Chapter XXX

HELEN CHAMBERS, SOME OTHER GIRLS AND "DAISY."

This is the story of Helen Chambers as told in a special dispatch from Kansas City, Missouri, to the Republican of Joliet, Illinois, and published in that newspaper August 5, 1909. Drink, drugs and debauchery hurried this winsome and respected girl to her coffin before nineteen years had passed over her head. She is one of thousands who perish similarly every year in this beautiful land of churches and colleges.

FIRST DRINK SENDS GIRL TO HER RUIN.

Died a Drug Fiend.

Kansas City, Mo., Aug. 5.—On last New Year's eve Helen Chambers, daughter of a respected family of Aurora, a girl not yet 18 years old and still a student in the high school, with a girl companion went to Chicago. There in a cafe Helen Chambers took her first drink. She took several drinks, and before the night was over was enjoying to the fullest the fascinations of a life that she had never known before.

After a lapse of several months Helen Chambers died at the general hospital this morning of a reaction following an operation. Her system had been too weakened by dissipation to recover from the shock. A mental and physical wreck, she had gone to the hospital in the vain hope of relief.

Lives Two Weeks on Absinthe.

Within seven months Helen Chambers, the simple Aurora girl crowded events into her life that would have been good measure for as many years. From the simple drinks that she indulged in on her first night, which marked the passing of the old year, she went in for the stronger ones. For two weeks prior to being taken to the general hospital she virtually lived on absinthe, and at the last she began using morphine. A message to her mother, still living in Aurora, received no response and the girl, with her life slowly ebbing out, dozed restlessly through weary and tortuous minutes until the end came.

"I was just quitting high school," she said yesterday, when asked to tell her story. "On New Year's eve I went to Chicago with another girl. We met two boys and went to a cafe, where the New Year's celebration was just starting. I didn't know what it was like, but I found out. Everything was in order, but I noticed that the girls seemed to drink as much as the men.

"Every one drank freely and soon it seemed as though every one was intoxicated. I took my first drink because every one seemed to be drinking and to be happy as well. The minutes passed quickly and my brain grew numb.

Decides to Leave Her Home.

"I don't know exactly how I got out of the cafe or the events leading up to it. But when I awoke the next morning I felt disgraced. That was the beginning, this is the ending of it.

"I then decided to run away from home. I decided it would be best. I came to Kansas City about April 1. I fell in with bad associates, but finally married. I went to Dallas, Texas, with my husband. There we quarreled and he returned to Kansas City without me, but I soon followed. We made up here, but quarreled again and separated, and then I started anew, and the rest you know. I slept in a cheap rooming house last Sunday night. Monday I came here, hoping that there might be some relief, but it seems all up with me."

Both Miss Chambers and her parents are well known to many Joliet residents.

VETERAN MINISTER PROTESTS AGAINST THE VICE TRAFFIC.

The Rev. Dr. Duncan C. Milner, a veteran of the Civil War and a veteran in the wars of the Lord, published the following warning against the white slave traders in the same issue of the Joliet Republican, which told the tragic story of Helen Chambers.

Systematic Traffic in American Girls.

There has been much said in the public press about the "White Slave Traffic." Some people suppose that this is only one of the sensational inventions of yellow newspapers. There is undoubted evidence that young women are made articles of merchandise for vile purposes and that the business of supplying the market has assumed vast proportions.

The evil is by no means confined to the great city. While Chicago may be the headquarters for this traffic in human flesh in this part of the country, the smaller cities and the rural districts are involved. Edwin W. Sims, United States district attorney, has prosecuted a number of cases against the white slave traders and has also by his articles in "The Woman's World" given to the public the results of investigation. Mr. Sims said he had to "put aside personal feelings against appearing in print in connection with a subject so abhorrent," because he wanted fathers and mothers to know the perils of their daughters.

The extent of this evil can only be judged by the statements of such men as Mr. Sims, his assistant, Mr. Parkin, Clifford G. Roe, assistant state's attorney of Cook County, and by a number of judges of the courts.

It has been said by investigators that 20 per cent voluntarily enter such a life, and that 80 per cent are led into it or are entrapped and sold. A small per cent of these are from foreign countries, but two-thirds of them are from our country and largely from farms and smaller towns and cities.

This systematic traffic in girls from American homes is carried on by male parasites, who live lives of luxury from their gains from this work as procurers and panderers. Women are also used to beguile other women for the trade.

These infamous creatures sometimes go as agents for books, gramophones, or machines. A woman now in the penitentiary said she canvassed communities to sell toilet articles, for the purpose of finding girls.

