Part 4

When the raids began she was secreted and arrangements made to ship her to a dive in the mining regions of the west. Fortunately, however, a few hours before she was to start upon her journey the United States marshals raided the place and captured herself as well as her keepers. To add to the horror of her situation she was soon to become a mother. The awful thought in her mind, however, was to escape from assassination at the hands of the murderous gang which oppressed her.

Evidence shows that the hirelings of this traffic are stationed at certain points of entry in Canada, where large numbers of immigrants are landed, to do what is known in their parlance as “cutting out work.” In other words, these watchers for human prey scan the immigrants as they come down the gang plank of a vessel which has just arrived, and “spot” the girls who are unaccompanied by fathers, mothers, brothers or relatives to protect them. The girl who has been spotted as a desirable and unprotected victim is properly approached by a man who speaks her language and is immediately offered employment at good wages, with all expenses to the destination to be paid by the man. Most frequently laundry work is the bait held out, sometimes housework or employment in a candy shop or factory. The object of the negotiations is to “cut out” the girl from any of her associates and to get her to go with him. Then the only thing is to accomplish her ruin by the shortest route. If they cannot be cajoled or enticed by promises of an easy time, plenty of money, fine clothes and the usual stock of allurements—or a fake marriage, then harsher methods are resorted to. In some instances the hunters really marry the victims. As to the sterner methods, it is of course impossible to speak explicitly, beyond the statement that intoxication and drugging are often used as means to reduce the victims to a state of helplessness, and sheer physical violence is a common thing.

When once a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive, she becomes a prisoner. The raids disclosed the fact that in each of these places is a room having but one door, to which the keeper holds the key. In here are locked all the street clothes, shoes and the ordinary apparel of a woman.

The finery which is provided for the girl for house wear is of a nature to make her appearance in the street impossible. Then added to this handicap, is the fact that at once the girl is placed in debt to the keeper for a wardrobe of “fancy” clothes, which are charged to her at preposterous prices. She cannot escape while she is in debt to the keeper—and she is never allowed to get out of debt—at least until all desire to leave the life is dead within her.

The examination of witnesses have brought out the fact that not many of the women in this class expect to live more than ten years, after they enter upon their voluntary or involuntary life of white slavery. Perhaps the average is less than that. Many die painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation. “We’ll all come to it sooner or later,” one of the witnesses remarked to her companions in the jail, the other day, when reading in the newspaper of the suicide of a girl inmate of a notorious house.

A volume could be written on this revolting subject, but I have no disposition to add a single word but what will open the eyes of parents to the fact that white slavery is an existing condition—a system of girl hunting that is national and international in its scope, that it literally consumes thousands of girls—clean, innocent girls—every year; that it is operated with a cruelty, a barbarism that gives a new meaning to the word fiend; that it is imminent peril to every girl in the country who had a desire to get into the city and taste its excitements and its pleasures.

The facts stated here are for the awakening of parents and guardians of girls. If I were to presume to say anything to the possible victims of this awful scourge of white slavery it would be this: “Those who enter here leave hope behind;” the depths of debasement and suffering disclosed by the investigation now in progress would make the flesh of a seasoned man of the world creep with horror and shame.

Why Girls Go Astray

Right at the outset let me say in all frankness that I would never, from personal choice, write upon a subject of this character. Its sensationalism is personally repellant to me and cannot fail to be of actual protective benefit to many homes; and to withhold the facts and disclosures which have come to me as investigator would be to deprive the innocent and the worthy of a protection which might save many a home from sorrow, disgrace and ruin.

The results of this work and of the explanations of the conditions uncovered in this book have brought to me a gratifying knowledge of the practical rescue work being done by the settlement and “slum” workers of Chicago. They are not only specialists in this field, but they are as devoted as they are practical.

So far as the matter of sensationalism is concerned, that may be disposed of in the simple statement that the naked recital, in the most formal and colorless phraseology, of the facts already brought to light by the “white slave” prosecutions are in themselves so sensational that the art of the most brilliant orator, or the cunning of the cleverest writer, could not add an iota to their sensationalism. And it may as well be said here that it is quite impossible to even hint in public print of the revolting depths of shame disclosed by this investigation. Behind every word that can be said in print on this topic is a world of degradation of which the slightest hint cannot be given.

