Chapter IV: Responsibility for Immorality and Vice

Sources of information: Visits to offices and agreements with proprietors; interviews with waiting employers and employees; stories of women who were traced or rescued; records, and statements of officers in immigration homes and bureaus, prisons, reform societies, rescue homes, etc.

In the preceding chapters intelligence offices have been considered as bona-fide places of business and have been studied from the business point of view. In them the housewife has recognized familiar scenes of office surroundings, experiences of many interviews, weary hours of search for girls, and despair or wrath at their incompetency or failure to arrive, lost fees, and petty pilfering. The employee has recalled the well-known pictures of the various places of waiting, of friendly gossip, or parting with her last dollar, and of initiation into the tricks of the trade.

But the surroundings, the business methods, and the frauds pale into insignificance beside the conscious, deliberate immorality of many offices and the traps which they set for their unwary and helpless victims. Of these the honest employer knows but little and the employee recalls many escapes. The bare fact is that while advertising honest work and while furnishing it to some, many also degrade, debase, and ruin others, and later cast them out moral and physical wrecks. Not only are they robbed of their small savings, herded like animals, and subjected to many indignities by proprietors, but they must submit to association with and temptation by street-walkers and immoral men; not only must they lodge under conditions which rob them of their self-respect, but unsuspectingly they are sold into disreputable houses and held as prisoners. These facts and more can be proved, and still "the half will not be told."

Not all offices are engaged in this work, though with few exceptions they are careless in making inquiries where girls are sent. Figures can only be approximate, but it is no exaggeration to say that in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago about seventy-five per cent. are not averse to sending women as employees to questionable places; and from forty to sixty per cent. send them as inmates, obtaining their consent when possible. The best offices are so ignorant of the extent of this practice that when called upon to co-operate in reform measures they refused to believe the charges until the contracts and affidavits were shown to them. Some offices, bearing every evidence of poverty, have insisted they would starve rather than furnish such houses, and have actually kicked out applicants for inmates for questionable houses, and such of course hesitated to believe our statements.

There is no question so pertinent among employers as "Why cannot we secure servants?" When offices receive from five dollars upward for girls furnished to disreputable houses because the demand from these establishments is so great, and when our evidence shows that many thousands of women are annually sent to these houses, one answer to this question is given. Our investigation shows beyond a doubt that at least three cities—New York and Philadelphia with large numbers of immigrants, and Chicago with some immigrants and a large number of girls from surrounding country districts—contain many offices which supply these houses, and that no one pays much attention to what becomes of the employees sent to them. Boston is not to be included with the other three cities. We are prepared to say that girls are frequently furnished to disreputable houses with their own consent and as servants, but we found few open violations. Agents are exceedingly wary of strangers, and our facts are less certain, depending as they do upon observation and statements of employees rather than upon our affidavits. Employers must be known or come safely recommended before such a proposition will be entertained, and it is safe to say no stranger can secure girls openly as in other cities. Previous to the enforcement of the present law, which makes any other procedure unprofitable, an investigation revealed conditions similar to those which now prevail in other cities. But there is the same carelessness in placing girls, and so few inquiries are made that there is no reason to believe that a fairly presentable individual could not secure girls for such houses.

Our knowledge may be grouped under methods by which girls are obtained, influences of the offices while they wait for positions, conditions of placing, and the effect upon the homes of employers. In a preceding chapter many of the methods of securing girls were described, but there are some which are peculiarly characteristic of offices which supply questionable houses. The assertion that the majority of women (who have not already gone astray) who enter disreputable houses by means of these offices take such places willingly is, we believe, untrue. The demand so far exceeds the supply that such offices find it necessary and profitable to maintain such expensive importation systems as have been described in the previous chapter, and many of the women thus obtained do not know their destination.

