A Fearful Condition

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 7, 1913

A Fearful Condition.

One woman with a name that is a decided misnomer, Mrs. Goode, a keeper of a house of ill fame in New York City, of whom it is said that she would be called an intelligent woman but for her business, finds no shame in that business, counts it legitimate and necessary, and objects only to the demands made by corrupt police—demanding at least one third of her receipts. She also asks that a respectable commission, like a railroad commission, should supervise the business and see that it is carried on decently, and that no white-slave traffic is allowed, and no robbery by the police. She puts as the number of girls who are in this business, 35,000 in New York City, but among these are a large number of shop-girls who do not receive wages enough to support them. She does not present this as a matter of vice or wickedness, or the opposite. That evidently does not come into her mind at all, at least into her argument; it is a matter of simple, pure business, this trading in human souls and in human bodies. And evidently there are thousands of others who look at it in the same way, both men and women, and it is just this that prevents its abolition, for it ought to be utterly abolished. It is a fearful thing to lose all moral sense, to prostitute morality to pure commercialism.