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A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil by Jane Addams
page 109 of 126 (86%)
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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