This is facilitated by the employment of "runners." A runner may be one of the proprietors or the husband of the woman who conducts the office, but he must be a suave, attractive young man who can win the confidence of the immigrant girls, and to do this he must know their language, customs, and foreign homes. His business is to bring them to the office, by any means and from any place, so he is found at landing places for immigrants, railway stations, boarding-houses where people out of work congregate, saloons, resorts, places of amusement, social gatherings, and even in tenements and homes, for he is always on the alert. We believe that no vestiges of slavery existing in the South are more absolute, more real, than that of the immigrant girl whose passage is prepaid by the office, or who comes from the country in answer to an advertisement and who is met by a runner—the essential factor in the system. One case typifies thousands. A country girl arrives in a city like Chicago, or a woman who does not know one word of English lands in complex, bewildering New York straight from a peasant's home in Russia, Hungary, or Sweden. She comes consigned to friends or relatives whom the runner knows, and so he meets her with messages from them and wins her trust by his helpfulness. From that moment she is as helpless as though engulfed in a sea. Her baggage is sent to the office or to a boarding-house in collusion with it, and here it is held, upon one pretext or another, if the girl shows any disposition to leave. When girls have been rescued from these places, sometimes the only way to obtain their baggage has been through a show of force or by the payment of preposterous charges for board and storage. Day by day the girl is paraded before employers, and when she goes out it is under the strictest surveillance. After she is engaged and the fee is paid, the runner, still her faithful attendant, takes her to a new home. Not for one brief moment is she allowed to go to any place or to see any one without his approval. If she has fears she can tell no one, and too often she is sent to a place where all ears are deaf.

The character of some of these runners defies description. There seems to be no meanness to which they will not stoop. They rob girls of their small savings, they collect tribute when a girl has a position, and if it is in a disreputable house they become "cadets" and still levy a tax.

If a girl refuses to enter questionable places it is part of the work of the runner to ruin her and make 6 her more amenable to suggestions. The runner of a model agency recently established on the lower East Side in New York, as a result of this investigation, was recently set upon and severely beaten because of his connection with a decent agency. Two others were recently arrested while tearing the clothing off an immigrant girl over whom they were fighting, both claiming they had found her first and trying to pull her to their offices. Two others were quarrelling over a girl who did not wish to go to the office of either. One finally stole her pocketbook and ran to his office, and of course she had to follow him. It was returned only when she had promised to go to the address furnished. A runner who had left his position told us that it was impossible for any man to hold such a place and keep his self-respect, and that many of the things he was asked to do would not bear repetition, and yet he was a man of dull sensibilities.

Where runners are not employed the methods used by the proprietors are similar. In New York the immigrant home for Finnish girls is located less than two blocks from the Battery, where the immigrants land. When the missionaries from this home come over from Ellis Island, bringing the friendless girls committed to their charge, they sometimes need the protection of policemen. The streets are lined with men who accost the girls in their own language, grasp their baggage, and would literally tear them away if this protection were not given. Girls do not always know the character of the missionary, and are inclined to listen to the stories about her and the promises which their own coun

trymen make. One of these missionaries succeeded in getting a girl for whom a woman proprietor had been watching for some time. She was so incensed that she followed them to the house, demanded the girl, and tried to remove her forcibly. When prevented she assaulted the missionary, blackening her eyes and otherwise disfiguring her. This is but one case showing the character, temper, and greed of some of the people who keep these offices, and the lengths to which they go to supply their trade, and the heads of immigrant homes say that such disturbances are not uncommon.

The methods used to secure girls for negro offices are equally shameful, and where they are sent North by white agents the same system of slavery exists as in the case of immigrants, for the girls are met at the stations and wharfs and kept at the offices until sold. They are often threatened until they accept positions in questionable places and are frequently sent out without knowing the character of their destination. These negro girls are utterly unfitted to meet the conditions of a great city, for they know no one but the employment agent, and as evidence of where some of them go the superintendent of the Bedford Reformatory says: "Almost without exception the negro girls at my institution have been brought North by some employment agency." Unlike the white offices, negro proprietors really believe they are bettering the condition of these girls by giving them city life and advantages and the opportunity to mingle with whites.

But the character of the runners is equalled by the influences of the offices to which women are taken. Few who have read the previous descriptions or have visited these realize what effect such an environment has upon those who wait there daily. The crowded conditions, lack of supervision, indifference to the character of the people who mingle together, and lodging of men and women, as previously described, cannot but develop immorality. The proprietors argue that many immigrants come from conditions equally free, crowded, and dirty. But peasant homes, where the family and friends are acquainted and to a certain degree respect each other, exert an influence far different from that of a tenement office in a crowded metropolis, where the associates may be inebriate, diseased, or immoral or hardened criminals.

Certainly the moral influence of offices over, or connected with, saloons or gambling places cannot be good. In New York some are merely Raines Law hotels. One is a place where numbers of girls are entertained in the evening, entering the place through the side entrance. When we made our visit there was no sign of an office, but the wife of the proprietor, who was in the rear of the saloon, said it was one. She said she could furnish plenty of girls, as they came there to drink. Few girls were sent out for less than ten dollars, so the character of the place was evident. Not infrequently at night native dances and other entertainments at which liquor is brought in from these saloons are held in these home offices and lodging-places.

