We shall continue to
maintain the White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on
the one hand, tolerating the white slave as the necessary
breakwater of marriage; and, on the other, trampling on her and
degrading her until she has nothing to hope from our Courts; and
so, with policemen at every corner, and law triumphant all over
Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven from one end
of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and
hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to
utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and
infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering
blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and
death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and
genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving
either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall
keep enthusiastically investing her trade with every
allurement that the art of the novelist, the playwright, the
dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight man, and the
sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue to be
very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the
young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the
other victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable
refrain: "Why did nobody warn me?"
WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?
I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet
that would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of
the reply.
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