Chapter XXII

THE WHITE SLAVES AND THE BLACK PLAGUES.

The White Slave Trade means two things, snaring girls and spreading disease. As tuberculosis has been called the White Plague, the diseases spread by vice are now called the Black Plagues. Every father and mother, every youth and maiden should be instructed at once in the right way and put on guard against the reptiles that lure unprotected girls, and against the sting of deadly disease that inevitably punishes all who break the moral law, which is physical law as well.

It is not enough to hint softly at these horrors. The truth must be told as plainly as the preacher's Bible and the physician's microscope tell it. Delicacy is excellent in telling the truth, but the delicacy that suppresses the truth is sin. Our loins are to be girt about with truth—our loins, the apostle says, the region of our sex life—girt with truth, not with ignorance and false modesty.

The general public must be made to realize the enormous extent and serious character of these diseases. They cause one-seventh of the suffering of the human race, and in cities more than one-seventh. Physicians have heretofore concealed the truth from the public, but now are foremost in telling it.

When a girl is induced to take up an immoral life she is quickly infected with the diseases that go with that misconduct, and is dead while she lives and a source of death to others. A physician whose former duty it was to inspect depraved women in Paris said to an audience of young men in a vice district of Chicago that ninety-five in a hundred of those women were walking pest-houses.

The victims of the loathsome commerce in girls are first ensnared, then enslaved or at least exploited, inevitably infected with the loathsome disease and all the time compelled to make money for their wicked masters. Constantly they are spreading the pestilence to the men and youths who patronize them and then pass on the plagues to their present or future wives and children.

The red light districts, like a lake of fire, are perpetually engulfing unwary and unprotected girls, along with the wilfully depraved. They are misled by crafty women and villainous young men with smooth manners and false tongues, on promises of light work, big pay, fine clothes, jewels and great happiness. The route to the abyss is commonly by way of dance halls and amusement resorts of all kinds having drinking attachments. The girl who drinks puts herself at the mercy of the young man in whose company she may be. The girl who dances is in very great peril, and she puts young men with whom she dances under greater temptation than herself.

Soon after the fatal plunge a girl becomes immodest, indecent, lawless, homeless, a victim and distributer of vile diseases. When the plain people know the horrors of the white slaves and the black plagues, the sane plain people will demand the destruction of the white slave market and the extirpation of the black plagues.

The committee of seven physicians, appointed by the Medical Society of the County of New York, after elaborate investigation reported that 225,000 persons were treated in New York City in the year 1900 for the diseases caused by vice. The majority of these were immoral men and immoral women, but a large and deeply wronged minority consisted of virtuous wives and children of all ages.

HALF A MILLION BLIND.

Any medical professor can tell any inquirer that there are at least ten or twelve thousand blind in the United States today, whose blindness dates from a few days after birth and was caused by disease which their mothers contracted innocently from their guilty husbands—who in most cases supposed themselves cured before marriage.

Dr. Neisser, of Berlin, who in 1879 isolated the germ that causes ophthalmia of the new-born, a vice germ, after careful investigation throughout Germany concludes from the statistics that there are thirty thousand blind in Germany from this cause. If the same proportion would hold throughout Europe, there are two hundred thousand blind in Europe from this cause—more than the three armies engaged at Waterloo.

But to be very conservative, let us cut the figures in two, and we have still one hundred thousand sightless persons, blind from babyhood, in Europe alone. Including America, and adding Asia, Africa and the islands of the South Seas, we shall find in the world half a million persons blind or one million sightless eyes, from this pestilent germ—at which many young men laugh as no worse than a cold and which is on sale all the time in every immoral resort in the world.

HELEN KELLER'S "I MUST SPEAK."

In a full-page article in The Ladies' Home Journal for January, 1909, Helen Keller, the brilliant blind graduate of Radcliffe College, wrote under the heading "I Must Speak":

"The most common cause of blindness is ophthalmia of the new-born. One pupil in every three at the institution for the blind in New York City was blinded in infancy by this disease.