There are other objectionable surroundings the influences of which are not apparent at first sight. We saw no connection with midwives and thought the frequency of such arrangements a coincidence; but inquiry revealed that they profited by the immorality of the girls, and furnished many a loophole for disreputable offices, when girls came back making accusations against proprietors of disreputable houses. Offices are friendly toward fortunetellers and palmists, who ply a good trade with the idle, superstitious employees, whose desire for excitement leads them to sacrifice many a coin. Whether these establishments pay the office or are in collusion with it could not be learned. Few are so resourceful as the one which had a sign in one window, "Employment Agency," in another, "Facial Massage," and in the third, "Manicure." The proprietor advertised as a "Bureau of Social Requirements," and called it "The Innovation," which name seemed well applied. One Philadelphia office was run by an "artist photographer." This apparently was a blind, and obscene pictures were taken. When asked for his card he jeered and said: "I don't care about your trade; you must be new at the business."

Because of the character of many who frequent offices, one waiting-room and one lodging-house for both men and women are undesirable, and some such offices degenerate into mere hangouts. Familiarities with and demoralization of women are more possible, and some offices do not allow men for this reason. Others have attendants to prevent loitering on the stairs. These conditions are most demoralizing in immigrant and negro offices, and in the latter we found employees in bed as late as ten to twelve o'clock A.M., and men were waiting in these rooms or came in to ask them to take positions. Enough has been said in the previous description of lodging-houses to show that crowded, dirty, and unsanitary, closely connected with furnished rooms for men, and often run by men, as they are, they furnish at least the opportunity for much immorality. In Chicago some of the so-called "working-girls' homes" are used and are a great boon to girls who cannot afford to live honestly elsewhere. But without hesitation we urge that all of them be carefully inspected, for many were found to be only disorderly houses which advertised in this way to attract girls. Some have such lax regulations that men and questionable women mingle indiscriminately with the girls; others require no references, and procuresses find it profitable to live there. One such place was open at all hours to men visitors, while another admitted that they lodged men occasionally. On another visit to such a "home" a dissipated, disreputable woman looked us over through a crack in the door and then contemptuously closed it in our faces. Not suspecting the character of the house, we had not "made up" as working girls. In many little protection is afforded by house rules, and one or two undesirable girls can have a great influence. In order to secure addresses, we advertised for such homes and received over thirty-five replies in answer to one such advertisement—all offering rooms and various attractions for working girls. In Philadelphia girls are more frequently sent to "furnished rooms," the character of which offices do not know, or to which they are indifferent. One office-keeper says, "They are all right," and sends girls to them; while another says "They are all wrong," and "I would not send a girl there for love or money."

We found some offices advertised by prominent and alluring signs which were disorderly houses, and the signs were used as a blind or ruse to attract girls, and these were not infrequently in tenements. They are run chiefly in the daytime, lest at night they create suspicion. In some the girls are simply inmates under a proprietor who is in reality the madame; in others rooms are rented to the girls, who pay a good price, and they can receive any one they wish or whom the madame sends. Girls out of work are induced to accept lodging in these by promises of employment. Sometimes offices are not disreputable houses, but permit street-walkers to lodge there and influence other lodgers. Other offices run their own mountain, seashore, and suburban disorderly houses and actually imprison girls who are unwilling to stay. One office sent three girls up to its own mountain house, assuring them they were going to take positions in a summer hotel. When they arrived they found themselves not only in a disreputable house, but prisoners. One of the girls made so much disturbance by crying and attempting to escape that the keeper beat her and threw her out. When the case came to our notice she was in the hospital, insane from treatment and fright. She died there, and a few days later another of the three escaped and was also insane. The relatives, ignorant and poor, were powerless. They complained to the office-keeper, who insulted them and said: "The girls ask to be sent there and then make trouble." Their defence is always that "the girl went willingly." Offices which own disorderly houses are not so common as those which send girls into other established houses, but we are convinced that a constant surveillance would reveal many other irregularities, if not open houses, for report after report of the male investigators, which we were unable to follow up, recommended "night visits."

