There is but a small chance for a girl, once having been sold into or
entered upon a life of prostitution, to ever escape therefrom. Invariably
she is kept in debt to her masters; excessive bills for parlor clothes,
board, dentistry, laundry and all conceivable expenses are kept charged up
against her. She is under constant threat of personal violence and
blackmail in every form (her owners securing whenever possible, some
knowledge of her home and friends, and continually holding this knowledge
as a dagger over her), and there is the ever-present whore-masters and
madams with drugs, drinks and bolts and bars, guarding every avenue of
escape with blows and curses and brutality beyond conception. Very few
young girls enter a life of prostitution voluntarily, and few, having once
entered, ever escape therefrom.

A WORD OF PROTEST

The writer just here wishes to enter vigorous protest against houses of
prostitution in Chicago and in =America= furnishing the American girl or
her alien sister for the use of that class of alien men who are either
excluded from citizenship in our Country by law, or who without wife or
family, are here temporarily and simply to make all the money possible, in
as short a time and in any way possible.

At 2130 Armour Avenue, Chicago, stands an old tenement house filled with
girls--girls from all over the United States--a beautiful ruined girl from
Georgia, girls from Europe. Good girls they were a year or two ago, but
are now the chained, wrecked slaves of festering vice and habit. This
place is said to be operated by a dope-fiend by the name of W---- and is
exclusively for the use of a class of men debarred from the United States
by law, except for educational purposes and mercantile interests among
their own kind, a class of men with whom no white laborer will live or
work--the class of men who a year or two ago murdered Elsie Siegel in New
York--the lop-shouldered, smuggled-in, pig-tailed opium parched Chinese.
It is a crying shame to-day against our Churches, our Union Labor and our
Law that there is allowed to exist on a public street, in the second city
in the United States, a public stock-market for wrecked girlhood where the
filthy Chinese, in rows, wait their turn to rent for thirty minutes of
unparalleled Asiatic debauchery, the bruised, bleeding wreckage of our
American home or the girl who came to us a few months ago--to the greatest
Christian Republic the World has ever builded,