A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil | Page 4

the public in France, produce in the
spectators a disquieting sense that society is involved in
commercialized vice and must speedily find a way out. Such writing is
like the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troops
ready for action.
Some of the writers who are performing this valiant service are related
to those great artists who in every age enter into a long struggle with
existing social conditions, until after many years they change the
outlook upon life for at least a handful of their contemporaries. Their
readers find themselves no longer mere bewildered spectators of a
given social wrong, but have become conscious of their own hypocrisy
in regard to it, and they realize that a veritable horror, simply because it
was hidden, had come to seem to them inevitable and almost normal.
Many traces of this first uneasy consciousness regarding the social evil
are found in contemporary literature, for while the business of literature
is revelation and not reformation, it may yet perform for the men and
women now living that purification of the imagination and intellect
which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror.
Secure in the knowledge of evolutionary processes, we have learned to
talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility of
racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider outlook
than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled with

chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience
gather force until men and women, acting under its sway, shall be
constrained to eradicate this ancient evil!

CHAPTER II
RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS
At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that,
first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be called
white slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procure
their victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested and
prosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently and illegally
detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturally through
the line of legal action that the most striking revelations of the white
slave traffic have come. For the sake of convenience, we may divide
this legal action into those cases dealing with the international trade,
those with the state and interstate traffic, and the regulations with
which the municipality alone is concerned.
First in value to the white slave commerce is the girl imported from
abroad who from the nature of the case is most completely in the power
of the trader. She is literally friendless and unable to speak the language
and at last discouraged she makes no effort to escape. Many cases of
the international traffic were recently tried in Chicago and the offenders
convicted by the federal authorities. One of these cases, which attracted
much attention throughout the country, was of Marie, a French girl, the
daughter of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor that he was obliged
to take her from her convent school at the age of twelve years. He sent
her to Paris, where she became a little household drudge and
nurse-maid, working from six in the morning until eight at night, and
for three years sending her wages, which were about a franc a day,
directly to her parents in the Breton village. One afternoon, as she was
buying a bottle of milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conversation
by a young man who invited her into a little patisserie where, after
giving her some sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur Paret,

who was gathering together a theatrical troupe to go to America. Paret
showed her pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed and
announcements of their coming tour, and Marie felt much flattered
when it was intimated that she might join this brilliant company. After
several clandestine meetings to perfect the plan, she left the city with
Paret and a pretty French girl to sail for America with the rest of the
so-called actors. Paret escaped detection by the immigration authorities
in New York, through his ruse of the "Kinsella troupe," and took the
girls directly to Chicago. Here they were placed in a disreputable house
belonging to a man named Lair, who had advanced the money for their
importation. The two French girls remained in this house for several
months until it was raided by the police, when they were sent to
separate houses. The records which were later brought into court show
that at this time Marie was earning two hundred and fifty dollars a
week, all of which she gave to her employers. In spite of this large
monetary return she was often cruelly beaten, was made to do the
household scrubbing, and was, of course, never allowed to leave the
house. Furthermore, as