The greatest evil is placing girls in disreputable houses. They may be sent as employees with or without their consent; or as inmates, by their own request, with consent secured through misrepresentation or fraud, or without their knowledge. The first is the most difficult to remedy, for it furnishes the office with the best defence. Women, not all of them immoral, ask for such work, because the duties are light and the pay better than in private houses, and they are sent willingly, the object often being through this gradual means to induce them to become inmates. One girl, whose case is typical, took a position as an employee in such a house. For a few days she was permitted to do her housework unmolested. She noticed that there were other girls in the house and many men, but was not suspicious. On the third day the mistress asked her to wear clothing more suitable to the house, saying: "You have worked long enough in street clothes, and there are many men callers whom you must help entertain." No attempt was made to keep her when she declared that she would leave. Many, even the best, fill applications from these houses and allege that women sent as employees are in no danger. But the life in such a house must either repel or tempt them to earn money more quickly and by less honest means than housework. The constant hammering upon the sensibilities by the things with which they come into contact must harden them, and they are continually exposed to persuasion. Some offices have said with evident pride that they had the custom of the best sporting houses in the city. Upon good authority it was learned that in Philadelphia some which supply colored girls are actually backed financially by such houses, and they offered to put us in touch with "backers," who would enable us to "form connections in New York." Even free public offices do not always regard this as a serious evil, and in Chicago, when the Woman's Protective Association investigated, they found that they were not only extremely careless in placing girls, but that they sent them as employees to hotels and houses they knew to be disreputable, and so informed the employees. Since the agitation by this association, they keep a "black list" to which help is refused.

Undoubtedly there are some who ask to be sent as inmates, and offices simply make it easy for them to change from house to house. In such cases the fees are high, and the contract usually contains a guarantee by the office that they will remain thirty days. Office-keepers consider it a defence to say: "Well, what can we do? they ask us." Some asserted that they were accosted on the street and asked to direct girls to these places. It is a trifle odd that girls, in this haphazard way, so unerringly pick out such good sources of information. The "old timer" who requests such a place is usually no loss to the ranks of household workers, for love of ease, aversion to work, desire for finery, false pride, and vicious habits make her undesirable, but she is a source of much danger when permitted to frequent offices purporting to furnish honest and well-meaning workers. Any one who goes as an employee into the waiting-rooms and notes the familiarity and the ease with which girls make each other's acquaintance, and how readily they rely upon each other, will see at once how wide the influence of such women is. Many girls ask to go into such houses, not knowing anything of the conditions except that they will have easy work and much money—girls who might never find this path to ruin if the office did not direct them.

These offices have so many girls for such places—voluntary, or obtained by coercion—that they take contracts to furnish a certain number of girls weekly or effect exchanges when for any reason the house wishes to dispose of former girls. So close is this bond, that in some instances where prosecutions of offices have been made, the house has paid all the fines and fees for legal service.

Many girls are sent out with their consent secured by means of persuasion or force. In the first offices dwell upon the luxury, advantages, and pay, until girls are bewildered and see only the side which is picturesque and exciting. In the other they take advantage of the despair and poverty of girls by holding back honest places and telling them there is nothing else for them to do. When their money is gone and the office demands pay for lodging and constantly nags them to take such places, it can scarcely be said that they go of their own accord. One girl held out for a week after her money was gone, and then said, in answer to such a proposal: "You have told me for a week there is nothing else, but I have seen others go out to honest work. I'll take it, but I've been sent out before and I know it's a choice between hell and starvation." That is exactly the situation, though the office tries to picture it as heaven.

Once in a house of this character, a girl is not always permitted to leave. The reader will recall the case of the girls who escaped from the country house and were taken to the hospital. One office in Chicago supplies such a house in Wisconsin, and it is only one among many. Girls are sent up there with the understanding that they are going to a hotel. The buildings are surrounded by a high stockade, and once inside it is impossible, except through some lucky chance, to escape. They are kept prisoners until they are no longer wanted and then are set adrift, penniless, ragged, and broken in spirit. In Philadelphia two girls sent to such a den were held prisoners in the very heart of the city, and only managed to escape by attracting the attention of some passers-by. Another girl traced from an office to such a house was found locked in a closet.