"What is the cause of ophthalmia neonatorum? It is a specific germ communicated by the mother to the child at birth. Previous to the child's birth she has unconsciously received it through infection from her husband. He has contracted the infection in licentious relations before or since marriage. 'The cruelest link in the chain of consequences,' says Dr. Prince Morrow, 'is the mother's innocent agency. She is made a passive, unconscious medium of instilling into the eyes of her new-born babe a virulent poison which extinguishes its sight.'

"It is part of the bitter harvest of the wild oats he has sown."

Miss Keller goes on in her article to tell the women of America that blindness is by no means the most terrible result of this pestilent sin.

INNOCENT WIVES SUFFER.

Dr. Prince A. Morrow, whom Miss Keller quotes, has written a volume on the consequences of these diseases to wives and children. The book is entitled "Social Diseases and Marriage." On page 132 Dr. Morrow quotes this from Dr. Garrigues:

"I knew a girl in perfect health, of great beauty, of Junoesque proportions, combining muscular strength with regularity of features and graceful movements, possessing a most amiable disposition—in brief a paragon of a wife to make a husband happy. She married a nice young man in a good business. It was a marriage based upon mutual affection and held out every prospect of a long and happy union. A week after her marriage she came to me with an abscess in one of Bartholini's glands and a profuse discharge. . . . She was under treatment for months. . . . She was seized with violent pain in the lower part of the abdomen and had a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit and a pulse of 140. . . . The peritonitic infection continued to spread, and laparotomy was performed. Finally she died.

"In many similar cases the patients recovered for the time being, but went on leading a life of invalidism, interrupted by more acute attacks of peritonitis. Some get well after having their ovaries and tubes removed. This, then, is what awaits these poor women—discharges, inflammations, a life full of suffering, capital operations, or death."

A Chicago physician writes to the Chicago Society of Social Hygiene:

"Several years ago there came under my care a case that I can never forget. The patient was a bride twenty-two years old, a beautiful woman of excellent family. She was suffering from a disease contracted from her husband, who had supposed himself cured before the wedding. An operation, which offered the only chance of saving her life, was performed. All went well for a few days. Her husband, who had been constantly with her, was called away on urgent business. The patient suddenly became worse and died before his return."

These two beautiful brides, and countless thousands like them, were killed by a disease of which young men are not afraid, of which they make light in their ignorance. Any physician will attest these statements. Some surgeons attribute three-fourths of the surgical operations on women to this disease; one-fourth is a very conservative reckoning.

THE REMEDY.

Mr. Edward Bok, editor of The Ladies' Home Journal, on the editor's personal page of that magazine for September, 1908, puts the responsibility for meeting these terrible evils upon parents. He wrote:

"First: We parents must first of all get it into our heads firm and fast to do away with the policy of silence with our children, that has done so much to bring about this condition. Our sons and our daughters must be told what they are, and they must be told lovingly and frankly. But told they must be.

"Second: We fathers of daughters must rid ourselves of the notion that has worked such diabolical havoc of a double moral standard. There can be but one standard: that of moral equality. Instead of being so painfully anxious about the 'financial prospects' of a young man who seeks the hand of our daughter in marriage, and making that the first question, it is time that we put health first and money second: that we find out, first of all, if the young man comes to court, as the lawyers say, with clean hands. Let a father ask the young man, as his leading question, whether he is physically clean: insist that he shall go to his family physician, and if he gives him a clean bill of health, then his financial prospects can be gone into. But his physical self first. That much every father would do in the case of a horse or a dog that he bought with a view to mating. Yet he does less for his daughter—his own flesh and blood."

Dr. William Osler, formerly of Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, now of the University of Oxford, in an article describing the diseases which are the greatest scourges of the human race, such as cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, pneumonia and leprosy, wrote of the group of vice diseases:

"These are in one respect the worst of all we have to mention, for they are the only ones transmitted in full virulence to innocent children to fill their lives with suffering, and which involve equally innocent wives in the misery and shame."

E. A. B.