Theodore Alfred Bingham

“ I am willing to do my part by showing you the under-world as it is revealed to a chief of a police department in a great city. You must do your part by resolving to abandon timidity and hypocrisy. Do not hesitate to talk openly and frankly of the social evil in your town. Drive the facts out into the open, where every one must see them. If any considerable proportion of our citizens would do this for a year or two we would soon have this horrible problem under control at least. ”

“ The white slave, as we use the term in the police business, is a woman whose earnings are collected by a man. Why, you ask, would any woman permit that; why would not she appeal to the nearest policeman rather than live the life she lives and get in return the pittance her master allows her? A girl used to the ways of the United States will not submit for long; but a girl in a strange land, among strange people, can be cowed into doing so. ”

“ Creature comforts count for much with most of us. To the very poor, especially the very poor shopgirls who work in the big stores with all their atmosphere of spending and pleasure, the urge of life is particularly keen. And it would have done away with white slavery, for where the protector cannot hold over a woman the fear that she is doing something that lays her liable to immediate arrest, he cannot keep her in his clutches. ”

“ On the other hand the public is assured that no such organization is in existence.
In the minds of one part of the public every woman of the under-world is a "white slave." Another half of the population scouts the idea that any woman is a white slave, and there we are.
The fact is that the social problem is a great deal wider and deeper than the published statements about the white slave traffic give any indication. But first let us take up and dispose of this particular phase of the social evil. ”

“ Magistrates, be it known, are of two varieties, hard and easy. The police know, and the women know, that a hard magistrate is sitting, and the women are willing to pay a pretty heavy graft in order to avoid arrest. I firmly believe that fully eighty-five per cent, of the police of New York City are honest men, but the honest policeman, like other honest men, are more or less quiescent. The fifteen per cent, who are grafters, are active. They arc always on the alert. The grafters are men powerful in politics and they are able to do a terrific amount of hold-up work among the unclassed. ”

“ Some of them take bribe money to keep hands off, but even the honest men hesitate to arrest a man who is "strong" with the organization. They know, too, that conviction is impossible without the woman's testimony, and in only one case out of a hundred will she testify against her master. The magistrates, either because they are too much, impressed by the old rule of letting a score of guilty men escape rather than convict one innocent, seem always to give the prisoner, never the policeman, the benefit of the doubt. The immoral woman needs a protector as a matter of business. ”

“ THE POSITION OF THE PROTECTOR WHERE the work of the cadet leaves off, the labors of the "protector" begin. He is the immoral woman's man of business. He is her friend, even her lover sometimes, and he is her master at all times.
The police know of many men who have no other vocation, who live entirely from the earnings of their women. Naturally you wonder why they do not arrest them and send them to prison or drive them from the community. ”

“ Putting all prejudice, all hypocrisy aside, what system seems to you most sensible, most humane, most civilized, most Christian. The old system of closing our eyes to facts, denying the plain truth, and allowing a monstrous evil to exist unchanged; to allow countless thousands of its miserable victims to suffer infamy, pain and death ”

“ Most of these girls come to New York with the honest intention of earning a respectable living in the dramatic profession. Many of them do remain honest, but if they do the chances are strong that they advance little in their work, and their purity is retained only by overcoming numerous temptations. For so great a prize does the show girl become that there are in New York regular brokers who maintain in the theater districts secret agents to help them gain for any rich client the acquaintance of a girl whose face or figure has struck his fancy. ”

“ I am speaking of the professional bondsman necessary to a woman to whom arrest means detention over night and a loss of a night's earnings. The system as it used to operate in New York, and still operates in some cities, is for each one to employ a "trailer," an individual who hires himself out to follow the unfortunate woman, and in case of her arrest to report by telephone to one of the professional bondsmen, often a saloon keeper, or the owner of property used for immoral purposes. Promptly he appears and gives bail for the woman's appearance the next day in court. ”

“ If you become alive in the situation mayors will have to support their chiefs of police, and I don't think there is a head of a police department in the United States who would not rejoice in an opportunity to do his share to crush the evil. ”

“ There are some who live in the most magnificent luxury, whose incomes run far into the thousands. They, in most cases, are not the sort of women one generally puts under the heading of prostitutes. They have developed the business to a science and have a select and limited clientele. These women are held up to the girl who toils as glowing examples of success in life, but to the police eye they are one of the biggest factors in the social evil. ”

“ There is absolutely no question of the existence to an appalling extent of women who are veritable white slaves. At least 2,000 of them are brought into the country every year; brought in like cattle, used far worse than cattle, and disposed of for money like cattle. They are enticed from their homes by deceit, by promises of big pay for easy work in the United States, the land of gold. ”

“ There is only one excuse for a discussion, public or private, of the social evil. There is only one motive we can have in dealing with it, and that motive is a desire to find a remedy. There must be a cure, or at least there must be alleviation. When I was police commissioner I received more than one deputation of clergymen, more than one individual clergyman, who came to me and said: "General Bingham, the street-walkers are parading up and down in front of my church, plying their infamous trade right under the eyes of the boys and girls who go to my Sunday school. ”

