and faster until I could bear it no longer. American "fillies" and body
and soul under a brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into
the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on
Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties--poor, wretched hovels, every one of
them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant,
rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of
drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign
tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and
boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day's work. On I
went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied
by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking
my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the
midst of prostitution at its lowest--the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago's
thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were--the fair young
American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphiletic
harlot, living, prostituting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths around
that great red-light--Chicago's West Side Soul Market--their poor,
wrecked, foul smelling bodies sold day and night at from twenty-five to
fifty cents an hour to all comers who could pay the pitiful price demanded
by their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked, the burning fire of
intense pity entered my soul for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and
chained slaves--my sisters in Christ and this great, free American
Republic, and so, with a heart-consuming desire to know more of the lives
of these scarlet women and to help them, if possible, I began at once a
thorough personal investigation of Chicago's public Slave Market, visiting
these people whenever occasion offered; talking with them, gaining their
much abused confidence, until I gradually learned the inside lines of the
saddest story America has ever known since the black mothers of our
Southland were torn from their black and white babies and with shrieks of
agony and heart strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened horror were
sold to death on the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, and I want
to tell you who read this and who think there is little truth in the now
much agitated question of White Slavery in America, that in the dives and
dens of our City's underworld I have heard shrieks and heart cries and
groa