Victims are looked for in railroad depots, and trains are watched for young women traveling alone.

General deliveries in post offices are watched where young women call for letters.

Recruiting stations are found in dance halls, in the cities and amusements parks with drinking places as attachments. Ice cream parlors and fruit stores sometimes serve as spiders' webs for entanglement.

The villainous men engaged in this work assume the guise of friends and sometimes will even talk to parents about getting fine positions for their girls. They are promised places in stores and laundries and in a number of cases theatrical positions, with large pay. Sometimes the procurer professes to have fallen in love and marries his victim and then sells her in the market. Several of the runaway marriages on the boat excursions and at summer resorts have been shown in the courts as of this fraudulent order.

After girls are caught in the net and drawn into a vile resort various plans are made to complete their ruin and hold them in absolute bondage. Their street clothes are taken away, they are not allowed to write letters to their friends, and some are confined under lock and key.

Their owners keep them in debt for clothes, charged for at exorbitant prices, their wages are often paid to the parasite who has claims upon them and often these ties of debt and vice so fasten the bonds of slavery that they become broken and desperate. All of these things and many more unprintable details of these cases have been made matter of court record and show that this systematic traffic in American girls is not a fiction.

To show the tremendous financial gains of the traffic, one couple gave a bond of $26,500 and immediately ran away and forfeited their bond.

To combat this wide spread evil a National Vigilance Committee has been organized and a number of states including Illinois, have formed state societies, "to suppress traffic in women and girls." The Chicago Law and Order League, of which Arthur Burrage Farwell is president, has done active work in aiding to prosecute cases. Chicago has also The Midnight Mission of which R. S. Simmons, an attorney of high standing is president, and Rev. Ernest A. Bell is superintendent. Street meetings are held in the "Red-light" districts and work is done to spread the teachings as to the penalties of vice and the blessings of purity, and appeals are made from legal, sanitary, moral and spiritual motives for men and women to be saved.

Judge Mack of Chicago and Judge Ben Lindsey of the Juvenile Court of Denver, with noted physicians and ministers have spoken and written words of warning to parents and also have sent out pleas for wise instruction of children for their protection from the evils of sexual vice.

It is not enough to simply prosecute the monsters who are part of this vile traffic, but there should be a campaign of education in all communities, city and county, with better laws and more strict enforcement of those we now have.

Duncan C. Milner.

Many ministers might well follow Dr. Milner's example and write articles for the newspapers to whose columns they have access, instructing, warning and alarming parents and brothers of girls and the girls themselves against the enemies of every home in the world.

AMERICAN GIRLS IN MOST DANGER.

An able investigator, a lady whose name we cannot divulge, comparing virtuous immigrants and American girls, writes:

"The foreign girls have a safeguard in early marriage. While unmarried and away from home, they usually live with families of their own nationality and are treated as members of the family. Italian girls are further protected by the severe standards of their parents; an Italian father will almost kill a daughter who has gone astray. I have found Russian, Jewish, and Italian girls innocent, very sweet and trustful.

"American wage-earning girls on the other hand present a different picture. While many of them find homes in private families or among friends, many others are rooming in houses where there is no one to look after them. Many of them have no sitting room in which to receive men friends and have to use their bedrooms for this purpose. Some girls speak of this necessity with regret and a serious realization of the situation. Such girls can live under such conditions and be safe. Others resent the implication that these conditions are dangerous, feeling that their own virtue is questioned. Others treat the matter flippantly.

"The men and women who are interested in girls for no good reason have no difficulty in meeting the American girls, working as they do in stores, offices, hotels and restaurants. I believe that the American girl is surrounded by more numerous and far more subtle temptations than is the foreign girl."

KITTY SCHAY. (This story is clipped from The National Prohibitionist.)

Another of the horrid stories that have come to light in the work of the Law and Order League of Chicago is that of a young girl who may be known here as Kitty Schay. This girl was born in Milwaukee twenty-one years ago, and became an orphan when only four years old. She was brought up in the home of an aunt who seems to have been a good woman, but somewhat unfeeling, and was given little or no opportunity for education, going to work at any early age.

Seeking amusement and companionship that her home did not give her, the poor girl began to frequent the public halls where dances were given, under saloon auspices, and came to attract much admiration and secure many acquaintances because of her graceful dancing. These associations led to late hours, and although the girl, under circumstances that made truthtelling likely, insists that she was guilty of no offenses against virtue, her aunt became angry with her and drove her from her home.