“ We should have in Europe a spy system modeled in a way after the customs spy service of the United States Government. It would not need to be so extensive as the customs service, and it could be maintained at an expense that is slight when compared with the cost in human misery of our present indifference; but a few alert men could discover and prevent many of the cases where girls are shipped from the London "breaking in ground." At least they could diminish the traffic by getting the evidence necessary to deport the girl when she arrives in the United States and send her back to her home. ”

“ The girl who disappears lives on somewhere in the under-world for the money profit of men. These men who profit directly from the shame of women fall into two classes procurers and protectors. The classes overlap one another, and the men are often engaged in both ends of the business. The procurer, or the "cadet" as he is usually known, keeps up the supply of women, which, except for his industrious labors, would fall far below its present volume. ”

“ The plain, shocking facts are that this American attitude encourages the growth and spread of vice. It makes it possible for a girl to disappear from your town, from your own neighborhood, and be drawn into the net of the underworld. ”

“ This protector may be selected by a woman after she has entered her life of immorality. She is bound to him by ties of affection as well as interest. He represents to her a certain domesticity. He is the one human being with whom she is on a sincere basis. Living in a world of lies, hypocrisy, and pretense, she stands in need of some one man to whom she can reveal her true mind.
Often the protector is also the "cadet," and in many cases he is the legal husband. ”

“ The immorality of women and the brutishness of man has to be persuaded, coaxed and constantly stimulated, in order to keep the social evil its present state of prosperity. The protector finds patrons for his women or for the house in which she works if she be a house dweller. He stands between her and the proprietor of a house who charges her three prices for board and for finery.
If she runs afoul of the police he uses his political pull to secure her release, or failing that he secures a lawyer for her. He takes care of her interests in business and in police court. ”

“ The laws against procuring are very strict, but making laws and enforcing laws are two radically different propositions. In enforcing laws on this particular subject, the police confront that same psychological phenomenon that saves many a protector from prison the women, from fear or fancied loyalty or shame, will not testify against them. Now and then they do turn on the cadet, but I have known magistrates in New York and elsewhere to deal light sentences even then on the theory that "a woman of that sort cannot be believed, anyway." ”

“ It is always easier and cheaper for the woman to pay bribe money than to go to court. So she, or her protector, sound out a new man on a beat or a new captain in a station. They may send him presents at first. If he shows a disposition to treat with them, they pay always in advance.
In point of numbers, much larger than grafting policemen, is another masculine population which flourishes under the fining system. The night court in New York was established for the definite purpose of abolishing these men, and it has been partially successful. In other cities, however, the tribe flourishes. ”

“ Generally the picture of what they are to find in this country is painted by one of their own countrymen, a man who has been in the United States and has returned for the fixed purpose of finding girls to take back with him. They do not know his real purpose until they are far from home. My observation and the police records convince me that fully ninety-five per cent, of all the so-called white slaves are foreigners, principally girls from France, Italy, Germany and Hungary. ”

“ In any event the girl who falls, rarely attempts to reform. To her simple mind the one evil act has completely changed her life and character. She has acted the part of an immoral woman, and she believes that she has thereby joined the ranks of the permanently immoral. ”

“ LITTLE USE FOR THE ONE RATIONAL INSTITUTION FOR FALLEN WOMEN LESS than fifty miles from New York City there is an institution known as the Bedford Reformatory. It exists for the reformation of delinquent women, and once in a great while a city magistrate will send a woman there instead of to the workhouse. I think I saw it stated that in the year 1909 three thousand women were sent to the workhouse and eleven to Bedford. This does not argue malevolence on the part of the magistrates. The fact is they cannot get it out of their heads that sending a woman to a reformatory is a punishment. ”

“ HOW WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC IS CARRIED ON FAIRLY well established prices are maintained for women, and they are referred to in letters that have been found as "stock." Few of these women are ruined or clubbed into submission after they reach the United States. London is known throughout the under-world as "the great breaking-in ground" for white slaves.
The majority of the men engaged in the traffic also are foreigners. One of the principal members was a Frenchman, Alphonse Dufaur, living in Chicago. His books of account showed that his earnings as an importer exceeded $100,000 a year. ”

“ Even with all this, white slavery is only a small part of the great social problem. The most important thing about white slavery is that it demonstrates the vast network of energy and skill spent in forcing and artificially stimulating the hideous evil of prostitution.
NOW MAN'S BUSINESS, NOT WOMAN'S brings us to a vital, shameful fact, too little known to the general public, but a fact policemen have impressed on them more and more every day; prostitution as it exists as an inteniiitional traffic and as a part of the life of every one of our big American cities, is no longer a WOMAN'S trade ”

“ Appeal to the police? Why, she has been terrorized into believing they would send her to prison if it were not for her master. That is why it is easier for a white slaver, when his victim dies and the average life of a woman in the underworld scarcely exceeds five years to go to Europe and bring a new victim from there. Easier and cheaper, he figures, in the long run. ”

“ As soon as a woman is placed in a normal state of mind and body she is given work to do, household work of course, but other work as well according to her individual capacity. A great deal of gardening and outdoor work is done at Bedford, and the handsome concrete walk and long flight of steps across the grounds is entirely the work of women's hands. ”