Читать книгу Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade - Various - Страница 14

In 1893, during my missionary service in India, a clique of white slave traders was discovered in Calcutta. They were found to be trafficking not only in European girls whom they could lure to India, but also in little native girls, as young as nine years. There was great indignation in the capital and throughout India when these criminals were exposed and arrested.

The laws of India were at that time inadequate to punish them, but an old statute was found under which the Viceroy could deport undesirable aliens. So these wretches, too abominable to be endured in heathendom, were shipped back to Europe.

Those were the first white slave traders of whom I, a young missionary, had ever heard. Last year in Chicago a French trader told me that he had been in India, and I could not but wonder whether he had been deported from Calcutta or Bombay and made welcome in Chicago. The United States government soon afterward put him out of his wicked business.

Rev. Dr. Homer C. Stuntz, formerly of Calcutta, now of New York, told me of a frightened European girl who nervously rang his doorbell in Calcutta late at night. She had been deceived into going to India by false promises made to her by the hunters of girls. Learning their real purpose just in time, she fled from them, and inquiring the way to a missionary, she was directed to Dr. and Mrs. Stuntz, with whom she was safe, and thankful a million times.

How many hundreds of innocent American and European girls have been led away to heathen and Mohammedan lands, on false promises of good positions as teachers, governesses, or even as missionaries, only the open books of the day of judgment will disclose.

E.A.B.