Thrust upon her own resources, the poor creature sought work, living in a cheerless furnished room, and found her associations for companionship and pleasure at dances and in concert halls and in the back rooms of some of the numerous gin mills that flourish in the city of Milwaukee, with the approval and consent of so many of that city's good people.

Thus she lived, comparatively blameless, amid perils and temptations, until one night she was introduced to a young woman who offered her a position in Chicago where she could earn "good wages." The winter was coming on. The child had no store of winter clothing and looked forward to the terrible days of December and January with dread. She realized that the scanty pay for which she worked would buy her little of what she needed, and when the temptress talked to her of what seemed to her fabulous pay she consented all too willingly.

Perhaps she did not inquire too closely into the character of the work to which she was going. She had begun to drink, indeed, she says she was partially intoxicated at that moment with drink that had been furnished her by the woman and a male companion. At least, she agreed to go, and at the depot in Chicago was met by a closed hack in which she was taken at once to one of the dives of Chicago's greatest vice preserve where the police, to whom she glibly told the story that she had been instructed to tell, speedily enrolled her as a woman of the "underworld."

Then began two months of horror. Exposure to disease, unthinkable brutality, degradation never before dreamed of—these were her portion in a full cup; and the alluring prospect of pay that had baited the trap faded away and she received in return for all this nothing but the barest, scantiest living.

At length a frequenter of the place, in whom honest impulses were not wholly dead, moved by her sorrowful story, fought her way out of the dive and reported the case to the Law and Order League.

The police have sent the poor creature back to Milwaukee to what improvement of fate it may well be imagined. And the vice mills grind on, and the police are busy "registering" new victims.

SALVATION ARMY EXPERIENCES.

Some time ago a Chicago girl found herself orphaned and almost friendless; her aunt cared for her for a little while, but life was so unbearable there that she decided to try domestic service.

One of the best known department stores in this city was at that time running a Labor Bureau; the girl went there and in due time was presented to a pleasant-faced ladylike woman, who offered her employment as "parlor-maid."

The poor girl, with glad heart and bright hopes, set off for her new home; but before night fell she found that she had been sold into a slavery worse than death. Her pleadings and tears were all in vain, and it was some months later before an opportunity of escape presented itself. Then, while walking on Clark street with the keeper of the house, she suddenly espied a little group of Salvationists holding an open-air meeting. To the amazement and consternation of the woman with her, the girl not only paused to listen, but took her stand between two Army girls, saying, "You will take care of me, I know."

That night she slept in an Army Rescue Home, and stayed with us for some time. An operation, made necessary by the life she had been forced to live, ended her days; but she died in peace, confident that she was going to a world where sorrow and sin never can enter.

Captain G., a Salvation Army officer while doing house to house visitation in the "Red Light" district, was amazed to meet a woman who came from her own township in the Fatherland.

It was perhaps a sentimental feeling which prompted the woman so freely to speak to the officer in reference to her chosen life. She said that years ago she had been beguiled to this country by an advertisement, which promised a good home and good wages to suitable girls. She replied to the advertisement and in due time was met at a Chicago railway station by the parties with whom she corresponded; and a few hours later found to her horror, that her confidence had been betrayed and that she was an unwilling guest of a resort.

There seemed to be no way of escape; and as time went on she grew accustomed to it and concluded that as others were making money in such fashion, she would follow their example. For years she has maintained a disreputable house, and most of the girls who live in it were entrapped and snared from their country homes much after the same fashion as she herself.

A Canadian school girl started to make a visit to her married sister in New York State. The train reached its destination several hours late. The sister, who had been waiting at the railway station for hours, had just returned to her home when the train arrived; thus there was no one to meet the little girl at the end of her journey.

A man who had been lounging around the railway station, stepped up and asked her whom she was waiting for. Innocently enough she told him the whole story, when he remarked that he had been sent by the sister to take her to her home. Stepping into a carriage they drove to a well appointed house; but in his haste to leave the station unobserved, the man had forgotten to ask for the check for the child's trunk.

Leaving the little one, he returned to the station where the married sister was frantically making inquiries in reference to the traveler and was told that no one, answering that description, had stepped from the train. However the trunk standing there with the child's initials on it made her confident that her sister had arrived and, in some unexplained fashion, had disappeared.

While the controversy with the station-master was going on, a man came up to claim the trunk; and an innocent girl was thus saved from the hands of the procuress, for the house to which she had been taken proved to be a notorious house of ill-fame.

No steps were taken in this case, as in thousands of others, to punish the wrong-doer; the sister dreading the notoriety, which would follow such a case.

