St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1893-12-31

The only point to be gained would be
lhe elimination of the chance for black
mail.
That might, or it might not follow
The license would have to be Il very di-
rect kind of one. with no butts or ifs
about it, or the keeper of such a resort
might not after all, be safer than the
keeper of a saloon who is popularity
believed to be a fellow sufferer. No! |
would not license it, ana, anyhow, as
the community will not listen to such a
proposition, that certainly is bootleSS
discussion. Nothing good can come of it.
BY the way, is it not the oldest part
of it all that we should expect good of
any kind to come in any way out of evil
evil OF this sort at that, the oldest
piece of original sin there is?
1 know only one thing | would GER
talnly do. l would remove politics from
within the reach of it, that is to say, out
of the police department., if the police
must deal with the subject. Politics
has marvellous faculty of appropriate
ing to itself the faint of all the wicked
ness it comes into contact with, and of
returning the poison intensified hun
dred fold
are the police. There is no better body
found anywhere when it comes to hunt
ing down thief or crushing a mob. as
New York we'll knows. 1t is the COM
bination of politics and nefarious
trade like this under one police hat that
works the mischief. That they make a
bad combination scarcely needs argu-
ment. If it ever did, thee has been
quite enough of it lately to satisfy most
anybody.
There is one thing l would certainly
not do. L would not, whatever else
might happen, by any hasty or ill-ad-
Vised system of wholesale raids, crowd
these women into the tenements and
flats of our city. Unless they are
watched and prOvid, d tor, whether re-
happen, Is happening now. That is
danger infinitely greater to my mind
than any flowing from their presence
where they are and as they are. Each
center of moral contagion by this scat
tering process becomes ten or twenty,
planted where it Will do the most
possible harm. Think of the ex-
ample held up before the hard work
ing young Women-not to mention
the young men-of the tenements, who
come home from the shop tired and
freezing in their poor rags, to encounter
this creature in velvets and furs sally
ure as it must seem to them-after day
of rest. Think Of the effect of it in this
hard winter with the thousands of
young women looking vainly for work.
For if there be ever so little money to
pay for woman'S honest work, there is
always enough to buy her virtue. How
long before, with this spectacle on one
hand and the starvation OH the other,
she will follow where this woman leads?
Have tenement houses moral re-
sources that can be trusted to keep her
safe from this temptation?
This is a wicked villainy that must
not be perpetrated, come whatever else
may. What sort Of cowardly plea is
that for ''our young men," and what
sort of young men must they be that
would risk the sacrifice of the poorer
sisters for their own safety? And it is
being risked wherever houses of this
kind are being shut up and the women
turned into the street. The Jail does
not keep them: Christian families will
not receive them; they cannot be killed.
They have to go somewhere, unless
some door opens to them. And they
go where they think they can hide from
the police and still ply the trade that
| gives them the only living society Is