It seems impossible to believe that women—wives and mothers—are not only cognizant of this work, but do the actual placing, and they, more than the men, send girls out without informing them of the character of the places. It was a woman who shrugged her shoulders and said, when asked for a girl for such a place: "I don't care for what purpose you want her. I give you a girl for a waitress—you do as you please when you get her there." It was also a woman who said: "It's best to send green girls to bad places. I was in trouble some time ago, for the brothers of a girl threatened me with arrest and it cost considerable money to hush it up, so now I use green girls." Verily experience is a great teacher! Only too often did we find old gray-haired women, and young wives and mothers, sending into such places, without hesitation, their own country-women who, but for them were friendless in a new country; and when they knew that they could come back but physical and moral wrecks and utterly unfit for any honest work. A woman sent to us as a chambermaid said she wished to go home at night because she had been sent to such bad places that she was afraid to stay nights. She gave us some of the addresses of these places, and when looked up they proved to be notoriously tough places.

One Jewish girl, sixteen years old, whom we rescued, gave a simple story. She had worked with her brother at tie-making, but had grown restless and gone to an office for work. An assistant found her there just going out to a disreputable house and paid ten dollars for the privilege of saving her. The agent represented to her that she was going to a restaurant to work for two dollars a week and tips, and she had no suspicion of double dealing. When told where they were sending her, she became thoroughly frightened and hysterical and cried bitterly for two hours. She had no money and had been in the office all day without food. For a time she refused food because she had no money, though she finally offered us her small bundle of clothing. She was sent to a Jewish home for training, but seemed averse to steady work because the office had told her she need not work hard and money came easily. Such pernicious teaching does untold harm in encouraging immorality and shiftlessness, and especially if it comes from an immigrant's own countryman.

Open and defiant as much of the work is, precautions are taken in the more fashionable offices, such as the French and American. One important feature of this is the exchange system. Bright, capable girls who might make trouble, but who are too attractive to turn away, are sent out upon the order of friendly offices in other cities. How devilish is the scheme which strands a girl in a distant city, and what are her possible chances against such a fine system? Two, rescued in Philadelphia, after being prisoners for a month, had been taken there from a New York agency. Another agent offered to send some girls to Florida, telling them that a smart girl who could hold her tongue could make lots of money, and that he sent them there in good numbers. A French girl was sent from New York to a dive in Philadelphia and, managing to escape, was cared for by Catholic sisters and sent back to France. There is evidence to show that Chicago and St. Louis exchange, though the St. Louis end of the thread was not traced. To defraud a woman of her earnings, to keep her waiting for weeks for a position, and to house her in wretched quarters, require a heart and conscience of adamant, but to send a girl penniless and friendless to such places in a strange city does not seem a possibility, much less the common occurrence that it proves to be. Such traffic is much increased during periods of national importance. For the World's Fair and St. Louis Exposition, offices were opened in the large cities and many women sent out only to find themselves in disreputable houses or resorts. Others imported them from Europe. For the St. Louis Exposition, girls were lured to America by advertisements in various European, especially German, papers, offering positions at good wages at light housework. In one instance, ten girls were thus attracted and met at the station by the advertiser. Two of them, who, according to her ideas, failed to meet the advertisement's requirements for youth and beauty, were refused employment, and appealed to a policeman, who directed them to the woman's address where the eight girls had gone. Proposals were made to the girls upon their arrival that they engage in improper pursuits.

Not all offices which do shady work are so bold. Many will not sell a girl outright, but encourage and allow street-walkers and solicitors to frequent their offices, receiving from them gifts and large fees. They mingle with the girls, invite them out to lunch, make them presents, and induce them to accompany them to their homes. We have seen these painted, powdered, silk-gowned, jewelry-bedecked women mingling with the bareheaded, booted peasants, and have seen them go out for walks in the parks and finally disappear with the girl and her little bundle. Still others refuse to send girls, but will refer employers to other offices which cater to this trade, thus assisting such work if not actually engaging in it.

Such traffic is evidently conducted more or less openly, since the investigators were strangers, and yet had no difficulty in securing the facts. Some little precaution is exercised. For instance, some offices will not send to a house that has not police protection; others keep young, inexperienced clerks and then plead ignorance, an excuse which is frequently accepted by relatives in case of trouble, especially if the clerk is afterwards discharged.

Even where they do not actually and consciously sell girls, negligence and carelessness make it easy to get them. With a little deception or reticence on the part of the employer, girls can be secured from almost any private agency which operates for profit only, and can be taken away as soon as the fee is paid. In some of the best ones, unknown men can secure employees for out-of-town places without any questions. There is not only carelessness but indifference, for when places are reported as bad no attention is paid, and so another girl is sent, the office saying: "If she don't like it, she can leave; if she stays, well, that's her business."

