Chapter I

HISTORY OF THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE.

By the white slave trade is meant commerce in white women and girls for wicked purposes. Most of its history cannot be written, for two reasons: That these crimes are kept secret as far as possible, and that they are so revolting that their details cannot be published and ought not to be read anywhere outside of the bottomless pit.

Crimes against womanhood are as old as sin. From the day that the serpent beguiled Eve by his craftiness until now, there have been few days or nights when some daughter of Eve has not been deceived or forced into an evil life by some serpent or other.

BABYLON.

In ancient Babylon the dishonoring of girlhood was a part of the temple service, as it is to this day in many temples of India. In the opinion of the German historical scholar, Dr. Grau, the temples of India probably derived the hideous custom from Babylon, which the Book of Revelation calls "the mother of the harlots and of the abominations of the earth." No wonder that Babylon was denounced by prophets and apostles, or that her crimes of slavery, cruelty, dishonesty and debauchery brought perpetual ruin upon the wicked city and nation. "Fallen, fallen is Babylon!" Up the valley of the Euphrates from Babylon, and westward among the Canaanites and Phenicians, the horrible alliance of religion and lust extended, until it reached Asia Minor and Greece.

GREECE.

At Corinth, a great commercial city and seaport, business shrewdness was linked with sensuality and profanation, and a great temple of Venus was built, where one thousand priestesses were required to lead a life of religious infamy to make money for their despicable masters. There were constant importations of new girls from Lesbos and the other Grecian isles. Then as now the devices of the white slave trader were assiduously employed to keep up and increase the number of profitable European and Asiatic girls.

It is pastime as well as business to these traffickers to drug, to make drunken, to deceive, to ensnare or to debauch by force the innocent, the confiding, the thoughtless, the weak. Whether for the ancient temple of Venus at Corinth or for the dens of shame in the white slave market of Chicago or Paris, beautiful victims who will earn much money for their masters and captors must be hunted and trapped.

At Athens the lawgiver Solon established houses of shame by statute, and filled them with slave girls for whom there was no possible escape. But whoever, man or woman, caused a freeborn Athenian girl to enter one of the houses incurred the penalty of death. It might be well if freeborn American girls were as thoroughly protected. An Athenian forfeited his citizenship on opening a house of shame. American citizenship in our large cities allows the white slave traders an astounding amount of political influence.

ROME.

In Rome immoral women were enrolled by the police in a public register, and this public record of their evil life always remained to bar their way to repentance and respectability. Modern European cities, on the Continent, follow this hurtful custom, and it has been introduced without authority of law in some American cities.

Many bakers, barbers and keepers of taverns, baths and drug stores were also traders in women. These depraved traffickers were regarded with the greatest loathing by the Roman people. The white slave traders of ancient Rome probably differed little from the Italian traders to be found in so many parts of the world today, notably New York and Chicago. The poet Milton tells how his love of purity kept him in his youth from the evils practised at Bordello's, presumably an Italian resort in London. Persons desiring to know the trader's boasting over a young and beautiful girl who had come into his devilish power, will find it described in the old English play commonly attributed to Shakespeare, called "Pericles, Prince of Tyre."

An exceedingly bad example was set by some of the Roman emperors. Augustus even in his old age sent out men to bring him women and girls. The beautiful Mallonia stabbed herself rather than yield to the emperor Tiberius.

The emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was very virtuous and religious and wise according to Roman ideals, persecuted Christians to the extent of legally condemning Christian girls to the houses of infamy. Young women were seized and required to sacrifice to idols. Upon refusing they were dragged through the streets and given to a white slaver.

Some beautiful legends have been preserved which tell of miraculous deliverance of Christian girls from this most Satanic cruelty. St. Agnes, the story runs, was seized and stripped, but immediately her hair grew quickly and covered her like a garment. Dragged to a den of shame, she appeared transfigured, a wonderful light shining from her body, and no one dared to harm her. At length one bold ruffian came near her, but was struck dead at her feet by a thunderbolt.

The emperor Diocletian renewed these terrible persecutions. The church's only retaliation was the rescue of depraved women. Mary, an Egyptian, was a conspicuous penitent, who sailed for Jerusalem and spent her remaining years virtuously in the Holy Land.

The Christian emperor Theodosius II., who died in the year 450, laid heavy penalties on traffickers in women. Justinian, who came to the throne in 527, punished procurers with death. He was merciful toward erring women, but was unsparing toward every one who exploited them for gain.

FRANCE.

The Latin writers, conspicuously Tacitus, represent the Germans, Franks and Gauls as very virtuous, and very severe in their punishment of offenders. The earliest known legislation in the northern kingdoms is in the Capitularies of Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope in St. Peter's at Rome on Christmas day in the year 800. Early in his reign in his northern dominions Charlemagne enacted that all who kept houses of shame or lent their aid to vice were to be scourged. He would spare neither bad women nor vile men.

