this case, as in thousands of others, to punish the wrong-doer; the sister dreading the notoriety, which would follow such a case.
We present in this book photographs of "Daisy," who died the day these words are penned. One picture shows her at seventeen in her beauty, "young and so fair." Another shows her dying in the poorhouse before she is twenty, after one year of sinful indulgence and one year of lingering death. The third shows her coffin, if the photographer is successful in snapping it tomorrow as the hea.r.s.e leaves the undertaker"s rooms, for her friends are too ashamed to give her burial from their home. These and all the others in this book are actual photographs, correctly named and in no way made up or misrepresented. The story of Daisy is told over their signatures, by Rev. W. E. Hopkins, formerly a missionary in India, now pastor of the Baptist church at West Pullman, and a worker in The Midnight Mission; and Miss Belle Buzzell who has been for many years a worker in the slums and prisons of Chicago. Miss Buzzell"s picture is seen beside the bed of the dying girl. It was "Daisy"s" own expressed desire that her death might be life to other girls by its warning.
THE STORY OF "DAISY."
We found her one day in March in the venereal ward at Cook County Hospital. She was unconscious, and it was five weeks before she could tell us her story. One of those great blue eyes was sightless. One hand was crippled. Her lower limbs were paralyzed. She was dying--dying of the horrible, loathsome, putrefying disease of the life of shame.
Poor child! This was the work of but one year of this life and she was not yet twenty years old. During that miserable year of sin, she was ill but recovered sufficiently to resume the service of l.u.s.t. Then came the break and for long weary months she lay helpless in the resort amidst the revellings of her stronger companions and their consorts--ghastly haunt of the women whose way ends in death.
The madam was kind to her, Daisy told us, and during the long illness at the hospital and later at the poorhouse she visited her frequently, bringing flowers and fruit and supplying her with money for the little delicacies which the county forgets to provide. But she, too, is a woman of sorrow. She is much better than her business and did not mean that her parlor should become a death-chamber. When we told her tonight of Daisy"s death she broke down in an agony of tears and for an hour cried out her story of shame, of heartbreak, of regret and remorse, and of longing for home and a worthy life. Yet she is bound for the present and we pray for her deliverance from this partnership with h.e.l.l, and hope that Daisy"s death may be as the touch of the Divine Spirit that shall restore in her the marred image of an exalted Christian womanhood.
About two years ago Daisy was left an orphan under peculiarly sad conditions. She resented the solicitude of an only sister--tho" her senior--and as neither was a Christian, the friction grew into a quarrel. She was given the alternative of submission or separation, and her sensitive spirit sought a place in the strange world without.
She entered the employ of a man whose family and business standing gave her reason to believe that she could trust him, and she testifies that he treated her as a true friend until he had won her entire confidence.
Then in an hour of need when she was in search of a new place, he directed her to No. ---- West Madison street. He did not take her in, lest he be charged with selling her as a white slave, but left her on the brink of ruin to take the plunge alone. How true the saying of the wise man, "Confidence in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth or a foot out of joint."
After six months at Cook County Hospital she was removed to the infirmary at Dunning. She thought that her sister was having her taken to a private sanitarium and the rude awakening in the County poorhouse broke her heart. We had secured funds for a Christian burial to save her from the potter"s field, when after a long search, we found her sister, who will bury her; and we would gladly have saved her from the poorhouse had it been within our power.
She told us that she was always of an affectionate disposition and was led to hope that her lonely heart would find loving companionship among prost.i.tutes. Oh! G.o.d, judge these devourers of loving, trustful, innocent children. Instead of love she found betrayal and shame and remorse, and sickness, and death; another victim sacrificed to ignorance and treachery and greed and l.u.s.t.
During the second month in the hospital, Daisy made such gain as to raise hopes of at least partial recovery. With returning strength she came to realize the sinfulness of her life and repented in deep humility. She was at her best when she accepted Jesus as her Savior, and definitely, determinedly yielded herself to him. Her sympathy went out to the diseased and friendless other girls in the ward, and her testimony moved them profoundly.
Her love for Jesus grew so strong that one desire possessed her--that she might live to warn girls of the sure end of the evil way and win them to Christ. In response to flowers and loving messages from young peoples" societies and friends, she sent most pathetic warnings. "Tell the girls for me always to confide in and obey their mothers," was her common message, and she urged us to tell her story wherever we could to warn mothers and daughters, and to use it in every possible way to save lost girls.
In fulfillment of her request, we send out on this day of her death, September 2, 1909, this message to accomplish the ministry that she was unable to perform.
"She, being dead, yet speaketh."
Belle Buzzell, W. E. Hopkins, Missionaries.
E. A. B.
CHAPTER x.x.xI.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE VICE DISTRICTS OF LOS ANGELES AND DES MOINES.
"My G.o.d! If I only could get out of here!" This midnight shriek of a young girl in the "crib" district of Los Angeles pierced the ears and the hearts of Rev. Sidney C. Kendall and Rev. Wiley J. Phillips, editor of The California Voice. They joined hands under the midnight sky and vowed to G.o.d and to each other to fight against that white slave market until it was annihilated.
Mr. Kendall could pray and preach and write. Mr. Phillips controlled the columns of the Voice, and also had the spirit and skill to use the law against the horrible traders in girls. Every week the Voice exposed and denounced the "cribs." Everyday Mr. Kendall wrote an article or a chapter, or addressed a ministers" meeting against the city"s awful curse and shame. At night these determined men led little companies of ministers and others through the crib district that they might know the infamies that were practiced in their city.