If there are any who are inclined to feel that the term “white slave” is a little overdrawn, a little exaggerated, let them decide on that point after considering this statement: “Among the 'white slaves’ captured in raids since the appearance of this book, is a girl who is now about eighteen years of age. Her home was in France, and when she was only fourteen years old she was approached by a 'white slaver’ who promised her employment in America as a lady’s maid or companion. The wage offered was far beyond what she could expect to get in her own country—but far more alluring to her than the money she could earn was the picture of the life which would be hers in free America. Her surroundings would be luxurious; she would be the constant recipient of gifts of dainty clothing from her mistress, and even the hardest work she would be called upon to do would be in itself a pleasure and an excitement.

“Naturally she was eager to leave her home and trust herself to one who would provide her with so enriching a future. Her friends of her own age seasoned their farewells to her with envy of her rare good fortune.

“On arriving in Chicago she was taken to the house of ill-fame to which she had been sold by the procurer. There this child of fourteen was quickly and unceremoniously 'broken in’ to the hideous life of depravity for which she had been entrapped. The white slaver who sold her was able to drive a most profitable bargain, for she was rated as uncommonly attractive. In fact, he made her life of shame a perpetual source of income, and when—not long ago—he was captured and indicted for the importation of other girls, this girl was used as the agency of providing him with $2,000 for his defense.

“But let us look for a moment at the mentionable facts of this child’s daily routine of life and see if such an existence justifies the use of the term 'slavery.’ After she had furnished a night of servitude to the brutal passions of vile frequenters of the place, she was then compelled to put off her tawdry costume, array herself in the garb of a scrub-woman, and, on her hands and knees, scrub the house from top to bottom. No weariness, no exhaustion, ever excused her from this drudgery, which was a full day’s work for a strong woman.

“After her scrubbing was done she was allowed to go to her chamber and sleep—locked in her room to prevent her possible escape—until the orgies of the next day, or rather night, began. She was allowed no liberties, no freedom, and in the two and one half years of her slavery in this house she was not even given one dollar to spend for her own comfort or pleasure. The legal evidence collected shows that during this period of slavery she earned for those who owned her not less than eight thousand dollars!”

If this is not slavery, I have no definition for it.

Let us make it entirely clear that the white slave is an actual prisoner. She is under the most constant surveillance, both by the keeper to whom she is “let” and the procurer who owns her. Not until she has lost all possible desire to escape is she given any liberty.

Before me, as I write, is a letter from a father which is a tragedy in a page. He begins the note by saying that the warning has aroused him to inquire after his “little girl.” There is a pathetic pride in his admission that she was considered an uncommonly “pretty girl” when she left her home to take a position in Chicago. Her letters, he states, have been more and more infrequent, but that she does occasionally write home, and sometimes encloses a small amount of money. From the tone of the father’s note it is evident that, while he is a trifle anxious, he asks that his daughter be “looked up” rather to confirm his feelings of confidence that she is all right than otherwise.

A glance at the address where she was to be found left no possible question as to the fate which had overtaken this daughter of a country home. So far as a knowledge of the girl’s mode of life is concerned, no investigation was necessary—the location named being in the center of Chicago’s “red-light” district.

However, the case was placed in the hands of a settlement worker, and at this moment the girl is waiting, in a place of safety, for the arrival of her father, who is on his way to take her back to the mother and brothers and sisters who have supposed that she was holding a respectable, but poorly paid position. They will, however, welcome a very different person from the “pretty girl” who went out from that home to make her way in the big city. She is pitifully wasted by the life which she has led and her constitution is so broken down that she cannot reasonably expect many years of life, even under the tenderest care. What is still worse, the fact cannot be denied that her moral fibre is much shattered, and that the work of reclamation must be more than physical.

The “White slaves” who have been taken in the course of the present prosecution have, generally, been very grateful for the liberation and glad to return to their homes. It has been necessary for their own protection as well as for other reasons—to commit some of these unfortunates to various prisons pending the trial of the cases in which they are to appear as witnesses, and practically every one of them gives unmistakable evidence that imprisonment is a welcome liberation by comparison with the life of “white slavery.”

Now, as to the practical means which parents should use to prevent this unspeakable fate from overtaking their daughters. They cannot do it by assuming that their daughter is all right and that she will take care of herself in the big city. In a large measure it seems impossible to arouse parents—especially those in the country—to a realization that there is in every big city a class of men and women who live by trapping girls into a life of degredation and who are as inhumanly cunning in their awful craft as they are in their other instincts; that these beasts of the human jungle are as unbelievably desperate as they are unbelievably cruel, and that their warfare upon virtue is as persistent, as calculating and as unceasing as was the warfare of the wolf upon the unprotected lamb of the pioneer’s flock in the early days of the Western frontier.

