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w iiiiTjnnliimriiT rr-v-fc'w m m : ..-....-.. .: - f
The Fight Against the
oaenfice of Women .
that Young Rockefeller
Mas Taken Up
tFTER many and slow years of devel
jf opment, this country is in the midst
0 a nation-undo war on slavery
one of the most ancient and most evil forms
of slavery the human race has evehfrac
ticed, the most universal that is practiced
now.
For years ignored by public, press and
pulpit, as though the very thought of its ex
istence were infection, condign rebuke befell
those daring spirits, whatever their station
and their reputation, who, -like Dr. Park
hurst, boldly directed attention to the social
canker. The moral conspiracy of silence al
ways engulfed the spasmodic movements of
reform, as though that one evil, among all
the ills that afflict mankind, had either a
taboo which made it too accursed for utter
ance, or some patent of immunity from un
conquerable powers of darkness.
The consequence is here, in the body
social of a' people now numbering ninety
millions, and here again t on this blistering
map which shows the stations of white slav
ery's underground railway center of ever
increasing despair along the dolorous way
of the ivhite woman s ruin.
Today there is no Parkhurst, because
there is no crusade calling for the eloquent
hermits of old. That time has passed the
time when a clergyman could penetrate in
cognito into a districted tenderloin and later
summon good Christians to the fray.
The gangrene virus has spread every
where, and the war is a civil war in which
no city or section is exempt; and, what is
worse, no woman of any class or nationality
is safe.
IT MAY be that those who deplored publicity
can feel exoneration from responsibility1 of
the evil's growth; for the conspicuous
feature of recent exposures has been the
swift and terribly debauching intrusion of th
foreign element into conditions of social vice,
'already, bad enough, but by no means" so ap
pallingly extensive a the modern revelations k
have shown them to be. '
feoufe of the 'ls?d?groff7S-&rwqy "
fying disclosures such as Dr. l'arkhurst made
from the pulpit a generation ago, have precipi
tated the brooding conflict. The individual
shocks to the national heart'and conscience were
but so many startling preliminaries, as, with a
far Ipss integrally-evil slavery ' of the century
past, both the John' Brown raid and the firing on
Sumter were but passing manifestations of the
vast and vital quarrel which drew'to its inevi
tably destined war.
So. too, the -men and women who have at
last mustered the moral courage to meet tho
modern issuo, instead of temporizing and evad
ing it, are fur from regarding Jhe now nation
ally known grand jury investigation, instituted
in New York, as the decisive engagement of the
6truRK'e.
True, that, grand jury, fated to tnko its
place prominently among the factors contribut
ing to the archives of (lie nation, is headed by
so wealthy and energetic a man as John D.
Rockefeller. Jr.. with his heart so' earnestly in
the tight that he offered $l'5,000. out. of the mil
lions Standard Oil has earned for hi inher
itance, to serve as the sinews of the war.
And true, as well, are the, facts which that
grand jury' has . brought to the light of the
ashamed day, demonstrating how debauched we
are a a people, and how lnx our fancied safe
guards of virtue have proved in the practical
enforcement.
But can the work of that single grand jury,
fostered as it is by all the intellectual energy
and influence of a man who is no inconsiderable
personage among the Standard Oil brains, accomplish-more
than a skirmish, revealing the
positions and intrenchments of the foe?
ffl74 s Mng to Jtenp
"The GreeVc Slave.
Whatever the suddenly- aggravating cause,
the imminence of the domestic war that has now
come to pass was for some time apparent. City
after city found it more and more difficult to
ignore the-extending" ruin of its youth and the
expanding, risks undej hich 'its girls grew into,
womanhood. .
a. ncrted tUtne by Powers.' typical of Oie enthrallment.af woman.
Kxposure after exposure betrayed the ex
istence of ramifications in vice, embracing all
neighborhoods in all large centers, as well aa
the more or 'less systematized recruiting of th
nation's brothels from, both the ignorant peas
antry and the vide-trained, outcasts of Europe.
' No single expose only, no peculiarly horri-
ITS DANGER EVERYWHERE
Tt has done that, to a great extent, It has
done something infinitely more, which is as
momentously helpful, as it is immediately daunt
ing. The evil of white slavery has been proved
far more widespread and far more difficult of
extermination than the least sanguine of re
formers had thought, to find it.
That epochal grand jury had barely begun
its labors 'when many of the dealers in women
fled from New York yet did not relinquish the
reins by which tlfcy TU"'"d the fortune-! of their
nefarious trade. As it progressed, the echoes
came of arrests in other cities, where supine au
thorities had been stimulated to prosecutions.
cIn Washington, with such shocking narra
tives becoming public as that in which women
inspectors of the federal government told of the
debauched conditions of the ste.- and case
after case developing where aliens-were shown
to be selling women like so many catjle, the
House of Representatives was working itself up
to the viva voce vote by which it. .passed tho.
Mann -white slave bill, making a. maximum fino
of $5000 and a term of imprisonment for five
years tho penalty for "interstate commerce" in
white slaves. ,,
From Europe came word, of a Parisian
spasm of vimio, by which Charles Auber, con
victed, of the Tuin of one peas'tt'ut.. girl for tha
profits, of the slavery there, Svas sentenced to
ninety-nine years in priwon. : . ' j , . '
From Russia came 'the siatfsttdsJpf; profit!
in the traffic as it is conducted, at Itigs.j. The
women we receive bearing Rus.sia'3braiid( for
our white slave market bring an averagef.prica
of. $:',(, f. o. b. at Riga. The slave exchange in
thnt town alone numbered fifteen members, all
prosperous. . ,.'
SELL FOR A SONG
The domestic article, according to testimony
on which the New York-grand j.wy brought, half
a dozen indictments in January, sells for, 133 per
cent. less. When "'ebru'oly ' ElizabetlTllared was
sold to a woman maintaining a slave pen in East
Seventy-ninth street, she brought only $20..
Much as has been revealed by the Rockefel
ler grand jury in New York, and for all that so'
much more has been published on the shameful
subject, it has remained for two such well-informed
authorities as Dr. 0. Edward' Janney,
chairman of the National Vigilance C'ommitteo
for the Suppression and Prevention of Traffic in
Women, and D.Clarence (iibhoijey, president of
the Law and Order Society in Philadelphia, to
disclose the real extent of the evil. It remained
for them to teach Americans the terrors that be
set the paths, not merely of the helpless foreign
girls who are betrayed and cafltured abroad for '
the service of criminality here, but of our own
American girls and women, ruined amid tho
people whose proudest boast is the chivalry with
which they defend the honor of their daughters.
Dr. Janney, pomting out that the very terra,
"white slavery," originates in European condi
tions, where all the victims are of the white race,
comments upon the incongruous feature that it
must, perforce, include here the negroes and
others of color who are bought and sold into its
hideous toils.
"But," he remarks, the term 'buying' and
'selling' do not fully describe the condition, sinco
many girls a:e put into dens of vice unwittiugly
and unw illingly, and are then forced, by ineaiH . ;
of threats, violence and fear of death, to ply
this vicious trade. The money they ottain thus
is taken from them by the. men who virtually "
own them, called , 'cadets' in this country nd
'souteneurs' in'Europe. ' . " ,-v
"It will. be-readily understood that, whether 1
eCO'NTINH'lSD 'ON'XKStDE 'J'AGK.J "
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