;88 



The Review of Reviews. 



TO ABOLISH WHITE SLAVERYI 



Crusade bv Miss Jane Addams. 



Miss Jane Addams, having by a career of vic- 

 torious struggle with the dragons of municipal slime 

 established her position as the foremost woman in 

 the United States, has now declared battle with the 

 age-long curse of prostitution. She opens in McC/ure's 

 Magazine a series of papers on " A New Conscience 

 and an Ancient Evil." She begins her record of 

 horrors hopefully. 



A CHEERING PARALLEL. 



She draws an analogy between the eftbrts directed 

 against the existence of this social evil and similar 

 organised efforts which preceded the overthrow 

 of slavery in America. There are the same pre- 

 liminary endeavours to regulate the white slave 

 traffic as there were to control negro slavery. The 

 underground railroad has its parallel in rescue homes 

 and preventive associations. There is a similar 

 array of reformers, lecturers, writers, setting forth the 

 enormity of the later as of the earlier horror. She 

 says : — " We may certainly take courage from the 

 fact that our contemporaries are fired by social 

 compassions and enthusiasms to which even our 

 immediate predecessors were indifferent." 



She recalls how gradually all those who sought 

 to control, regulate, or limit the negro slavery were 

 forced in fhe end to work for its abolition. Some 

 such gradual conversion to the point of view of 

 abolition is the experience of every society or group 

 of people who seriously contemplate the social evil. 



NEED OF HEROES AND MARTYRS. 



Hopeful as she is. Miss Addams does not disguise 

 the difficulties. She says : — 



Perh.ips the iiiosl sliiking indication that our generation lias 

 become the Ijearer of a new moral consciousness in regard to the 

 existence of commercialised vice is the fact that the mere con- 

 templation of it throws the more sensitive men and women 

 among our contemporaries into a state of indignant revolt. The 

 long struggle .ahead of these newer associations may also claim 

 its martyrs and its heroes. Few righteous causes have escaped 

 baptism with blood, and, if one may paraphrase Lincoln's 

 speech, if blood were exacted drop by drop in mea!.ure to the 

 tears of anguished mothers and enslaved girls, the nation would 

 still be obliged to go inlo the struggle. 



All of this emotion ought to be m.ade of value. 



THE SLAVE TRADE FIR.^T. 



As the abolition of the slave trade preceded the 

 abolition of slavery, so even the least conscientious 

 citizens agree that the organised traffic in whiteslaves 

 must be suppressed and its traffickers arrested and 

 prosecuted. This policy adopted in Chicago has led 

 to about a thousand white slave traders— of whom 

 thirty or f(jrty were impotters of foreign girls — being 

 driven from the city since 1909. 



WHAT A I'OLICE INSfECTOR DID. 



Miss Addams tells how kind-hearted police have 

 turned even their corrupt patronage of evil resorts 

 into good : — 



Quite recently, a former inspector of police in Chicago estab- 



lished a requirement that every young girl who came to live 

 in a disreputable house within a prescribed district must be 

 reported to him within an hour after her arrival. Each one 

 was closely questioned as to her reasons for entering ihe life ; 

 if she was very young she was warned of its inevitable conse- 

 quences and urged to abandon her project. Every assistance 

 was offered her to return to work and to live a normal life. 

 Occasionally the girl was desperate, and it was sometimes 

 necessary that she be forcibly detained in the police station 

 until her friends could be communicated with. More often she 

 w.as glad to avail herself of the chance of escape, practically 

 always, unless she had already become romanlically entangled 

 with a cadet whom she firmly believed to be Iier genuine lover 

 and protector. 



Then follow heart-sickening tales of youthful 

 ignorance and innocence abused by men whose only 

 motive was commercial. 



It is good that the enslaved womanhood of 

 America has found at last its Joan of Arc. When 

 Jane Addams takes the field even the most strongly 

 "entrenched hosts of Belial and Mammon may quail. 

 But it will be a tough fight. 



IS THIS THE CHRIST WHO IS TO COME? 



To Whom Mrs. Besant is John the Baptist. 



According to the Theosophist the Christ who is to 

 come has already selected the body in which He is to 

 reveal Himself to mankind. The body is at present 

 the object of much attention, as it is now inhabited 

 by the soul of .Mcyone, who has passed through thirty 

 lives, the story of which is gradually being unravelled 

 by Mr. Leadbeater. In the process of re-reading the 

 history of Alcyone, the researchers claim to have 

 come upon the history of the previous lives of Jesus 

 Christ, who, under the name of Surya, had intimate 

 relations with Alcyone in his second, sixth, and ninth 

 lives. Mr. E. .C. Reynolds, in the T/uvso/'hist for 

 November, tells us that in his second life Alcyone 

 was the mother of Surya. When Surya was a year 

 old, Alcyone rescued him from a burning house, but 

 was herself fatally injured in so doing, and soon 

 died : — 



In the ninth life Surya is a high priest and is the groal- 

 •'randfathcr of Alcyone. He is much attached to his grandchild, 

 and one day tells him that he, Alcyone, gave his life for Him 

 in Ihe past, and that another opportunity would oRer in the 

 future to give up his life for Him if he would, and thereby bless 

 the world. 



Surya is the one which appears in Indian literature as Lord 

 Maitrcya, and is known among Western nations as the Christ, 

 lie had long since attained .\deplship, and w.as serving as an 

 .assistant to Vyasa, the Gautama Buddha of an after lime. 

 Vyasa held the office of Bodhisatlva ; that is. He had charge of 

 ihe formation of all the new religions of the world and the 

 conduct of the old ones. This office He passed on to Surya, 

 when lie attained Buddhahood two thousand five hundred 

 years ago. 



At the present lime Alcyone is a Hindu youth, and has passed 

 his first Initiation with the help of Mercury, belter known to us 

 as Master K. H. There are many who hope and believe ih.Tl 

 in this life Surya's ancient prophecy will be fulfilled, and thai 

 He will lake possession of Alcyone's body to bless the world, 

 even as He did that of Jesus at the time of the baptism iwo 

 thousand years ago. 



