OUR RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX
Quick, Herbert
OUR RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX By HERBERT QUICK WHAT are we to do about the "white slave" traffic? We are shocked day by day by the unspeakable revelations of the newspapers and magazines as to this...
...Could such things be if all industries were run on a wage basis contemplating the support of a wife by every workman...
...The dread Moloch eats and eats and eats all the time, and the blood that drips from his jaws is that of the girls and boys that played but yesterday in those groups of the only happy Faery we ever see...
...The full answer to the question with which we set out is the full answer to the labor question...
...Such a society cannot live...
...Look at the groups of little girls about the country school, tripping along the streets of villages and towns, thronging the crowded tenement districts...
...A cancer devouring the heart of a man could not be more surely destructive of the individual life than a deep-seated corruption of the relations of the sexes must be to the greater individual, society...
...Until universal marriage of those fit for it is an industrial possibility, will not white slavery in some form certainly exist...
...It may cumber the earth for a few centuries with its presence, while its decay poisons God's air with its steneh, but sooner or later it must give way to a purer race, as the Romans gave way to the Germans...
...Would such a thing exist under a social organization making it economically possible for all men to marry...
...He is short-sighted indeed who sees in this an evil which springs from mere human depravity unaffected by human need White slavery, like black slavery, has an economic basis...
...Girlhood is a real fairyland...
...White slavery is but the most nauseous form of industrial slavery...
...The nation that after becoming fully conscious of such diseases settles back into supine suf-ferance of it has already shown itself unfit to live...
...In the old Scotch fairy lore there was a fanciful notion that in Fairyland every year one of the happy "gude folk" was taken by the Foul Fiend to pay the debt of Faery to the devil...
...And in this twentieth Christian century of ours, this fairyland of girlhood has its dread tribute to pay to the hell of white slavery...
...The "tiend to hell" is taken—not every year only, but thousands of times a year—from farm, from village, from city...
...Yes, they live in a real fairyland full of glamour and indescribable charm...
...We are shocked day by day by the unspeakable revelations of the newspapers and magazines as to this gangrene which is eating into the vitals of the social body...
...Therefore every good man and woman should hasten to do something, with voice or pen or presence where work is under way to purge the nation of this pestilence...
...For the boys are corrupted, too, with the same deadly rot that consumes the girls—and with them the society that permits such a leprosy to infect it...
...It is a cancer of the social heart...
Vol. 1 • December 1909 • No. 49