There is one further evil which lies somewhat within the control of the office—sending girls into private homes where the conditions are notoriously bad. They repeatedly return and report that they cannot stay because of the conditions or persistent attentions of male members of the family. When an office receives half a dozen reports of such a home from different girls, whom it has known as honest and reliable, what does it do? Not refuse to send a girl—but some one else who will "meet the requirements." A well-dressed woman came into a prominent Chicago office and said, in our hearing: "Have you the girl you promised?" "Yes." "You are sure you understand—his wife is dead, and he wants a girl who can play the piano and is entertaining—and"—with a depreciating gesture—"you know the rest." A young, fresh, good-looking girl was sent out with her. Offices continually send young girls to homes where they know there are unscrupulous husbands and sons and say: "If they don't stay, that 's another fee; if they do, that 's not our look-out." Conditions in a private family are not so well known as is the character of a disreputable house, but a conscientious agent can do much toward saving innocent girls from both.

Certainly for some of the inmates of workhouses, reformatories, and other institutions, some offices are responsible, and many have learned their first steps in immorality, theft, and inebriety in them, or in positions in which they were carelessly placed. The daughter of honest, well-to-do parents in a small town drifted into one of these offices upon losing her position in the city, and they sent her to a wealthy, unscrupulous, dissipated old man, as a "sort of assistant," and she was kept a prisoner for a while and later thrown out with a few hundred dollars. She was then sent into another house, where the two sons forced their attentions upon her, and here she learned to drink and smoke. These steps led her to the workhouse, where she died, her life

being just five years long in the city. Another girl was sent to a questionable house, and upon her threat to leave and expose the place it was made to appear by a cunning device that she had stolen, and she was sent to prison on this charge.

Negro offices are so hopelessly immoral that some city authorities think it is useless to disturb them and argue that they do not affect the whites. As a matter of fact they do, for some of their best patrons are whites, and they have many white girls. One white girl in Philadelphia was taken to an office by the colored cook in the house where she was holding her first position. They told her that the only position open was in a sporting house, where she need do nothing but have a good time and make money. Upon refusal, she was told she could go there and see how the white ladies fared, and if she did not change her mind it would not hurt her, and she could then go to another office and get a slave's job. They said they were "only sorry for poor white girls and tried to put them in the way of a good time." The negroes are not only more indifferent about the kind of place, but say frankly that they prefer to send girls to sporting houses. Even the most conscientious do not consider it wrong to send a girl into these places as an employee, although they acknowledge she may become both immoral and intemperate. Offices reflect the current thought among many city negroes that immorality between negroes and whites is a mark of distinction and is to be encouraged. So long as this is true, something more than legislation and inspection is required.

When asked to compare the dangers of intelligence offices with those of advertising, girls have favored the latter. Some newspapers exercise a careful supervision over advertisements, and girls testify that most of the offers found in these are bona fide. In these some of our advertisements were refused as suspicious, though we had not made an extreme effort to have them appear so. Unfortunately, the papers having the greatest amount of advertising as a rule use the least care, and advertisements are answered by invitations to lunch, requests for appointments, etc., and many of those requesting help are from doubtful employment offices and questionable houses. The private post-offices which newspapers run make it possible for these places to mislead girls, with little hope of the advertisers ever being traced. In such papers, it is always a risk to answer or make a request for a housekeeper, and ladies advertising that they wish to place their girls during their absence from the city are the especial prey of such sharks. Household workers' advertisements are less dangerous than are those for office positions. An assistant answered thirty of the latter in a prominent New York paper, and twenty were not only doubtful but open proposals.

There is another point from which the work of these offices must be considered: the effect upon the employer and her home. Can employers afford to accept household workers who come from such dirty, disease-laden, vermin-infested, and immoral places as many of these offices and lodging-houses are? Can they afford to accept women who associate with street-walkers and spend part of their time in disreputable houses? Do they want women just out of workhouses, or hospitals; or who are physical and moral lepers, ready to contaminate all with whom they come into contact, and who are doing housework temporarily? Some offices even assist unmarried couples to get places together in quiet, out-of-the-way houses, assuring the employer that they are man and wife and thoroughly respectable. For this falsehood they receive an additional fee. The employer may get her employee from a good office, but she can never be sure that she has not been the rounds. Some girls would scorn an immigrant office, but it must be remembered that the fashionable offices supply the fashionable disreputable house, and the deterioration may be slower but is equally sure. Certainly the grade of women in household work can never be markedly raised so long as workers are recruited from such sources. That these women take housework only when nothing else offers is further shown by the fact that eighty per cent. of the inmates of the work-house on Blackwell's Island claim this, saying: "Oh, we do this when we are up against everything else."

