AT MARY RANDALL'S SUMMER HOME
Lake Geneva season was at its close. Most of the lake dwellers had closed
their houses and returned to town. For those who remained late autumn had
her glories. Woods and groves were gay in foliage. Orchards bowed their
heads beneath their loads of ripened fruit. In shorn fields the birds,
preparing for southern migration, sang of a year crowned with plenty.
Vines hung deep about the broad veranda of the villa where Mary Randall
was resting from her labors in the company of her uncle and aunt. She sat
alone in a corner of the veranda one sunny day, waiting for the arrival
of the journalist Ambrose, one of her most efficient aids.
Anna, her faithful maid came with an armful of flowers and began
arranging them on the table.
"You love those old-fashioned flowers even more than I do, I believe,
Anna," said Miss Randall.
"I do love them. They seem like the blossom of my vacation," said Anna.
"That's a pretty way to put it. Your vacation is to be a good long one.
You have certainly earned it. You're as worn as I am, after our battle. I
never should have got through it without you."
"Thank you, Miss Mary. Here comes the flower of all your workers,--Mr.
Ambrose," said the girl, and withdrew.
"Good news," said the journalist cheerfully, coming to greet his friend,
and noting with a sudden swift pleasure that a faint blush came to her
cheeks and a new light to her eyes as she welcomed him. "Good news! As I
was coming away the newspapers were out with the extra. The city council
held a special meeting during the afternoon. They have abolished the
segregated district. The city has formally adopted the policy of
suppressing instead of circumscribing vice."
"That is the beginning of the end," said Miss Randall. "If our campaign
has won that we have won all I hoped for."
"Yet many people believe that we failed."
"Even if we had failed we should have made progress. Every movement of
this kind leaves its mark on the public conscience. It makes work easier
for other crusaders."
"Yes," responded Ambrose, "because it brings out the facts. Facts are
lasting. They cannot die."
"Progress comes through inculcation of these facts, by means of
education. Schools and churches--and parents--must concentrate on the
moral improvement of the rising generation, or we wrestle ineffectively."
"The kind of vice you have been specially fighting will be extinct within
the next ten years," said Ambrose. "I don't mean that we shall have
suppressed vice. That is a task for centuries. But our people in the
United States will not stand for this trade in girls."
"I'd like to preach to men who have daughters to protect to take their
wives and go out and see some of the shady places of the city for
themselves. It would make any mother far more careful in future about the
companions of their daughters."
"Yes, to whisper about 'wild oats' and to see a young man who wants to
marry one's daughter in a dive are two very different things."
"We are going to have vice," said Miss Randall, "as long as economic
conditions set the stage for it. A young girl housed in a poor tenement,
ill-lighted, poorly heated, badly ventilated, fed and clothed
insufficiently--see to it that she hears foul language, and witnesses
drunkenness and quarrelling--then you have the condition that produces
the delinquent city girl."
"We are attacking all those evils," said Ambrose. "The public conscience
is rising against them. I predict the time when it will be regarded as
great a disgrace for a city to possess a 'back of the yards,' a ghetto or
a slum tenement district as it is now to have a district organized for
the exploitation of women. It's coming. You and I shall see it."
Mary Randall had risen, deeply moved while he spoke. She leaned against
the trellis and gazed far across the silver-shot lake at the sun sinking,
a great ball of crimson fire among the dark trees.
"God speed the day!" she said.
Beyond the veranda in a darkened drawing-room Mary Randall's aunt had
been resting and had heard this conversation. She rose and went softly
away and out to a pergola where she found her husband smoking a cigar.
"Lucius," she said. "That young newspaper man who has been out here to
see Mary is here again. They are talking in the veranda, settling all the
problems of Chicago!"
Lucius Randall blew a cloud of smoke. "Well, my dear, that is the only
way this old world gets ahead, for each generation to tackle its problems
anew."
"I believe that young man likes Mary."
"Many young men do."
"But--I really believe Mary likes him. She talks to him with a sweet note
in her voice, even when they are discussing the most impossible
subjects."
"I shouldn't wonder," said Lucius Randall with much serenity.
AFTERWORD
In our modern crusade against that most ancient evil known as the white
slave traffic we have made at least one serious advance. All over the
world that conspiracy of silence which has fettered thought and prevented
open action in the fight is ended.
Nowadays, as Havelock Ellis, author of the famous "Psychology of Sex,"
says in the _Metropolitan_ discussion of this subject, "churches,
societies, journalist, legislators, have all joined the ranks of the
agitators. Not only has there been no voice on the opposite side, which
was scarcely to be expected--for there has never been any anxiety to cry
aloud in defense of 'white slavery' from the housetops--but there has
been a new and noteworthy conquest over indifference and over that sacred
silence which was supposed to encompass all sexual topics with suitable
darkness. The banishment of that silence in the cause of social hygiene
is, indeed, not the least significant feature of this agitation. * * *
"By insuring that our workers, and especially our women workers, are
decently paid, so that they can live comfortably on their wages, we shall
not, indeed, have abolished prostitution, which is more than an economic
phenomenon, but we shall more effectually check the white slave trader
than by the most Draconic legislation the most imaginative vice crusader
ever devised. And when we insure that these same workers have ample time
and opportunity for free and joyous recreation we shall have done more to
kill the fascination of the white slave traffic than by endless police
regulations for the moral supervision of the young.
"No doubt the element of human nature in the manifestations we are
concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting
differently in each sex, but tending to drive both into the same risks.
Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer
foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of
a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly
back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently with our
dams. We can at least begin today a task of education which must slowly
though surely undermine the white slave trader's stronghold. Such an
education needs to be not merely instruction in the facts of sex and wise
guidance concerning all the dangers and risks of the sexual life; it must
also involve a training of the will, a development of the sense of
responsibility, such as can never be secured by shutting our young people
up in a hothouse, sheltered from every fortifying breath of the outside
world."
It was in Illinois that Abraham Lincoln--a Southerner, Kentucky
born--threw down the gage in his famous Bloomington speech in the matter
of buying and selling human beings as slaves. It is in Illinois--in spite
of much disgrace which the State's fair name has had forced upon it--that
men and women have enlisted for life to fight in the battle against
buying and selling white girls, to fight against that special dealing in
"live stock" actually known to have gone on for years, which is Chicago's
special shame as a distributing center.
There is eternal shouting and exhorting against the immorality and vice
of the levee, but I wonder if it isn't society's hue and cry to divert
attention from viciousness in what are called "the best circles," a
condition that is a hundred times more important.
Will the churches be in some measure convinced that they must organize
for a combined effort to save the children of today--that souls are more
important than sectarianism, and that Sunday is not the only day in the
week?
If every unmarried woman with money and time at her disposal were to
devote part of her leisure to the care of one child there would be far
less misery in the slums and many a little sister would be saved.
If there is to be any effective reform we must arouse society from its
lethargic viewpoint too generally accepted that the devil is never so
black as he is painted.
As long as mothers do not know who the young men are with whom their
daughters spend evenings away from home so long will there be the troop
of Little Lost Sisters tripping, stumbling down the trail that leads
hellward.
Let us make the war against commercialized vice a bigger thing than a
presidential campaign, bigger than any war, bigger than anything that was
ever known in a woman's movement before in the world!