A New City

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Feb 13, 1907

A NEW CITY.—Conversing with a gentleman well acquainted with conditions in Oakland, one of its leading merchants, the other day, the writer spoke of how changed Oakland is since the earthquake. "Yes," said he, "it has been well remarked that two towns were lost in the days of the earthquake and fire last April, one San Francisco, the other Oakland." From the quiet, respectable, moral city that it was before the earthquake, it has blossomed out in a few months to a metropolitan town, with double the amount of vice that a town of its size would be expected to have. Its Chinatown has been enlarged by blocks and blocks of those who came over from San Francisco. Traffic in Japanese girls for a life of shame has been begun on a scale that is simply appalling, where large houses of assignation buy and sell them as so many chattels, segregating them in little rooms that are consecrated to the lusts of bestial white men. Dr. Dille, one of Oakland's leading ministers, made the open charge recently in a sermon in Oakland that "in the heart of Oakland there is a fashionable milliner shop where hard-working girls are not only underpaid, but compelled to slave to an outrageous time

schedule. THE PROPRIETOR ADVISES THEM TO SELL THEMSELVES TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER. THEY ARE TOLD THAT VIRTUE IS OF NO USE SAVE FOR ITS PRICE. To all who wish to interest themselves in the welfare of these unfortunate girls I will give the name of this infamous milliner." This and many other charges of corruption of many other kinds Dr. Dille made in a sermon on the conditions in what has been called the Athens of the Coast. It would seem as tho the appalling calamity of last April would lead men to think of serious things rather than to rush on, blindly and morally dead to the certain judgment which lies before.