New York, Chicago, St. Louis, any great city will furnish examples
by the thousands. Where one girl enters this life from choice
(through sensuality inherited from the lust of her father, no doubt),
ninety-nine are sucked into its whirlpool by force of circumstances.
The young woman who is a clerk is paid an amount which will barely
cover the cost of living. She is expected to dress well, and if she
protests that she can not, is told to rely on some "gentleman friend"
for other expenses. Likewise in factories and shops. Only she who is
protected by home associations, and whose labor is done to add to the
general home comfort, can hope to escape, and then not always.
The grim, irrefutable facts in connection with the thrusting of the
working girl into prostitution by the wealthy owners of department
stores, was never better expressed than in a recent story by O. Henry,
in McClure's Magazine.
Henry dreamed that he had been dead a long while, and that he had
finally arrived at the Judgment Day. An Angel policeman was haling
him before the Great Court of Last Resort. As he was forced into the
waiting room the Angel policeman asked him kindly if he belonged with
a certain crowd which he saw near him. The members of this coterie
were dressed in frock coats, gray trousers, spats, patent leather
shoes, and all of them boasted of high silk hats.
"Who are they?" asked the trembling Henry. "Oh, they are the men who
ran big department stores and paid their poor girls five dollars a
week in order that they themselves might belong to clubs, go to Europe
and own fine residences and automobiles," replied the angel.
"Not on your life," replied Henry. "I'm only the feller that murdered
a blind man for his pennies and burned down the orphan asylum. I don't
belong with that bunch."
With the present system of government, each year tends to annihilate
the middle class, in which lies a nation's strength.
"Ill fares the Hand, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay."
While extreme poverty exists on the one hand, and extreme wealth on
the other, it would be as plausible to dam up Niagara Falls as to stop
prostitution by legislating against it. The current, checked in one
course, is bound to break out in another, and with all its pent-up
force. Human life, like the river, is bound to flow in the channel of
the least resistance.
Nature planned the association of the sexes as surely and as
inevitably as any other of her laws. Whenever her laws are trespassed
upon in any way there is suffering. The wretched conditions of the
poor and the perverted natures of the wealthy turn sex association
into social evil.