I cannot escape the conclusion that the country girl is in greater danger from the “white slavers” than the city girl. The perusal of testimony of many “white slaves” enforces this conclusion. This is because they are less sophisticated, more trusting and more open to the allurements of those who are waiting to prey upon them.

It is a fact which parents of girls in the country should remember that the “white slavers” are busy on the trains coming into the city, and make it a point to “cut out” an attractive girl whenever they can. This “cutting out” process consists of making the girl’s acquaintance, gaining her confidence and, on one pretext or another, inducing her to leave the train before the main depot is reached. This is done because the various protective and law and order organizations have watchers at the main railroad stations who are trained to the work of “spotting,” and quickly detect a girl in the hands of one of these human beasts of prey. Generally these watchers are women and wear the badges of their organizations.

But suppose that the girl from the country does not chance to fall in with the “white slaver” on the train, that she reaches the city in safety, becomes located in a position—or perhaps in the stenographic school or business college which she has come to attend—and secures a room in a boarding house. No human being, it seems to me, is quite so lonely as the young girl from the country when she first comes to the city and starts in the struggles of life there without acquaintances. All her instincts are social, and she is, for the time being, almost desolately alone in a wilderness of strange human beings. She must have some one to talk to—it is the law of youth as well as the law of her sex to crave constant companionship. And the consequences? She is sentimentally in a condition to prepare her for the slaughter, to make her an easy prey to the wiles of the “white slave” wolf.

The girl reared in the city does not have this peculiar and insidious handicap to contend with; she has been—from the time she could first toddle along the sidewalk—educated in wholesome suspicion, taught that she must not talk with strangers or take candy from them, that she must withdraw herself from all advances and, in large measure, regard all save her own people with distrust. As she grows older she comes to know that certain parts of the city are more dangerous and more “wicked” than others; that her comings and goings must always be in safe and familiar company; that her acquaintanceships and her friendships must be scrutinized by her natural protectors and that, altogether, there is a definite but undefined danger in the very atmosphere of the city for the girl or the young woman which demands a constant and protected alertness.

The training is almost wholly absent in the case of the country girl; she is not educated in suspicion until the protective instinct acts almost unconsciously; her intercourse with her world is almost comparatively free and unrestrained; she is so unlearned in the moral and social geography of the city that she is quite as likely, if left to her own devices, to select her boarding house in an undesirable as in a safe and desirable part of the city; and, in a word, when she comes into the city her ignorance, her trusting faith in humanity in general, her ignorance of the underworld and her loneliness and perhaps home-sickness, conspire to make her a ready and an easy victim of the “white slaver.”

In view of what I have learned in the course of the recent investigation and prosecution of the “white slave” traffic, I can say in all sincerity, that if I lived in the country and had a young daughter, I would go to any length of hardship and privation myself rather than allow her to go into the city to work or to study—unless that studying were to be done in the very best type of an educational institution where the girl students were always under the closest protection. The best and surest way for parents of girls in the country to protect them from the clutches of the “white slaver” is to keep them in the country. But if circumstances should seem to compel a change from the country to the city, then the only safe way is to go with them into the city; but even this last has its disadvantages from the fact that, in that case, the parents would themselves be unfamiliar with the usages and the pitfalls of metropolitan life, and would not be able to protect their daughters as carefully as if they had spent their own lives in the city.

More About the Traffic in Shame

The dragnets of the inhuman men and women who ply their terrible trade are spread day and night and are manipulated with a skill and precision which ought to strike terror to the heart of every careless or indifferent parent. The wonder is not that so many are caught in this net, but that they escape! “I count the week—I might almost say the day—a happy and fortunate one which does not bring to my attention as an officer of the state a deplorable case of this kind,” said Mrs. Ophelia Amigh.

Just to show how tightly and broadly the nets of these fishers for girls are spread, let me tell you of an instance which occurred to a girl from this institution:

This girl, whom I will call Nellie, is a very ordinary looking girl, and below the average of intelligence, but as tractable and obedient as she is ingenuous. She is wholly without the charm which would naturally attract the eye of the white slave trader.

Because of her quietness, her obedience and her good disposition, she was, in accordance with the rules of the institution, permitted to go into the family of a substantial farmer out in the west and work as a housemaid, a “hired girl”—her wages to be deposited to her credit against the time when she should reach the age of twenty-one and leave the Home.

