A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil by Jane Addams
page 109 of 126 (86%)
page 109 of 126 (86%)
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public prostitution, deprived of its artificial stimulus of alcohol,
will in the end be imperilled. The Chicago Vice Commission has made a series of valuable suggestions for the regulation of saloons and for the separation of the sale of liquor from dance halls and from all other places known as recruiting grounds for the white slave traffic. There is still need for a much wider and more thorough education of the public in regard to the historic connection between commercialized vice and alcoholism, of the close relation between politics and the liquor interests, behind which the social evil so often entrenches itself. In addition to the movements against germ diseases and the suppression of alcoholism, both of which are mitigating the hard fate of the victims of the white slave traffic, other public movements mysteriously affecting all parts of the social order will in time threaten the very existence of commercialized vice. First among these, perhaps, is the equal suffrage movement. On the horizon everywhere are signs that woman will soon receive the right to exercise political power, and it is believed that she will show her efficiency most conspicuously in finding means for enhancing and preserving human life, if only as the result of her age-long experiences. That primitive maternal instinct, which has always been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture, will doubtless promptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slave traffic; women with political power would not brook that men should live upon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruin and debase young girls, should be permitted to transmit poison to unborn children. Life is full of hidden remedial powers which society has not yet utilized, but perhaps nowhere is the waste more flagrant than in the matured deductions and judgments of the women, who are constantly forced to share the social injustices which they have no recognized power to alter. If political rights were once given to women, if the situation |
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