A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

A New Conscience and an
Ancient Evil

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Title: A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil
Author: Jane Addams
Release Date: March 1, 2005 [EBook #15221]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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A NEW CONSCIENCE AND AN ANCIENT EVIL
By JANE ADDAMS
HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO
Author of Democracy and Social Ethics, Newer Ideals of Peace The
Spirit of Youth and the City Streets Twenty Years at Hull-House
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1912

To the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, whose
superintendent and field officers have collected much of the material

for this book, and whose president, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, has so ably
and sympathetically collaborated in its writing.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
As inferred from An Analogy
CHAPTER II
As indicated by Recent Legal Enactments
CHAPTER III
As indicated by the Amelioration of Economic Conditions
CHAPTER IV
As indicated by the Moral Education and Legal Protection of Children
CHAPTER V
As indicated by Philanthropic Rescue and Prevention
CHAPTER VI
As indicated by Increased Social Control

PREFACE
The following material, much of which has been published in
McClure's Magazine, was written, not from the point of view of the
expert, but because of my own need for a counter-knowledge to a
bewildering mass of information which came to me through the
Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago. The reports which its
twenty field officers daily brought to its main office adjoining Hull
House became to me a revelation of the dangers implicit in city
conditions and of the allurements which are designedly placed around
many young girls in order to draw them into an evil life.
As head of the Publication Committee, I read the original documents in
a series of special investigations made by the Association on dance
halls, theatres, amusement parks, lake excursion boats, petty gambling,
the home surroundings of one hundred Juvenile Court children and the
records of four thousand parents who clearly contributed to the
delinquency of their own families. The Association also collected the
personal histories of two hundred department-store girls, of two

hundred factory girls, of two hundred immigrant girls, of two hundred
office girls, and of girls employed in one hundred hotels and
restaurants.
While this experience was most distressing, I was, on the other hand,
much impressed and at times fairly startled by the large and diversified
number of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic
had become unendurable and who promptly responded to any appeal
made on behalf of its victims. City officials, policemen, judges,
attorneys, employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly
arrived immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men,
as under a profound sense of compunction, were unsparing of time and
effort when given an opportunity to assist an individual girl, to promote
legislation designed for her protection, or to establish institutions for
her rescue.
I therefore venture to hope that in serving my own need I may also
serve the need of a rapidly growing public when I set down for rational
consideration the temptations surrounding multitudes of young people
and when I assemble, as best I may, the many indications of a new
conscience, which in various directions is slowly gathering strength and
which we may soberly hope will at last successfully array itself against
this incredible social wrong, ancient though it may be.
Hull House, Chicago.

CHAPTER I
AN ANALOGY
In every large city throughout the world thousands of women are so set
aside as outcasts from decent society that it is considered an
impropriety to speak the very word which designates them. Lecky calls
this type of woman "the most mournful and the most awful figure in
history": he says that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise
and fall, the eternal sacrifice of humanity, blasted for the sins of the
people." But evils so old that they are imbedded in man's earliest
history have been known to sway before an enlightened public opinion
and in the end to give way to a growing conscience, which regards
them first as a moral affront and at length as an utter impossibility.

Thus the generation just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the
enormous upas of slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race
of man," although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives
of man's earliest warfare, even as this existing evil thus originated.
Those