A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

Project Gutenberg's A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil, by Jane Addams This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
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
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A NEW CONSCIENCE ***

Produced by Jeffrey Kraus-yao

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 of us who think we discern the beginnings of a new conscience in regard to this twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself and even more persistent, find a possible analogy between certain civic, philanthropic and educational efforts directed