BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL.

Mexico

V. C. in Vera Cruz stands for Venereal City. “El Dictamen” is the leading newspaper. It has only four pages, yet whole columns are filled with advertised cures for scrofula, syphilis, locomotor-ataxia and all the rotten ills that licentious Latin-America is heir to. The space we give to weather reports on the front page, or to special news with extra headlines, is given up here to nauseating advertisements. The first thing one sees as he enters the plaza are billboards, walls and buildings with sure-cure advertisements.

L. A. in Latin America stands for “licentious animals.” In Vera Cruz the principal male pastime is to talk about girls and not of God. From 4 P. M. to 2 A. M. men sit in the plaza portales drinking, smoking and talking about the women who pass by. The leading subject of “town talk” is girls, the one they went to the movie with last, the other one the night before, and the one they hope to get tonight.

The people make themselves a sewer for immoral filth, court the devil Lust that eats and burns up their blood; are spendthrifts of body and soul; waste their inheritance to purchase dirty, loathed disease; pawn their bodies to a dry-rot evil; make themselves patients for Lust’s rendezvous, a hospital, where their bill of fare is pills, not beef, and the doctor’s bill is longer than the moral law they have violated. What I have written here about Vera Cruz morals applies to the rest of Mexico where conditions are the same or worse.

The Ten Commandments are little in evidence in the country and free love prevails with the fruit of seventy-five per cent of illegitimate births. A respectable bachelor is not qualified to enter society until several children call him “papa.” Few men are without a separate establishment for affinities.

Honolulu

The Hawaiians are out and out in their dancing. They do not gloss it over and wear no hypocritical fig-leaves. They do not throw masks or mantles over their viciousness, under the guise of religious charity balls and philanthropic society parties. The hula is a hip dance, but the Hawaiians are not “hip”—ocritical in doing it. The dance is not sad or hippish but one of joy.

I have seen many dances—the Apache in Paris, du ventre in Cairo, the can-can in Buenos Aires, and with money here in Honolulu one can arrange with a chauffeur or at a hula house to see a hula combining all these vile and violent exhibitions. It is a composite of the compost of all dirty dances, most delightfully depraved, innocent of decency and shame, the dancers being quite careless about the exposure of their legs, arms and charms. What captivating indelicacy, so disturbing to the looker-on. But this it not the native hula. There is sufficient of the sun and volcano without it. The whites have taken away the native naivete and added their own nastiness. As a physiological study the dance is informing. In antiquity these antics were a religious service, combining poetry, pantomime and passion. The old edition of the heathen hula dance has been expurgated, but Christian foot-notes suggest more.

At one hula house I witnessed an unscheduled fight between several sailors who had quarreled over the charms of a hula girl with the result of broken heads, hearts and furniture. The native proprietor welcomed us with characteristic Hawaiian hospitality—we could eat, drink and stay as long as we pleased—all night in fact, with his hula girls for company. I thanked him for his ancient, beautiful and unbounded generosity but told him I was married and a minister, although he seemed unable to understand why that should make any difference with me, since it made little to some of the local clergy and laity.

One day at high noon, not night, I saw several native women bathing at Waikiki beach. All they had on was a holoku night-gown that was as good as nothing when wet. Three white, male strangers sauntered up from the nearby hotel, waded in, threw their arms around the girls and were guilty of “divers” familiarities. The girls didn’t object to the conduct of the boys. I couldn’t help seeing or thinking whether the fishes swam away or stayed and blushed all colors. Here was a “freedom of the seas” I refer to the naval board for diplomatic discussion.

God’s righteousness is like the great mountains. I often thought, as I marvelled at the islands’ scenery, that there are sermons in stones, but men do not listen; summits preach high ideals and purity, but people are deaf; and nature’s green only looks down on the mud and mire of lucre, lies, lust and laziness.

Havana

Havana is a fool’s Paradise—a lunatic limbo for people with loud clothes, lots of money, loose morals and light heads. It is the place where bad folks go to have a good time. The more disreputable a city is, the more popular it is to high society.

I have visited Havana many times and found the H in its name stood for Hell, not Heaven. On a recent sojourn I asked a traveling companion what the state of religion was and if Havana’s morals were improved. “Oh, yes, there has been a great reformation.” He had scarcely made this gratifying statement when a young man came up to me and showed some vile postcards and postals which he offered for sale. This did not happen in a side street at night, but in Central Park at noon.

Havana has reformed! The city has no “segregation,” but you may walk for miles along streets to the waterfront and find every other house with a seductive senorita at the door or window with extended hand or winsome voice urging you in broken Spanish or English to forsake the counsel of your mother’s Bible. Regular saloons and concert halls had scores of the women of the town at the tables sitting with motley men, while glasses clinked and phonographs scratched their screechy music. This was all bad enough but the lowest hell was reached when I saw a woman standing in the doorway offering to sell a girl of about 14 who stood by her side. At the end of certain streets the police were on watch to keep the women off the sidewalks, and so maintain an appearance of decency and order. Other places were unwatched and free.

