Читать книгу Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade - Various - Страница 10

At Corinth, a great commercial city and seaport, business shrewdness was linked with sensuality and profanation, and a great temple of Venus was built, where one thousand priestesses were required to lead a life of religious infamy to make money for their despicable masters. There were constant importations of new girls from Lesbos and the other Grecian isles. Then as now the devices of the white slave trader were assiduously employed to keep up and increase the number of profitable European and Asiatic girls.

It is pastime as well as business to these traffickers to drug, to make drunken, to deceive, to ensnare or to debauch by force the innocent, the confiding, the thoughtless, the weak. Whether for the ancient temple of Venus at Corinth or for the dens of shame in the white slave market of Chicago or Paris, beautiful victims who will earn much money for their masters and captors must be hunted and trapped.

At Athens the lawgiver Solon established houses of shame by statute, and filled them with slave girls for whom there was no possible escape. But whoever, man or woman, caused a freeborn Athenian girl to enter one of the houses incurred the penalty of death. It might be well if freeborn American girls were as thoroughly protected. An Athenian forfeited his citizenship on opening a house of shame. American citizenship in our large cities allows the white slave traders an astounding amount of political influence.