The Bridgeport evening farmer. [volume] (Bridgeport, Conn.) 1866-1917, 1913-02-22

experience, the girl was surely enter
ed on a life of prostitution; what
they wanted was such punishment as
would be the talk of every barroom
and a specter to any man who con-
templated doing it in the future.
In the difference of opinion be-
tween judge and prosecutor on one
side and club women on the other
side in this case lies the key to the
criticism of the courts. A summary
of it and a study of the light SEN
fences imposed in all Jurisdictions
have just been made by Frederick H.
Within, secretary of the Committee of
Fourteen in New York, who, with the
cordial cooperation of Attorney-Gen-
era1 Wfckersham, secured a great
sheaf of letters from federal district
attorneys.
The federal judges and attorneys.
1t appears, pretty generally take into
account the circumstances of the case.
In clear cases, where white slavery is
erected through coercion, irnprison-
ment and heavy fines have been i'm
posed. But they were satisfied with
comparatively light sentences, for in
stance, in all of the following: The
Pittsburgh case, where the woman
was an acknowledged prostitute; a
New York case where the woman
brothel keeper convicted was believed
to be not the real offender, but his
women involved were acknowledged
negro inmates of the New Orleans 1e-
wee taken to a numbering camp in an
adjoining state; an Oregon case, the
woman in which is described by the
district attorney as "a well-seasoned
and hardened prostitute who, about
the time of the arrest, did q fancy
job of carving the white SLAYER with
a butcher Knife; a similar in
Illinois, where the woman was f'a
female veteran of the under world
In all these cases the judges and
district attorneys make allowances for
the degree of coercion involved. They
also have to reckon with points of
law and procedure, such as insuffi-
cient evidence making pleas of gull
ty or mole contendere acceptable (this
happened in the Pittsburgh case,
where, additionally, the defendant
had been in Jail six months awaiting
trial).
Summing up all the evidence, Mr..
Within says:
''The difference of attitude, which
constitutes the real difference between
the officials charged with the acts
enforcement and its friends, runs
through all the correspondence from
all the districts 1t must be recog-
nized that the judges now sitting on
the federal bench are generally men
, of the older genera tion-the genera
ton which grew up and accepted
from it's fathers, without protest by
its mothers, the theory of sex neces-
sity for men. They do not, there
fore, look upon the commentaries of
prostitution, if he is not white slav-
er in the stricter meaning of that
term, with the adherence which is
growlLg so rapidly in the younger gem
Grafton which has thrown a cha1-
1enge to the theory of sex necessity.
Tt comes, therefore, to a question of
education-of the courts critics to
distinguish between the personal safe
guards which our forefathers fought
so hard to obtain an the overgrowth
of legal technique which chokes our
criminal courts; education of the
judges that they may be abreast of
the moral sentiment of the day; ed
ucation of the public so that all may
unite in concerted effort to suppress
the crime of the ages, commercialized
sexual vice.