Where there are children and young men in the family, the question is even graver, for many impressions from both the character and the habits of employees are gathered. The requirements which mothers have made in our hearing for nurse girls seem to us little less than insane. We have seen them taken from negro and white offices when they were less fit companions for a child, from both hygienic and moral standpoints, than some of the inmates of workhouses. The only requirement was of wages. Some mothers' knowledge of the probable influence of the nurse upon the child appears to be bounded only by economic laws.

When these investigations were made, New York and Pennsylvania had no adequate law for the prosecution of such offices, and no one had made it his only business to prosecute under the new Illinois law. No redress for sending a girl into a disreputable house without her knowledge, unless she is a minor and is "abducted"! Even with this protection we found many girls between fourteen and eighteen offered for such houses, and offices have regular contracts to furnish girls of this age. What redress has a girl who wishes to prosecute them under these defective laws? How can she possibly prove that they knew the kind of place, or even that they sent her there, for they avoid giving receipts for fees, or send a runner with her so she has not even a copy of the address. Or, again, the offices remove and cannot be traced, and her story is not believed. Handicapped as the girl is by language, ignorance, poverty, and lack of influential friends, the office knows it is reasonably safe in its nefarious work. When a girl has relatives, who are disposed to "make trouble," they are bought off. The depths of iniquity to which these offices sink is further seen by the fact that negro and immigrant white, and the lowest of American, offices will, for an extra consideration or a large fee, agree to take back a girl and send her to the country or to a hospital, if necessary, charging a new fee and furnishing other girls upon the same agreement.

A more fundamental reason why offices escape prosecution is: that once in such houses, girls lose their self-respect, and form habits and associates which are stronger than steel bands in chaining them to the office, and their only resource is to return there for further aid. The vain, misguided, and headstrong fall into these once shares quite as readily as the ignorant, and no one frequenting them can feel sure of the kind of place to which she is sent. For many shattered lives and much wretchedness, we have only a few personal stories, gathered in the course of a brief investigation. But the victims of the negligence of the best offices and the iniquity of the worst offices are found all over the city, in the hospitals, almshouses, workhouses, and jails, in saloons, on the streets, and acting as second-rate help in families, and they can be found simply for the trouble of looking. One office-keeper says that she knows personally several girls in New York hospitals, thus led astray, and all have been in the city less than a year.

The connection between offices and disreputable houses will exist so long as the demand of these houses exceeds the supply and offices furnish convenient supply stations, and so long as the laws are inadequate and the policy is the "let-alone" one, for the chief aim of most cities is to collect the license fee. Too much reliance has been placed upon the free public agency to correct evils, and experience has shown that it is a failure for this purpose. Even a slight enforcement of law improves conditions. Whenever an arrest is made or an office has trouble, the others say for awhile, "We must be careful"; "We are watched"; and, "Our patrons must wait." If the "trouble" lasted, many patrons would always wait. To make clean offices, foreign countries must co-operate and know more of the places where their emigrants are going; cities and towns must watch to see who comes for them and where they go in the city, and public opinion and patron must insist upon clean work from every public office. The employee must be given at least protection in looking for honest employment, and it must be assumed that she seeks this. Those who prefer a disreputable house do not need an office, protected by a license from the city, to help them. While such patrons are willing to pay from $5 to $50 for girls, unfair pressure will always be brought to bear upon waiting employees. Certainly they have a right to demand that when they pay a fee it shall not be for the privilege of association with street-walkers, and for submission to unfair and dishonest proposals.

This chapter is in no sense of the word intended as a contribution to the question of methods of dealing with the social evil, whether it shall be regulated, exterminated, licensed, tolerated, or if it is necessary or otherwise. Its sole purpose is to show one source of supply— places where unwilling recruits are secured, and to insist that the methods are unfair and that some offices are sailing under false colors. Even granting that neither regulation nor segregation will affect the demand, one thing is certain: increase the risk, and the majority of such offices will retrench their work or go out of business, for they will do nothing that will not pay—and honest, ignorant, and helpless girls will be much better protected; for disorderly houses cannot so readily reach women who are penniless, friendless, and discouraged—a time when such proposals are most favorably received.