Chapter XIX

WANTED—FATHERS AND MOTHERS.

After conversing with many thousands of fallen women and misguided girls, I believe that the principal causes of their downfall are the following, in the order named:

1. Parental inefficiency, through lack of character, knowledge or vigilance.

2. Amusements that pander to passion, such as many theaters, some of the amusement parks, cafes and dance halls with drinking attachments, some Chinese restaurants, some Greek and other fruit and candy stores, and some pleasure boats that run at night.

3. Unsafe hours and unreasonable liberty; walks, drives and automobile rides, unattended, especially at night.

4. Betrayal of girls and desertion by husbands.

5. Wilfulness and love of ease and finery.

6. Insufficient wages in stores and factories.

7. Poverty, especially where children or parents are dependent. One girl sinned to pay her mother's funeral expenses.

8. A few are depraved from choice or heredity.

Doubtless other observers would add other causes, and yet others would put these eight causes here named in different order. But no one will dispute that these eight are constant and fruitful causes of the ruin of girls—these eight, and the greatest of these is the first, Parental Inefficiency.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS GO WRONG.

Within the last six days—it is August 10, 1909, today—the courts of Chicago have had to deal with two girls of only sixteen years who were placed in immoral resorts by young men, one of them only a boy of sixteen years.

A girl named McConnell, only sixteen years old, and a girl named Shubert, three years older, were taken by two Jews, Brodsky and Jacobson, to a resort kept by one Weinstein in South Chicago. The girls were lured from an amusement park in the suburb of Forest Park, where they were unattended by parents or friends—fair game for the white slaver.

Judge Walker in pronouncing sentence upon Brodsky, who was fined $300 and sent six months to the house of correction, said that Brodsky's wife and child and his confession of his crime stood between him and the extreme penalty of the new law of Illinois against pandering.

"Pandering," said the judge to the prisoner, "is a most abhorrent crime. A man of your attainments has sunk to the lowest depths when he hangs about parks seeking to betray innocent girls. A murder may be forgotten or the grief lessened, but the living death to which you sought to lead these girls is far worse than for their friends to have placed them in a black box and hauled them to the cemetery."

No words of judge or moralist are too strong to condemn the procurer and his master, the divekeeper. But what must be the feelings of the father and mother who thoughtlessly leave their young daughters exposed to these serpents? A mother bird is more watchful of her chicks or a cat of her kittens.

Only last Sunday afternoon Charles Kaufman, sixteen years old, of Milwaukee, was arrested by Detectives Magner and Dolan in Chicago for placing a sixteen-year-old Chicago girl, named Schwartz, in a resort in Milwaukee. He had lured her from her home, where he had been entertained for several days. Miss Mollie Schwartz, sister of the girl, said that Kaufman had beaten and threatened to kill her sister before he took her to Milwaukee and put her in the den of the white slaver. Kaufman freely admitted having lured the girl.

How terrible a story this is, involving two families, two cities, two states. What exposure could be more horrible than that a boy of sixteen, scarcely more than a child, takes a child of sixteen to another city and receives money for leaving her in a place of infamy?

But what must the father and mother of such a boy and the father and mother of such a girl, think of themselves and the way they have discharged their duty in bringing up their children?

And what must our cities think of themselves while they maintain red light districts to promote such crimes?

In winter the dance halls and in summer the amusement parks, and all the year long theaters and drinking resorts of all kinds, are very dangerous for young girls. At one time the superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls, at Geneva, found that eighty-seven per cent of her girls attributed their first wrong steps to temptations such as these.

Every good man and woman must do his or her whole duty against the hideous traffic in girlhood. Preachers, editors, teachers, physicians and rulers, being natural leaders of the people, have very great responsibility. But all else will follow if this end be gained—Parental Efficiency.

We close this chapter with the splendid editorial of Forrest Crissey in Woman's World for August, 1909.

SUMMER: THE SILLY SEASON.

Did you ever notice that, as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circumspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the butterfly nature within her is given wing, inward and outward restraints drop from her almost as inevitably as her cold weather clothing, and she lets herself dance along on the soft breeze of sentiment with the lightness and freedom of a bit of thistledown.

This odd Summer bewitchment might be immensely funny were it not for the fact that its consequences, in thousands of cases, are serious, not to say tragic. The comic papers depend upon this dog-day epidemic of silliness as an unfailing source of excruciatingly amusing jokes and pictures. Summer resort and seashore flirtations—what would the "comics" do without them when the mercury creeps high in the slender tube of the thermometer?

In the language of the sportsman, the Summer is everywhere recognized as the "open season" for the hunting of hearts and the pursuit of romance. The girl who is her own chaperone and protector allows herself a latitude of unconventionally in the period of Summer outings, of vacations and excursions, of moonshine and frolic, which she would not think of permitting herself at another season. Romance is in the air, and even the careful and well-reared girl finds herself under its spell.

What is the result? Thousands of half-baked romances ending in Gretna Green marriages are the invariable harvest of this season of Summer silliness; marriages which bring suffering and bitter repentance and a tragic climax in the divorce courts—if they do not come to a worse ending.

Wherever the prow of an excursion boat pushes its way through the waters, wherever crowds of young people mingle in the pursuit of pleasure, there are hatched the romances which spell heartbreak and unhappiness. Every Summer furnishes thousands upon thousands of these cases. They are "down in the books"—one entry in the books at the Gretna Green, the runaway marriage headquarters, and the other in the divorce courts.

But there is another and a darker side to this matter of Summer silliness. Not long ago, in the Woman's World, Mrs. Ophelia L. Amigh, superintendent of the Illinois State Training School for Girls, at Geneva, Illinois, warned our readers that the runaway marriage is a favorite trick of the White Slaver. Mrs. Amigh knows what she is talking about when she says this. The White Slaver haunts the excursion boat, makes love to the girl whose head is turned with silly notions about romantic courtships and marriages; he takes her to a Justice of the Peace or a "marrying parson" of the excursion resort type, and a ceremony is performed. Then they go to the big city and she is sold into a slavery worse than death! This sounds sensational, but it has happened so many times that it is a tame and threadbare tale to those who know the dark things of metropolitan life, the black and ugly secrets of the Under World.

Mothers should wake up to the fact that of all times daughters most need their strongest warnings and their most devoted care during the season of Summer silliness, of vacations and excursions, of unconventional meetings with young men under the easy familiarity of fun and frolic and a general "good time." And to the girl who has no mother at hand thus to warn her; take it from us that as your own chaperone you must recognize the silly season as your period of special peril, as the time when it is insidiously easy to relax your vigilance, to let down the protecting bars of strict social conventionality and to give yourself a little latitude in the matter of "harmless flirtation."

The only safe way is to be just a little more particular about the acquaintances you form during the silly season than at any other time.

E. A. B.