harlotry.

Sixty-nine per cent of the children raised in the vast slum neighborhoods
surrounding the segregated districts of prostitution are ruined before
reaching the age of eighteen. This dreadful, appalling feature has been
recently brought to light through close investigation by the writer and
her co-workers, together with the sickening fact that little girls
scarcely more than babies, are being constantly sought, secured and
sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal, degenerate vice and
debauchery abounding in every large city. These little children, painted
and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as
New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child
debauchery. These little girls are seldom seen on the streets, but may be
recognized when seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and
shrivelled little, old faces--such faces as we find in cripples aged by
pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the
terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly
fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into
their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready,
through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese
monster who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the use of their
shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave them after a day or two of
unparalleled debauchery, dead, or if still living, then with broken back
or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed.

We have read and known all this and wished that we could die that these
children might be saved--but listen, do we realize that with the influx
into our midst, into our larger cities, of the vilest, most degenerate men
and women on earth, thousands upon thousands of the most hellish brutes of
Asia and China--men who reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has
come this very thing--this reeking, diabolical crime against innocent
girlhood. Two especially revolting cases have come under the direct notice
of the writer, yet without sufficient legal proof to face in court the
organized, thoroughly financed hand of men and women exploiting these
dreadful conditions: one, a girl Louise, on Custom House Place; the other,
Rosie from the 22nd Street environments. The last named, cut, torn and
bleeding, made a statement to the writer that cannot be put in print; yet
she was by her owners accused of masturbation. Both of these girls we