"WHERE IS MY WANDERING BOY TO-NIGHT?"
ONE evening last week, in company with a competent guide, we took a walk down through the "red light" section of the city. This whole section is built especially for immoral purposes. The buildings are low, and the rooms look to be only about 8x10 feet, built of brick. The rooms, most of them, do not open on the street, but into a court with passage-ways leading through screens from the street into it. In these rooms, several hundred in number, is some mother's daughter selling her body and soul to anybody who will buy. We saw girls from fourteen to perhaps twenty-five years old, of many nationalities and all colors, one to a room, some smoking, some doing some light fancy work, but all half nude, and slaves as they are, offering themselves to every passer-by. We did not, could not, count the number of boys and young men who were crowding in even at this early hour to contribute a part of their week's earnings to the fallen girls. "It is too early," said our guide, "to find many young men and boys here. They come later." But there were a few there, mostly, as we said, boys from fourteen to twenty or twenty-two or three. We saw a few. At a rough estimate we should think we saw in the one hour somewhere from five to seven hundred in all. The back doors of the many saloons open in upon this court, and both boys and girls have easy access to the saloons. Many of these girls, we are told, were procured for, and are kept by, wealthy business and professional men who have wives and families of their own. Some of them, in fact most of them, are beautiful, bright, winsome girls whose appearance would indicate good raising. We heard one exclaim as we passed, "O, my God, I wish I was out of here!" Another answered her, "Don't be a fool." There are more young, bright girls in one small block of this city selling their souls and bodies to the devil than are in the best Sunday-school in this city. And there are no ten Sunday-schools in this city that can count as many boys on their rolls as you can count in one evening in this one block of the city going in with the harlot "as an ox goeth to the slaughter or as a fool to the correction of the stocks." Mothers, the words of Joel (ch. 3:3) are to-day being fulfilled:—"And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink." You have in this section of the City of Angels the legitimate fruit, the inevitable and always certain results of the ball-room, private dance, dancing-school, and saloon. You can not gather grapes from thorns; and whatsoever a man, a family, a city, or a nation soweth, that shall they also reap.—California Voice, Los Angeles.