“O, he keeps a bunch of ‘fillies’ in a shanty down near the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and they’re not foreigners, either. They’re American girls. No wonder he can make a bet like that on a mere chance from a roll of yellow backs.”

The speaker was the madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in that screened back room to risk their hard earned or evil-gotten money on the horses of the Louisville race track.

There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed book-maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race-track favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds—he counted them until three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a “clocker tip” in that day’s last race in Louisville.

There was grim, deadly silence—eating, unbearable silence in that gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the winner. Again the yellow haired madam’s voice screamed shrilly out, for she was indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the favorite—“Yes, a bunch of American ‘fillies’ peddled out at 50 cents an hour to all comers, black or white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on an outside chance.”

Three-hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria street, some mother’s girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and watched the feverish anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster and faster until I could bear it no longer. American “fillies” and body and soul under a brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties—poor, wretched hovels, every one of them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant, rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day’s work. On I went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the midst of prostitution at its lowest—the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago’s thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were—the fair young American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphiletic harlot, living, prostituting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths around that great red-light—Chicago’s West Side Soul Market—their poor, wrecked, foul smelling bodies sold day and night at from twenty-five to fifty cents an hour to all comers who could pay the pitiful price demanded by their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked, the burning fire of intense pity entered my soul for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and chained slaves—my sisters in Christ and this great, free American Republic, and so, with a heart-consuming desire to know more of the lives of these scarlet women and to help them, if possible, I began at once a thorough personal investigation of Chicago’s public Slave Market, visiting these people whenever occasion offered; talking with them, gaining their much abused confidence, until I gradually learned the inside lines of the saddest story America has ever known since the black mothers of our Southland were torn from their black and white babies and with shrieks of agony and heart strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened horror were sold to death on the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, and I want to tell you who read this and who think there is little truth in the now much agitated question of White Slavery in America, that in the dives and dens of our City’s underworld I have heard shrieks and heart cries and groans of agony and remorse that have never been surpassed at any public slave auction America has ever witnessed, as these girls, many of them, oh! so young, realizing their awful fate, with scalding tears and moans of horror, shut out from their hearts and lives father or mother or husband and child, and turned their sob-shaken, tortured bodies to face the years of final, relentless wretchedness and woe, to be at last thrown out sick and broken, to die in some alley or to be carted off to Dunning poorhouse to gradual physical decay and a pauper’s burial and grave of obliteration, while those who sold them just a few years before go out in their diamonds and fine linen and their great automobiles to buy up more girls (it might be your daughter, father, mother; or it might be mine) to fill the vacancy in the ranks of this vast army of White Slaves.

A woman said to me the other day, and it was in a lofty, sneering tone, too: “I doubt if these women are ever coerced or even imposed upon.”

LISTEN; READ, THEN LISTEN.

Sitting in my office one afternoon I listened, my blood almost freezing, to the following story vouched for by Mr. C——, an immigration inspector and brother of a well-known Chicago reform worker. Here it is as he told it to me:

Dear friends, there are true stories heard and known every day around the City’s seething, blood-red Soul Market that cannot be put into print—stories, though, that were they to become known, would make decent Chicago rise as one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort Sumter, “White Slavery in Chicago and in America must cease!”

During my years of study of this question of prostitution I learned to know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and South Side “levees.” One “Alice” I shall never, never forget. Beautiful aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax perfect, manner exquisite. “Alice,” seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-one away down the line in the West Side levee underworld. I used to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the “house” on Peoria street that gave her shelter, awaiting her call of “next” to go up stairs with whosoever—negro, white or Chinese—might buy for one dollar (one of the dollars of the Republic on which is eternally stamped the blessed words, “In God we Trust”) possession of her beautiful body for one hour. Smoking, always smoking her doped Turkish cigarette, Alice told me much of her life, both in years gone forever and of a daily “levee” existence. She told me of a father and mother and a beautiful home, of a lover who came into it and led her away by night into “levee” Slavery—of the awful disgrace and disinheritance, of a little baby that she only knew an hour, of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and scream and scream with mental pain until some whore-monger knocked her senseless, and then how she would crawl away to some near-by shanty saloon and drink herself helpless, to forget.

