from some European home and
a mother, asking only a chance to go to work with her bare hands and earn
a decent living.

The American citizen refuses to admit the Chinaman, refuses to work with
him, refuses him all rights accorded other aliens coming to us, and yet,
for the blood profits of vice and politics, allows to be placed to his
exclusive privilege that which a short time ago was our Nation's best and
cleanest womanhood.

* * * * *

For an American girl entering a life of public prostitution there is some
chance of salvation, for the immigrant girl there is indeed little. Two
years ago I had occasion to visit 21-- Armour Avenue, a "50-cent house" in
the infamous "bedbug row district." It was about three o'clock in the
afternoon, just before the beginning of regular business hours. In the
reception room of the place, around a rusty old stove, sat eight or ten
hopeless, lost girls; sick, smoking, cursing girls. Soon they would dress
up, dope up with whiskey, cocaine or opium, dash some bella donna in their
eyes and go on duty to meet all comers. Shivering by the stove sat a
little foreign girl. I asked her name, the girls told me it was Josie and
that she was an Italian. Speaking to her in that language, I soon learned
that she was a young Russian Jewess. The house seemed to possess
sufficient proof, as the law then required, that the girl had been in this
Country three years; so there was little I could do except give her my
card and tell her if she ever needed a friend to come to me. Less than a
year ago there came a ring at my door, and opening it, I found a lost
woman begging me to come at once into the West Side "levee" to see a girl
who was dying. I went with her, and there, in a mouldy, wretched cellar I
found "Josie" of the Armour Avenue resort, dying with syphilis. In that
awful underground place I listened to her story and give it to you as she
related it to me:

"I am nineteen years old and my name is Gezie Bruvatsky. I saw my
father bayonetted to the earth by Russian soldiers. I saw my mother
work over the washtub until her hands were bloody that I and my
little brother might have bread and my virtue be protected. One day a
man came to our house, who was either a Jew or a German, saying he
was agent for a steamship company and that he had good work in
America for many girls where they could earn as much in one month as
they could