of the evil wrought through the abuse of
the advertising columns of the press, but experience has shown us that
it is not by any means overdrawn. The responsibility of the health and
comfort--even of the lives--of many of the rising generation thus rests
with the newspapers. How careful, then, ought publishers to be that the
columns of their journals should in nowise assist in disseminating that
which pollutes the minds of the young, renders them unfit to fulfill the
duties of society, or to enjoy its pleasures, and, in short, makes their
whole life a burden and a misery.

CHAPTER XVI.

ABORTION AND THE ABORTIONISTS.

_The Career of Madame Restell--Rosensweig's Good Luck_.

"Such is the fate of artless maid.
Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade!
By love's simplicity betrayed,
And guileless trust.

Till she, like thee, all soiled, is laid
Low in the dust."
--Burns, "To a Mountain Daisy."

Love's young dream--the dream of the ages--has sometimes a fearful
awakening. In her "guileless trust" and unsuspecting ignorance, a young
woman weaves a light web of folly and vain hopes, which one day closes
around her like a poisoned garment, instantly changing all her
fluttering raptures into a wail of the deepest human anguish. All at
once the whole force of her nature is concentrated in the effort of
concealment, and she shrinks with irresistible dread from every course
that would tend to unveil her miserable secret. Overshadowed by a
misfortune that is worse than death, in her half-benumbed mental
condition, she hears of the professional abortionist, and braces herself
for one of those convulsive actions by which a betrayed woman will
sometimes leap from a temporary sorrow into the arms of Death.

The dark crime of abortion abounds in New York, as it does in all great
cities. Yet this crime is conducted with so much care that rarely a case
comes to light. Even when one of these ghouls is arrested and put on
trial it is but seldom that conviction follows, because it is an offense
extremely difficult to bring home to the perpetrator. Many indictments,
for inexplicable causes, from time to time have been pigeon-holed; but
as the transaction is committed in private, the victim is the only
witness, and she is naturally averse to exposure.

It is only when the remains of some beautiful victim are found packed in
a box, or jammed into a barrel, that the imagination realizes the
imminent peril disho