But succeeding kings of France, very many of them, were themselves models not of virtue and kingliness, but of dishonor and debauch. Many of the clergy also were very immoral, and the whole nation became corrupt.

Louis IX. made the first earnest effort to check the evil. He issued an extreme edict, in 1254, that all immoral woman and all keepers and procurers should be at once exiled from France. After a reaction Louis renewed his efforts to extirpate the iniquity, and his son Philip continued to inflict severe penalties. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries several notorious procurers were burned alive at Paris. In the sixteenth century in cities of the south of France sometimes a woman of this detestable class was thrust into an iron cage and thrown into the river. When almost dead from drowning she was drawn out, and after a little the punishment was repeated. Many of the women who were burnt as witches were really condemned because they were procuresses or otherwise odiously immoral.

The rise of Chivalry greatly increased the safety of good women and diminished immorality among men. A higher moral tone was imparted to society everywhere. Faithful preachers cried out against the traffic in shame, the snaring of young girls and the immodesty and immorality which were found in convents, and even in churches. In the reign of Louis XI., about 1475, Father Maillard, a bold preacher of the time, excoriated the whole company of traffickers in girls, especially procuresses and citizens who let their property for houses of shame. The procuresses, he said, ought to be burned at the stake, and for women who corrupted the clergy he had no mercy, but invoked the wrath of God upon them. Louis XI. was himself extremely immoral, like so many of the kings of France.

Catharine de Medicis, who became queen of France when her husband Henry II. ascended the throne in 1547, exercised a baneful influence during three reigns. Her court of two hundred ladies introduced from Italy worse vices than had before been known in France. She did, however, try to diminish prostitution in Paris.

An ordinance of 1635 condemned all men engaged in what we now call the white slave trade to the galleys for life.

Louis XV. at fifteen years of age married Maria, daughter of Stanislas, the dethroned king of Poland. The whole life of Louis was one of idle sensuality. When he was old he established a seraglio of fifteen-year-old girls, the most beautiful that could be bought or kidnapped. On this harem he spent a hundred million francs, or twenty million dollars. It was he who, when warned of the impending ruin of his nation, said "After me the deluge." He died, detested by all, in 1774.

PARIS THE MODERN BABYLON.

Paris, the capital of such kings and the scene of such debauchery, became the source and headquarters of the world-wide white slave trade of the present time. With the spread of legitimate commerce to every part of the world, the long experienced traders in women sought a world-wide market for girls. There is not a civilized country which has not been exploited by the traders, alike as a hunting ground for victims and as a market in which to sell them.

All Europe, North America, Panama, South America, Egypt and other parts of Africa, India, China and Japan are the fields of operation of these atrocious men and serpentine women.

By no means all the traffickers are French. Many are Jews, many are Italians and Sicilians, some are Austrians, Germans, English, Americans, Greeks. But it is Paris that has made vice a fine art, and has made the white slave trade a wide-spread systematized commercial enterprise.

It is as true as it is lamentable that the beautiful city on the banks of the Seine, the center of fashion and of art, gained the shameful reputation of being the capital of the white slave trade, and deserved it, "by merit raised to that bad eminence."

In recent years the French government and people have felt keenly the reproach of this condition, and have been foremost in efforts to suppress the abominable commerce.

WHITE SLAVERS IN INDIA.

In 1893, during my missionary service in India, a clique of white slave traders was discovered in Calcutta. They were found to be trafficking not only in European girls whom they could lure to India, but also in little native girls, as young as nine years. There was great indignation in the capital and throughout India when these criminals were exposed and arrested.

The laws of India were at that time inadequate to punish them, but an old statute was found under which the Viceroy could deport undesirable aliens. So these wretches, too abominable to be endured in heathendom, were shipped back to Europe.

Those were the first white slave traders of whom I, a young missionary, had ever heard. Last year in Chicago a French trader told me that he had been in India, and I could not but wonder whether he had been deported from Calcutta or Bombay and made welcome in Chicago. The United States government soon afterward put him out of his wicked business.

Rev. Dr. Homer C. Stuntz, formerly of Calcutta, now of New York, told me of a frightened European girl who nervously rang his doorbell in Calcutta late at night. She had been deceived into going to India by false promises made to her by the hunters of girls. Learning their real purpose just in time, she fled from them, and inquiring the way to a missionary, she was directed to Dr. and Mrs. Stuntz, with whom she was safe, and thankful a million times.

How many hundreds of innocent American and European girls have been led away to heathen and Mohammedan lands, on false promises of good positions as teachers, governesses, or even as missionaries, only the open books of the day of judgment will disclose.

E. A. B.