A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil | Page 7

dangers at the very
moment when she is least able to defend herself. Such a girl, already
bewildered by the change from an old world village to an American
city, is unfortunately sometimes convinced that the new country
freedom does away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony. Many
others are told that judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America
than in the old country. The last month's records of the Municipal Court
in Chicago, set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen
unfortunate girls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing
eight different nationalities. These discouraged and deserted girls
become an easy prey for the procurers who have sometimes been in
league with their lovers.
Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an
affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from
chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their
daughters work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town."
They themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would
gladly give the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire

situation is so unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that,
discouraged by their inability to judge it, they make no attempt to
understand their daughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on
the part of their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which
the first taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation
during certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the
traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of
himself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quite
unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public
opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives,
and while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a
factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as a
restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in
the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough
to offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreation
which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such
excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent. The
great human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries to
limit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes, and
it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements.
On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many
immigrant girls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist all
temptations. Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsome
girl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which a
continued mood of introspection so often lends to the young. Olga had
been in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned
to Sweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to be
thoroughly respectable. But a friendless girl of such striking beauty
could not escape the machinations of those who profit by the sale of
girls. Almost immediately Olga found herself beset by two young men
who continually forced themselves upon her attention, although she
refused all their invitations to shows and dances. In six months the
frightened girl had changed her boarding-place four times, hoping that
the men would not be able to follow her. She was also obliged
constantly to look for a cheaper place, because the dull season in the

cloak-making trade came early that year. In the fifth boarding-house
she finally found herself so hopelessly in arrears that the landlady, tired
of waiting for the "new cloak making to begin," at length fulfilled a
long-promised threat, and one summer evening at nine o'clock literally
put Olga into the street, retaining her trunk in payment of the debt. The
girl walked the street for hours, until she fancied that she saw one of
her persecutors in the distance, when she hastily took refuge in a
sheltered doorway, crouching in terror. Although no one approached
her, she sat there late into the night, apparently too apathetic to move.
With the curious inconsequence of moody youth, she was not aroused
to action by the situation in which she found herself. The incident
epitomized to her the everlasting riddle of the universe to which she
could see no solution and she drearily decided to throw herself into the
lake. As she left the doorway at daybreak for this pitiful purpose, she
attracted the attention of a passing policeman. In response to his
questions, kindly at first but becoming exasperated as he was
convinced