A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil | Page 8

that she was either "touched in her wits" or "guying" him, he
obtained a confused story of the persecutions of the two young men,
and in sheer bewilderment he finally took her to the station on the very
charge against the thought of which she had so long contended.
The girl was doubtless sullen in court the next morning; she was
resentful of the policeman's talk, she was oppressed and discouraged
and therefore taciturn. She herself said afterwards that she "often got
still that way." She so sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after her long
struggle for respectability, that she gave a false name and became
involved in a story to which she could devote but half her attention,
being still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative thought which
continually broke through the flimsy tale she was fabricating.
With the evidence before him, the judge felt obliged to sustain the
policeman's charge, and as Olga could not pay the fine imposed, he
sentenced her to the city prison. The girl, however, had appeared so
strangely that the judge was uncomfortable and gave her in charge of a
representative of the Juvenile Protective Association in the hope that
she could discover the whole situation, meantime suspending the
sentence. It took hours of patient conversation with the girl and the

kindly services of a well-known alienist to break into her dangerous
state of mind and to gain her confidence. Prolonged medical treatment
averted the threatened melancholia and she was at last rescued from the
meaningless despondency so hostile to life itself, which has claimed
many young victims.
It is strange that we are so slow to learn that no one can safely live
without companionship and affection, that the individual who tries the
hazardous experiment of going without at least one of them is prone to
be swamped by a black mood from within. It is as if we had to build
little islands of affection in the vast sea of impersonal forces lest we be
overwhelmed by them. Yet we know that in every large city there are
hundreds of men whose business it is to discover girls thus hard pressed
by loneliness and despair, to urge upon them the old excuse that "no
one cares what you do," to fill them with cheap cynicism concerning
the value of virtue, all to the end that a business profit may be secured.
Had Olga yielded to the solicitations of bad men and had the
immigration authorities in the federal building of Chicago discovered
her in the disreputable hotel in which her captors wanted to place her,
she would have been deported to Sweden, sent home in disgrace from
the country which had failed to protect her. Certainly the immigration
laws might do better than to send a girl back to her parents, diseased
and disgraced because America has failed to safeguard her virtue from
the machinations of well-known but unrestrained criminals. The
possibility of deportation on the charge of prostitution is sometimes
utilized by jealous husbands or rejected lovers. Only last year a Russian
girl came to Chicago to meet her lover and was deceived by a fake
marriage. Although the man basely deserted her within a few weeks he
became very jealous a year later when he discovered that she was about
to be married to a prosperous fellow-countryman, and made charges
against her to the federal authorities concerning her life in Russia. It
was with the greatest difficulty that the girl was saved from deportation
to Russia under circumstances which would have compelled her to take
out a red ticket in Odessa, and to live forevermore the life with which
her lover had wantonly charged her.

May we not hope that in time the nation's policy in regard to
immigrants will become less negative and that a measure of protection
will be extended to them during the three years when they are so liable
to prompt deportation if they become criminals or paupers?
While it may be difficult for the federal authorities to accomplish this
protection and will doubtless require an extension of the powers of the
Department of Immigration, certainly no one will doubt that it is the
business of the city itself to extend much more protection to young girls
who so thoughtlessly walk upon its streets. Yet, in spite of the grave
consequences which lack of proper supervision implies, the municipal
treatment of commercialized vice not only differs in each city but
varies greatly in the same city under changing administrations.
The situation is enormously complicated by the pharisaic attitude of the
public which wishes to have the comfort of declaring the social evil to
be illegal, while at the same time it expects the police department to
regulate it and to make it as little obvious as