Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/307

 *dle that circulate among the neurotic, a white slavery worse than any ever imagined by the most romanticistic of the dime novelists or by the most superheated of the professional reformers. Every one of these laws has been devised, written and enacted in the identical spirit with which the Puritans in Massachusetts branded the red letter on the scarlet woman. Every one of them is an element of that brutal and amazing conspiracy by which society makes of the girl who once "goes wrong," to use the lightest of our animadversions, a pariah more abhorred and shunned than if she were a rotting leper on the cliffs of Molokai. She may be human, alive, with the same feelings that all the other girls in the world have; she may have within her the same possibilities, life may mean exactly the same thing to her, she may have youth with all its vague and beautiful longings, but society thunders at her such final and awful words as "lost," "abandoned," thrusts her beyond its pale, and causes her to feel that thereafter forever and forever, there is literally no chance of redemption for her; home, society, companionship, hope itself, all shut their obdurate doors in her face. In all the world there are just two places she may go, the brothel, or the river, and even if she choose the latter, that choice, too, is a sin. She is "lost" and the awful and appalling lie is thundered in her astonished ears by the united voices of a prurient and hypocritical society with such indomitable force and persistence that she must believe it herself, and acquiesce in its dread finality. And there is no course open to her but