She had been in her position for some time and was so quiet and satisfactory that one Sunday when the family were not going to church, the mistress said:

“Nellie, if you wish to go to church alone you may do so. The milk wagon will be along shortly and you can ride on that to the village—and here is seventy-five cents. You may want to buy your dinner and perhaps some candy.”

When Nellie reached town and was on her way past the railroad station to the church, the train for Chicago came in, and the impulse seized her to get aboard, go to the city and look up her father, whom she had not seen for several months. She went to the city and hardly stepped from the train into the big station when she heard a man’s voice saying, “Why, hello, Mary!”

Instantly—foolishly, of course—she answered him and replied:

“My name is not Mary, it’s Nellie.”

“You look the very picture,” he responded, “of a girl I know well whose name is Mary—and she’s a fine girl, too! Are any of your folks here to meet you?”

“No,” she answered, “my father’s here in the city somewhere, but he doesn’t know I’m coming. I’ve been working out in the country for a long time and I didn’t write him about coming back.”

Her answers were so ingenuous and revealing that the man saw that he had an easy and simple victim to deal with. Therefore his tactics were very direct.

“It’s about time to eat,” he suggested, “and I guess we’re both hungry. You go to a restaurant and eat with me and perhaps I can help you to find your father quicker than you could do it alone.”

She accepted, and in the course of the meal he asked her if she would like to find a place at which to work. “I know a fine place in Blank City,” he added. “The woman is looking for a good girl just like you.”

“Yes, I’d be pleased to get the place, but I haven’t any money to pay the fare with,” was her answer.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he quickly replied. “I’ll buy your ticket and give you a little money besides for a cab and other expenses. The woman told me to do that if I could find her a girl. She’ll send me back a check for it all.”

After he had bought the ticket and put her aboard the train going to Blank City, he wrote the name of the woman to whom he was sending her, gave her about $2 extra and then delivered this fatherly advice to her:

“You’re just a young girl, and it’s best for you not to talk to anybody on the train or after you get off. Don’t show this paper to anybody or tell anybody where you’re going. It isn’t any of their business anyway. And as soon as you get off the train you’ll find plenty of cabs there. Hand your paper to the first cab driver in the line, get in and ride to Mrs. A——'s home. Pay the driver and then walk in.”

Believing that she was being furnished a position by a remarkably kind man, the poor girl followed his direction implicitly—and landed the next day in one of the most notorious houses of shame in the state of Illinois outside of Chicago. How she was found and rescued is a story quite apart from the purpose which has led me to tell of this incident—that of indicating how tightly the slave traders have their nets spread for even the most ordinary and unattractive prey. They let no girl escape whom they dare to approach!

Crime in Chicago

Strange as it may seem, men and women of certain grades of intellect and temperament deliberately devote themselves to lives of crime. These constitute the “professional criminals,” who make up such a terrible class in the population of every great city. In Chicago this class is undoubtedly large, but not so large as many people assert. That it is active and dangerous, the police records of the city afford ample testimony. It is very hard to obtain any reliable statistics respecting the professional votaries of crime, but it would seem, after careful investigation, that Chicago contains about 3,000 of them. These consist of thieves, burglars, fences and pickpockets.

In addition to these we may include under the head of professional criminals, the following:

Women of ill-fame, 20,000, keepers of gambling houses and of policy and lottery offices about 600, making in all about 23,600 professional law breakers. This is a startling statement, but unhappily true.

The population of Chicago is more cosmopolitan than that of any city in the union and the majority of the people are poor. The struggle for existence is a hard one, and offers every inducement for crime. The political system which is based more or less upon plunder, presents the spectacles of dishonesty. The professionals are not ignorant men and women, however. Among them may be found many whose abilities, if properly directed, would win for them positions of honor and usefulness. There seems to be a fascination in crime to those people, and they deliberately enter upon it.

The principal form which crime assumes in Chicago is robbery. The professionals do not deliberately engage in murder or the graver crimes; though they do not hesitate to commit them if necessary to their success or safety. They prefer to pursue their vocation without taking life; and murder, arson, rape and capital crimes are, therefore, not more common here than in other large cities. Robbery, however, is a science here, and it is of its various forms the following pages will treat.

The professional criminals in Chicago constitute a distinct community; they are known to each other, and seldom make any effort to associate with people of respectability. They infest certain sections of the city where they can easily and rapidly communicate with each other, and can hide in safety from the police.