A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

ous social movements with which they later find themselves allied. The most immediate help in this new campaign against the social evil will probably come thus indirectly from those stream

tted. But the experiments in segregation, in licensed systems, and certification have not been considered successful. The medical profession, hitherto divided in opinion as to the feasibility of such undertakings, is virtually united in the conclusion that so long as commercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city against the spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatal alike to the individual and to his offspring. The medical profession agrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become the purveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type, safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercialized vice. They point out t

in the end adequate provision must be made for their isolation. A child was recently discovered in a Chicago school with an open sore upon her lip, which made her a most dangerous source of infection. She was just fourteen years of age, too old to be admitted into that most pathetic and most unlovely of all children's wards, where children must suffer for "the sins of their fathers," and too young and innocent to be put into the women's ward in which the public takes care of those wrecks of dissolute living who are no longer valuable to the commerce which once secured them, and have become merely worthless stock which pays no dividend. The disease of the little girl was in too virulent a stage to admit her to that convalescent home lately established in Chicago for those infected children who are dismissed fr

ble difficulties. Many newspapers, so ready to deal with all other forms of vice and misery, never allow these evils to be mentioned in their columns except in the advertisements of quack remedies; the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian religion and the early apostles, seldom preach against

accomplishment. When we consider the many things undertaken in the name of health and sanitation it becomes easy to make the prediction, for public health is a magic word which ever grows more potent, as society realizes that the very existence of the modern city would be an impossibility had it not been discovered that the health of the individual is largely controlled by the hygienic condition of his

fear of spreading the infection for which her husband had been responsible, that she touchingly offered to leave her children forevermore, if there was no other way to save them from the horrible suffering she herself was enduring. In spite of thousands of s

sacted by the white slave traders, and has asserted that without its use this trade could not long continue. Whoever has tried to help a girl making an effort to leave the irregular life she has been leading, must have been discouraged by the victim's attempts to overcome the habit of using alcohol and

superintendent of police last year ruled that no liquor should be sold in any disreputable house. The difficulty of enforcing such an order is greatly increased because such houses, as well as the questionable dance halls, commonly obtain a special pe

al or adventurous glamor over an aspect of life from which a decent young man would ordinarily recoil, and its continued use stimulates the senses at the very moment when the intellectual and moral inhibitions are lessened. May we not conclude that both chastity and self-restraint are more firmly established in the modern city than we realize, when the white slave traders find it necessary both forcibly to detain their victims

will in the end be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission has made a series of valuable suggestions for the regulation of saloons and for the separation of the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all other places known as recruiting grounds for the white slave traffic. T

ure, will doubtless promptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slave traffic; women with political power would not brook that men should live upon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruin and debase young girls, should be permitted to transmit poison to unborn children. Life is full of hidden remedial powers which society has not yet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste more flagrant than in the matured deductions and judgments of the women, who are constantly forced to share the social injustices which they have no recognized power to alter. If political rights were once given to women, if the situation were theirs to deal with as a matter of civic responsibility, one cannot imagine that the exis

t is between fourteen and sixteen, and in some of them it is as low as ten. These legal regulations persist in spite of the well-known fact that the mass of girls enter a disreputable life belo

rs. Without such protection even an innocent woman, made to appear a member of this despised class, receives no consideration. A girl of fifteen recently acting in a South Chicago theatre attracted the attention of a milkman who gradually convinced her that he was respectable. Walking with him one evening to the door of her lodging-house, the girl told him of her difficulties and quite innocently accepted money for the payment of her room rent. The following morning as she was leaving the house the milkman met her at the door and asked her for the five dollars he had given her the night before. When she said she had used it to pay her debt to the landlady, he angrily replied that unless she returned the money at once he

ure their votes for a corrupt politician. The disreputable women, wishing to conceal their real names and addresses, did not want to be registered, in this respect at least differing from the lodging-house men whose venal

be made toward a more effective social control, if the mass of conscientious women were once thoroughly convinced that a knowledge of local vice conditions was a matter of civic obligation, if the entire body of conventional women, simply because they held the franchise, felt constrained to inform themselves concerning the social evil throughout the cities of America. Perhaps the most immediate result would be a c

been the very pioneers in the organization of the American Abolitionists, so it is quite possible that an equally energetic attempt to abolish white slavery will bring many women i

eousness. The wind of moral aspiration now dies down and now blows with unexpected force, urging on the movements of social destiny; but never do the sails of the ship of state push forward with such assured progress as when filled by the mighty hopes of a newly enfranchised class. Those already respons

cago live outside of the city. They are the men who come from other towns to Chicago in order to see the sights. They are supposedly moral at home, where they are well known and subjected to the constant control of public opinion. The report goes on to state that during conventions or "show" occasions the business of commercialized vice is enormously increased. The village gossip with her vituperative tongue after all performs a valuable function both of castigation and retribution; but her fellow-townsman, although quite unconscious of her restraint, coming into a city hotel of