As far as I know Alice is still on Peoria street, and, oh! men and women, there are thirty thousand of these Alices in Chicago’s great blasting Soul Market to-day.

United States Attorney Sims puts the average life of a prostitute at ten years or less, while other excellent authorities put it as low as five years, as these women must constantly drink any and all drinks purchased for them by visitors (as much of the business revenue is derived from the sale of these drinks), thus forcing them at all times into a half-drunken condition, rendering them helpless to control the abnormal, sickening, mind and body wrecking demands made upon them by the gonorrheal, syphilitic, sodden wretches of whom not one in ten is capable of normal sexual coalition, yet whose debauched, drunken desires and requirements, no matter how unnatural and revolting, must be satisfied by the use of the bodies of their hopeless victims at fifty or even as low as twenty-five cents an hour.

Very few young women entering this cesspool of prostitution are able to live therein an average of eight weeks without becoming infected with one or more of the loathsome diseases of the underworld, and thus ruined and horrible they live on and on for three, four or six years, and at the end of that time thirty thousand pure young girls, gathered from prairie homes and village firesides and from out of our own suburban and city families, must march out into this great Soul Market to take the place of the broken wretches whose decaying bodies are cast into the refuse of our alleys and sewers to become the menace of every girl and boy and drunken man who comes within their clutches or sets foot within their alley hovels.

THE END OF THE WAY.

At about ten o’clock on Saturday evening, September 19th, I boarded a West Madison street car and, transferring north at Halsted street, alighted at Lake and walked west to Lewinsky’s saloon at the corner of Lake and Green streets. Going around to the side entrance on Green street, I discovered in the wine and back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of perhaps fifty drunken, dirty, diseased men and women, most of them foul-smelling, young white girls huddled in with the worst mob of negroes, whites and Chinese I have seen in Chicago’s slums, all cursing, drinking, singing and blaspheming in plain view and hearing of the street. I stopped a moment to make sure I was making no mistake in what I saw and then crossed the street to interview the dark-eyed little foreign girl who at its door was boldly soliciting trade for the saloon and its adjacent evils, just opposite.

I walked on down to Peoria and south on that notorious street.

In the row of houses running from Lake to Randolph street there are approximately six hundred White Slaves, and diseased, crippled prostitutes of the lowest class, dumped from the city’s cleaner dives, and on that night it was almost impossible to push one’s way through the mass of men and boys—whites, negroes, Turks, Polocks, etc., gathered in front of these places of public abomination. At the corner of Randolph and Peoria streets several earnest men and women were holding a little gospel meeting, and, stopping with them, I counted during the thirty minutes I stayed there six hundred and forty (approximately) men and boys stop in front of or enter this horrible flesh market.

As I left the scene, a young girl in a drunken, filthy, diseased condition slipped out of an alley and followed me, asking me to help her, and as we sat on the steps of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, corner of Washington boulevard and Peoria street, she told me the worst, most heart-breaking story of wrong and vice and ruin I have ever listened to (see note.)[4]

As I left that West Side levee of vice I knew I had seen prostitution at its lowest ebb and that from these holes of horror finally went those awful alley women of the night to sell their soul and trail their black disease to any young boy or drunken man who could give them a few cents or even the price of a drink of whiskey.

Coming down Custom House Place one night about 10:30 o’clock I overtook, without their knowledge, six boys, ranging from about twelve down to perhaps seven years, three of whom I knew fairly well. Following them from shadow to shadow, I gathered sufficient of their low-voiced conversation to make me certain they had been holding an orgy in a nearby cellar or basement with a drunken harlot, and that together they had paid her the small sum of seventeen cents for this damning, soul-destroying commerce. One boy, a lad of about nine years, had been wheedled by his companions into paying ten cents of this sum and was arguing for the return of at least a part of his money, because of the age and helplessness of the woman and the extreme short time allowed him by his companions in his relations with her.

Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent of the John Worthy School, which is the local juvenile municipal reformatory, reported that one-third of the street boys sent to him were suffering from the loathsome diseases and distempers of the red-light district, nor is this to be wondered at when we consider the fact that sexual commerce may be purchased almost anywhere in South State street and in the West Side alleys for the remarkably low price of ten cents, or even a glass of beer or whiskey, from the gonorrheal, syphilitic denizens thrown out long ago from the better class houses of prostitution to live off of the half-drunken men and boys to be found in swarms along South State, Halsted and South Clark streets.

Almost invariably, the street boy haunting these underworld sections of our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half-rotten, yet painted vampires of the streets whose only care or hope is a crust of free lunch and enough whiskey or “dope” to drown for a time at least the last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a little longer in the wretched body, and the boy having purchased for a small fee his own destruction trails out again into the night and on into disease and crime and prison, and finally death.

The average parent of to-day has little idea of the temptations which constantly surround and beset the growing boy. I recall a case in Des Moines, Iowa, where a little degenerate girl of sixteen caused the moral, and in several cases physical, ruin of five young boys, all this happening in an exclusive East Side neighborhood and under the watchful care of honest parents and friends, so what must be the temptation thrown out to the young boys of our city when through block after block of our central districts they must come in contact with those whose only mission is to ruin and debauch.

It should be the direct object, morally and physically, of every father and mother in this city to banish these parasites—these leeches who suck the life blood of our boys—from Chicago’s streets.

Listen, father, mother, there are thirty thousand pure, dearly beloved young girls growing up in our midst to-day who within five years must, under the present business system of White Slavery, put aside father, mother, home, friends and honor, and march into Chicago’s ghastly flesh market to take the place of the thirty thousand helpless, hopeless, decaying chattels who now daily, behind bolts and bars and steel screens (see note[5]), satisfy the abominable lust of (approximately) two hundred and ten thousand brutal, drunken adulterers.

I believe, as I write, that the final solving of this reeking, hideous question lies in the moral and Christian teaching and protection of the growing girls of our Land. I believe in a rigidly enforced law that keeps girls under legal age and unattended, off the down town streets at nights after a reasonable hour. Harry Balding, the convicted White Slaver, in his confession before Judge Newcomer and State’s Attorney Roe, said:

There is a league of Masonry worldwide that makes it possible for a Mason anywhere, in trouble or distress, to raise his hand toward the heavens with a certain sign, and if there be a brother Mason within reach, that brother, no matter of what nationality, kindred or tongue, is sworn to give him all needed protection. Listen, father, mother, sister; listen, brother!

To-day from beneath Chicago’s awful moral sewerage system, which has sucked their hearts and souls under, thirty thousand trembling hands are held up to High Heaven and to you for help, hands reeking with the blood on which some whore monger has fattened, the hands though of your sisters and of mine. And I believe that here in Chicago, the greatest market for White Slaves on the Continent, should be formed a league that would become world-wide, of earnest, law-abiding men and women whose efforts, united with those of the proper police, municipal and Federal authorities, would make it practically impossible for a girl to be sold into or compelled to lead an immoral life, and through whose influence such open, publicly-protected flesh markets as our red-light and levee districts would be banished forever from Chicago streets. And I believe with all my heart that this can only be accomplished by education, by agitation, by legislation, by the ballot and by the power of God, directing a great national army of well informed, moral and Christian men and women against this vast, thoroughly organized, well administered and heavily financed public horror of our Republic.

I believe in helping, God knows, with heart and hand and money every fallen, or as one has put it, every “knocked down” woman in our Land whom there is the slightest chance to help in any way; but I believe, first of all, in using every known measure to keep our girls from falling.

You and I live beneath the only flag in all the world that has never known defeat, and the very basic principle upon which that flag is built is human liberty and human protection, and so by personal work and co-operation with every other reform and labor organization for the uplifting of womanhood, by song and by prayer and the Power of the Cross, let us set ourselves to help these helpless ones in our midst until the angels shall take up the story of shame and bitterness and wrong and bear to all the world and to Heaven itself the swift acknowledgment that you are your brother’s keeper.