We present in this book photographs of "Daisy," who died the day these words are penned. One picture shows her at seventeen in her beauty, "young and so fair." Another shows her dying in the poorhouse before she is twenty, after one year of sinful indulgence and one year of lingering death. The third shows her coffin, if the photographer is successful in snapping it tomorrow as the hearse leaves the undertaker's rooms, for her friends are too ashamed to give her burial from their home. These and all the others in this book are actual photographs, correctly named and in no way made up or misrepresented. The story of Daisy is told over their signatures, by Rev. W. E. Hopkins, formerly a missionary in India, now pastor of the Baptist church at West Pullman, and a worker in The Midnight Mission; and Miss Belle Buzzell who has been for many years a worker in the slums and prisons of Chicago. Miss Buzzell's picture is seen beside the bed of the dying girl. It was "Daisy's" own expressed desire that her death might be life to other girls by its warning.

THE STORY OF "DAISY."

We found her one day in March in the venereal ward at Cook County Hospital. She was unconscious, and it was five weeks before she could tell us her story. One of those great blue eyes was sightless. One hand was crippled. Her lower limbs were paralyzed. She was dying—dying of the horrible, loathsome, putrefying disease of the life of shame.

Poor child! This was the work of but one year of this life and she was not yet twenty years old. During that miserable year of sin, she was ill but recovered sufficiently to resume the service of lust. Then came the break and for long weary months she lay helpless in the resort amidst the revellings of her stronger companions and their consorts—ghastly haunt of the women whose way ends in death.

The madam was kind to her, Daisy told us, and during the long illness at the hospital and later at the poorhouse she visited her frequently, bringing flowers and fruit and supplying her with money for the little delicacies which the county forgets to provide. But she, too, is a woman of sorrow. She is much better than her business and did not mean that her parlor should become a death-chamber. When we told her tonight of Daisy's death she broke down in an agony of tears and for an hour cried out her story of shame, of heartbreak, of regret and remorse, and of longing for home and a worthy life. Yet she is bound for the present and we pray for her deliverance from this partnership with hell, and hope that Daisy's death may be as the touch of the Divine Spirit that shall restore in her the marred image of an exalted Christian womanhood.

About two years ago Daisy was left an orphan under peculiarly sad conditions. She resented the solicitude of an only sister—tho' her senior—and as neither was a Christian, the friction grew into a quarrel. She was given the alternative of submission or separation, and her sensitive spirit sought a place in the strange world without.

She entered the employ of a man whose family and business standing gave her reason to believe that she could trust him, and she testifies that he treated her as a true friend until he had won her entire confidence. Then in an hour of need when she was in search of a new place, he directed her to No. —— West Madison street. He did not take her in, lest he be charged with selling her as a white slave, but left her on the brink of ruin to take the plunge alone. How true the saying of the wise man, "Confidence in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth or a foot out of joint."

After six months at Cook County Hospital she was removed to the infirmary at Dunning. She thought that her sister was having her taken to a private sanitarium and the rude awakening in the County poorhouse broke her heart. We had secured funds for a Christian burial to save her from the potter's field, when after a long search, we found her sister, who will bury her; and we would gladly have saved her from the poorhouse had it been within our power.

She told us that she was always of an affectionate disposition and was led to hope that her lonely heart would find loving companionship among prostitutes. Oh! God, judge these devourers of loving, trustful, innocent children. Instead of love she found betrayal and shame and remorse, and sickness, and death; another victim sacrificed to ignorance and treachery and greed and lust.

During the second month in the hospital, Daisy made such gain as to raise hopes of at least partial recovery. With returning strength she came to realize the sinfulness of her life and repented in deep humility. She was at her best when she accepted Jesus as her Savior, and definitely, determinedly yielded herself to him. Her sympathy went out to the diseased and friendless other girls in the ward, and her testimony moved them profoundly.

Her love for Jesus grew so strong that one desire possessed her—that she might live to warn girls of the sure end of the evil way and win them to Christ. In response to flowers and loving messages from young peoples' societies and friends, she sent most pathetic warnings. "Tell the girls for me always to confide in and obey their mothers," was her common message, and she urged us to tell her story wherever we could to warn mothers and daughters, and to use it in every possible way to save lost girls.

In fulfillment of her request, we send out on this day of her death, September 2, 1909, this message to accomplish the ministry that she was unable to perform.

"She, being dead, yet speaketh."

Belle Buzzell, W. E. Hopkins, Missionaries. E. A. B.