Hon. Edwin Sims, ex-U. S. Prosecuting Attorney, in a recent conservative
statement, says he believes that =fifteen thousand= immigrant girls are
brought into this Country every year for commercialized prostitution.
We believe the actual figures are nearer Twenty-five Thousand, and we
appeal to the mothers and fathers of America, in the name of God and the
heart-broken mothers and fathers of other lands, to use their personal
influence and the money with which God has entrusted them, to wipe from
our flag the leprous blotch of shame which permits the importing into our
Republic every year of thousands of helpless girls to be ground up in the
murder mills of the segregated harlotry of such districts as the 22nd
Street district of Chicago, for it was the blood-covered hand of that
district that reached across the lands and seas and into that Russian
home and tore from it little Gezie Bruvatsky and led her across the waters
and under the very shadow of the Statue of Liberty itself and pinning to
her the little blue ticket of immigration, led her past the gates or Ellis
Island, on past the statues of Washington and Jefferson, of Lincoln and
Grant, and into the burning fire of American public prostitution to live a
few months, and dying in an underground cellar, be cast, scarce cold, into
our nation's great potter's field of lost women.
[Illustration: The Wretched, Pitiful Ending of Gezie Bruvatsky, left by
Her Heartless Masters to Die Unattended in Filthy, Squalid Surroundings]