Havana has reformed! The sporting women of the town advertise in several of the local magazines, where you find their photos, house address and some such paragraph in Spanish or in English for the benefit of the American tourist: “Tourist! Do you wish a good house in Havana, with plenty of women, pretty and elegant? Go to —— street, No. ——, ask for Helena. Go today.” Here’s another: “Artistic Academy. If you want a place for pleasure and a good time, go to ——, plenty of nice girls.” Another want ad reads: “Ladies from all nations,” and still another, “Violeta has moved to —— street, and with her Parisian arts welcomes the Havana public.”

Poor pleasure-seekers, whose law is fashion and folly their pursuit! Bubbles on the wave of pleasure, a tracery on the sand which Time’s tide will soon erase. Every year the siren voice of Havana calls, “Come in your private yacht on the Gulf Stream of gold; come with full purse and empty head and heart; come, you ‘best’ society, that you may be seen at your worst; come, all ye who would desert the temple of your mind and soul for this Circe’s palace of fleshy pleasures!”

Central America

Hamlet found something “rotten in the state of Denmark,” but it was sweet compared with what I discovered in Central America—the land of eruption and corruption, of dirt, disease, destitution, darkness, dilapidation, despots, delay, debt, deviltry and degeneracy, where a conservative estimate makes 90 per cent of the women immoral, 95 per cent of the men thieves, and 100 per cent of the population liars.

While strolling about the sultry seaport of Amapala, Spanish Honduras, and thinking of Morazan, the great Honduran liberator, two deceitful dames sought to enslave me. I was a stranger and they tried to take me in—their home nearby. Fortunately a policeman came up and warned me in broken English that these girls were “always—very—bad—to—everybody.” Each one took my arm and I thought it was time to take to my legs and get away. Anticipating my flight, one of them sprang upon me, wrapped her nether limbs about my waist and her arms around my neck. Thus in broad daylight in the heart of the town and in full view of the passerby I was attacked and assaulted. What a shipwreck of character might have happened had I landed at night! I hurried back to the ship and sought the seclusion my cabin afforded. The captain congratulated me on my narrow escape and informed me that on nearly every trip to this port native women of the town attempt to smuggle themselves at night on board to exchange their morals for the sailors’ money.

Panama

The last time I visited the Panama Canal it was closed, but the town was wide open. Former streets called straight were crooked and some rescued territory had relapsed. Just off the main street the scarlet woman and the red light flourished and flaunted. Posing as bar-girls these women came out boldly with the bar-sinister of their profession, came with forbidden fruit from the “Cocoa Grove,” and exposed it for sale on West Sixteenth street, contaminating the young. The groves may have been God’s first temples, but not this Panama “Cocoa” one. Here Satan conducts services every day of the year and passion-fruit is offered all who walk its thoroughfares. One finds all colors, classes and conditions of carnality. The U. S. soldiers are the police because the Panamanian police hate our boys sober or drunk, and when our boys had a fight the Panamanians beat them up. There are dens of high and low degree, full of filth, profanity, drunkenness, disease and debauchery, I know, for I saw, and I saw because I was there for local color and it was black enough.

Panama is famous for its canal, the wedlock of the oceans, but the city Panama is infamous, knows little of the family word “wedlock” and its red light “Cocoa Light” would make the fabled Daphne Grove wither up with envy. From the first to the fifteenth of each month the U. S. soldiers receive their pay and spend a large amount of it here in wine, women and song. In this pandemonium of profligacy, one may see, at any hour of the day or night, a brave soldier boy, intoxicated with love or liquor, sitting in a doorway with a half-dressed, bare-legged girl in his lap. These girls are o. k.’d by an M. D. twice a week and pronounced all right. Our soldiers cannot leave camp and visit them without a card certificate of good character. After they have made a night of it the boys repair to the “House of Lords” in the district and receive a bath and inoculation of anti-venereal dope. If they fail to take this treatment and are contaminated, they suffer more ways than one, being compelled to pay a fine. This is all too bad. Pleasures pure and simple should be given them at camp or in barracks. As it is, many of them are “shot to hell” before they ever go to war. If they have any extra money, strength or inclination, they may hit the opium-pipe, buy a get-rich-quick lottery ticket, or on Sunday attend a bullfight. A modern St. Anthony would find it difficult to withstand the temptations of this zone. More than one Pan-American religious conference is needed to make the moral atmosphere as pure as the city streets are clean. It is a bigger job to kill the devil than to exterminate the yellow-fever mosquito.

Friendship and Love

What causes the majority of women to be so little touched by friendship is that it is insipid when they have once tasted of love.

She Quit the Union

A party went to the opera and occupied a box. One of the men saw a raveling on the shoulder of one of the ladies. He picked it, and it kept on coming. He pulled and pulled till he had a tremendous mass, which he threw behind the door. Some days after the men met and talked it over. One of them said: “My wife had a good time, but she cannot figure out how she lost her union suit.”