The City's Sudden Morality Raid Targeted the Wrong Women

A spasm of virtue or morality has struck the city, which, by the way, is characteristic of municipal governments, and the city marshal is empowered or instructed, or both, to break up gambling and prosecute the inmates of the lows. He was told, however, that he was not expected to frequent saloons, the only places where games of chance are carried on, which leads us to the conclusion that the only danger the gamblers would run of being prosecuted would be by opening games on the sidewalk—a practice they are never known to indulge in except under the protection of a license. But to relieve the marshal of annoyance and show their respect for law, the pasteboard fraternity very politely abandoned their avocation for the time, and have taken to genteel pedestrianism under campaign hats.

Now the unfortunate girls, whose characters are claimed by the Christian community to be soiled beyond the possibility of cleansing, have not been so fortunate in their relations with the city police, for it seems that a number of them were brought before the court recently and fined $5 each, and given to understand the process would be repeated once a month hereafter.

The query arises, why was the marshal allowed to enter the houses of these women, and not the saloons; and if he did not go there, by whom did he prove they had committed a crime; and if he did not prove any crime against them, what were they fined for? To hold all women amenable to the law who receive visits from men other than their husbands, or who have no husbands, or who, having husbands, do not domicile with them, would tend at least to make the honorable council of even this severely Christian city a little cautious about their selection of marshal and police justice.

Do not understand me as reflecting on the women of this city, for a more virtuous community I have never found; in fact, I do not know of one unchaste woman in it—wherein I concede the city police may have the advantage of me.

But, Mr. Editor, what are the facts? The council is made up of Christians, common sinners, and at least one free thinker or infidel. For the sum of $7,000 these men have granted licenses to seven men or firms to carry on the retail liquor business, and which license also implies police protection of their business, as it legally should do. Every intelligent man and woman knows that to license retail liquor selling is to tacitly, at least, permit, if not protect, all the concomitants of the saloon business—such, for instance, as the stabbing of a quiet young man and head of a family, and of a man in another saloon being beaten, as a prominent citizen remarked, into a human poultice. But it is not my purpose or wish to sermonize on the effects of liquor selling. These men have paid well for their privileges, and the money thus obtained goes far towards defraying the expenses of the city government; but what can be the cause of moral oblivion or justice or consistency of a body of representative men who will, for money, extend the law's protection over the retail liquor business, with all its accursed consequences, and yet order the prosecution of a few poor, friendless, inoffensive creatures whose vocation is not, to any noticeable degree, productive of a thousandth part of the evil and misery that liquor selling is, and against whom every avenue of escape from their unfortunate condition is closed and every door of 'respectability' is bolted. How many followers of the Nazarene can readily find the words 'Neither do I condemn thee,' addressed to an adulteress; and how many men, who seem ready to add to the misery of these helpless fellow creatures, do not feel a kind of sympathy with the accusers of that woman, who could not testify for fear of self-crimination.

This action of the council and police looks to your humble servant very like blackmail, and I appeal to them in the name of humanity, or Christianity, or justice, or what-not, to help these forlorn social outcasts, and to give their attention to the men ... in this city of sacred temples and schools. — Boulton.