en by an investigator in the late evening hurrying away from the camp. She was so absorbed in her trouble and so blinded by her tears that she fairly ran against him and he heard her praying, as she frantically clutched the beads around her neck, "Oh, Mother of God, what have I done! What have I done!" The Chicago encampment was finally brought under control through the combined efforts of the park commissioners, the city police, and the military authorities, but not without a certain resentment from the last toward "civilian interference." Such an encampment may be regarded as an historic survival representing the standing armies sustained in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire. These large bodies of men

ized the unjustifiable expense involved in the maintenance of the standing armies of Europe, the social waste in the withdrawal of thousands of young men from industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren negative life of the barracks. They

ve forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family affection. The young couple who may have been brought together in marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work in meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfolded lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of children. They

t virtuous women could not safely walk the streets unless opportunity for secret vice were offered to the men of the city. It is pr

ial reconstruction, and since the publication of Bebel's great book, nearly thirty years ago, the leaders of the Socialist party have never ceased to discuss the economics of prostitution with its psychological and moral resultants. The Socialists contend that commercialized vice is fundamentally a question of poverty, a by-product of despair, which will dis

es as well as new nobilities in human nature; that a given social development-such, for instance as the conditions of life for thousands of young

during the past century so marked by the rapid growth of cities, because the great principle of liberty has been translated not only into the unlovely doctrine of commercial competition, but also has fostered in many men the belief that personal development necessitates a rebellion against existing social laws. To the opportunity for secrecy which the modern city offers, such men are able to add a high-sounding justification for their immoralities. Fortunately, however

d mutual protections to which the human will first yielded. Although this new control is based upon the voluntary co-operation of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the forced submission that characterized the older forms of social

refused to marry his deceased wife's sister because the law forbade it, the entire pathway of the so-called uncontrollable instinct has been gradually confined between carefully clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house of conventional domesticity. Men have fallen in love with their cousins or declined to fall in love with them, very much as custom declared marriages between cousins to be desirable or undesirable, as they formerly married their sisters and later absolutely ceased to desire to marry them. In fact, regulation of this great primitive instinct goes back of the human race itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are strictly monogamous, and many species of birds are faithful to one mate, season after season. According to the great authority, Forel, prostitution never became esta

on upon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for it becomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that social control may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feels superior to it. When a city is so large that it is extremely difficult to fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries was consid

elfare. To the individual restraints is added the conviction of social responsibility and the whole determination of chastity is reinforced by social sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is already obviously taking place in regard to the chastity of women. Formerly all that the best woman possessed was a negative chastity which had been carefully guarded by her parents and duennas. The chastity of the modern woman of self-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which gives her an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a new value and importance in the establishment of social standards. There was a certain basis for the belief that if a woman

r men, similar to the historic one so long established over women. As that modern relationship between men and women, which the Romans called "virtue between eq

emingly respectable apartment. They remain long enough to earn money for a spring or fall wardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances are quite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure the much-admired costumes brought from the city. Often an unattached country girl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a vicious life from sheer lack

rtisements and had no means of ascertaining the respectability of their employers. In addition to this, the girls who seek such positions are sometimes vain and pretentious, and will take any sort of office work because it seems to them "more ladylike." A girl of this sort came to Chicago from the country three years ago at the age of seventeen and secured a position as a stenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She was pretty and attractive, and in her desire to see more of the wonderful city to which she had come, she accepted many invitations to dinners and theatres from a younger member of the firm. The other girls in the office, representing the more capable type of business women, among whom a careful code of conduct is developing, although at present it is often manifested only by the socia

musement. She is always impressed with the ease for concealment which the city affords, although at the same time vaguely resentful that it is so indifferent to her individual existence. It is impossible to estimate the amount of clandestine prostitution which the modern city contains, but there is no doubt that the growth of the social evil at the present moment, lies in this direction. Another of its less sinister developments is perhaps a contemporary manifestation of that break, long considered necessary

gradation. An age marked by its vigorous protests against slavery and class tyranny, will not continue to ignore the multitudes of women who are held in literal bondage; nor will an age characterized by a new tenderness for the losers in life's race, always persist in denying forgiveness to the woman who has lost all. A voice which has come across the centuries, filled with pity for her who has "sinned much," must at last be joined by the forgiving voices of others, to whom it has been revealed that it is hardness of heart which has ever thwarted the divine purposes of religion. A generation which has gone thr

d savage infections of the primitive life from which it started. Now one and then another of the ancient wrongs and uncouth customs which have been so lo

er not only those sensitive to the wrongs of others, but those conscious of the destruction of the race itse