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Welty, "The Need of White Cross Work," 1895
the land. The procurer and procurers already travel, even under the
guise of honorable business and sometimes of piety, to hunt for "the
precious life." Incredible thousands of our sisters and daughters are
sold every decade like cattle in the tolerated shambles of lust. Oh, the
fearful ravages of licentiousness! Monstrous, harrowing, and still on
the increase! There are now two hundred and thirty thousand
(230,000) fallen women in the United States, and that means at least
eight times that many fallen men. To supply the demands of passion in
men one hundred families must give up a daughter apiece every day in
the round year. What a draft this is on homes! What sin and shame
and misery and heartaches and remorse and cruelty and murder and
death and damnation this means! Think of it! Estimate if you can the
fearful cost of this scarlet commerce! And then remember that this
unclean, abominable, merciless business is going on now, that it is
ever enlarging, spreading, taking in more victims; and there is little or
no effort being made to stop it. What if it goes on for another ten or
twenty years with the same ratio of increase that has marked it in the
last ten or twenty years? "What will the harvest be?"
5. Special effort in purity reform is forced upon us because of the
inadequate instruction, or lack of instruction, by parents in their homes,
teachers in the schools and pastors in the churches upon the subjects
of personal chastity and social purity.
The reticence of parents in these matters is well known. Because
of temerity, false modesty, inability, or ignorance of the need of it, they
fail to instruct children and young people in positive knowledge
concerning sexual relations and duties. For the most part, especially
with the boys, their first lessons about sex and reproduction and
motherhood and fatherhood are learned from corrupt playmates,
unclean innuendo, vile literature, obscene pictures, vulgar stories and
unfortunate personal experience. There are some things, some
knowledge about ourselves, that must come by teaching, by
explanation, by discipline. Important among these are the facts and
duties indicated in the Seventh commandment of the Decalogue. Let
alone, boys run to the bad and at an incredible early age become
impure in thought and often in practice.
In the public schools there is almost a total neglect of all the facts
that pertain to sexual functions, relations and duties. Physiology stops
short of these most important things and the young are left to
inference, or to unfortunate ways for learning what above all they need
to know. If we are to believe the testimony of teachers of public
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