Chicago Tribune
PASTOR ASSAILS ‘WHITE
SLAVERS."
———
Dr. M. P. Boynton Tells of Strenuous Efforts to Check the Traffic in Women.
———
PRAISES WORK OF SIMS.
———
Preachers Who Betray Their Trust Are Flayed by the Rev. W. B. Leach.
———
"White Slavery" was discussed last night by the Rev. M. P. Boynton in a sermon in Lexington Avenue Baptist church. He cited facts of his own experience as secretary of the Midnight mission and chairman of the Illinois Vigilance association.
"There are hundreds of men in this nation," he said, "whose sole business is to entrap young women and sell them to the slave drivers in the slum of the big cities. There is an international syndicate that has made millions of dollars out of this business. The office of the United States district attorney has full proof of this fact.
"In my own work as the secretary of the Midnight mission of this city, I helped capture one of the vile men, who even then had a young country girl in his clutches and was about to deliver her to a life of shame. He was convicted of the crime and sent to the workhouse and the girl was rescued.
Work of Prosecutors Praised.
"As chairman for the Illinois Vigilance association I have had unusual opportunity to judge of this new slavery, and am prepared to support United States District Attorney Edwin W. Sims and his assistant, Harry A. Parking, in their splendid fight upon the white slavers in Chicago and northern Illinois. Clifford G. Roe is doing valiant service for our county of Cook in his official capacity as assistant state’s attorney.
"These gentlemen are not the sort to grow hysteric or become extreme in their statements and actions. They have discovered a well organized and strongly protected traffic in young women, that has aroused their manhood and indignation; therefore they are using every endeavor to awaken a widespread interest and well directed effort on the part of the state and nation in fighting to a finish this holy war against the meanest and most unbelievable business in our modern life. They are writing notable articles for journals of national circulation and delivering stirring addresses to great audiences upon this new crusade.
Public Indignation Aroused.
"That this city is becoming aroused was shown by the attendance of 1,000 people upon the annual meeting of the Illinois Vigilance association last Monday, who sat from 10:30 to 1o’clock in the morning deeply interested and much pained by the reports and addresses of ministers, physicians, judges and other men and women who spoke from first hand knowledge of this white slave traffic in all of its far reaching influences. That the day had come for the plainest speaking on this heretofore hushed up theme was unmistakably shown by this meeting. Instruction was given and warnings lifted that ought to be heard from one end of this state to the other. If the means were forthcoming we would set the prairies of Illinois ablaze with holy fire that would burn up chaff and wheat of this foul harvest that has grown to such heavy proportions. It ought to be possible to send broadcast the reports of that wonderful meeting."
"Darwinism of Tennyson"
Dr. N. I. Rubinkam lectured in Music Hall on "The Darwinism of Tennyson." He said: "Darwin and Tennyson were among the noted Enlishmen born in the annus mirabilis, 1908. The nineteenth century was not only remarkable because so many great men figured in it but also because it gave birth to the scientific truth of evolution, which revolutionized entire human thinking, affecting all the great world sciences.
"The entire world thought became saturated with these new ideas of evolution, interesting not only to the scientist and philosopher — to Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace, to Green, Drummond, and John Fiske — but also to the prophets of literature, to Carlyle, Emerson, and Tennyson, who wrought them into their souls and their works. No poet was more sensitive to them or absorbed by them more fully than Tennyson, Darwin’s fellow student and friend.
Evolution the Poet’s Theme
"Tennyson met the problems not as a scientist, with empirical demonstration, nor as the philosopher, with argument and dialectics, nor as the theologian, with tradition, but as an artist — as a poet — with intuition, with spiritual clairvoyance, with audition, expressed in terms of art.
"The thought of evolution, human evolution, social evolution, through an infinite, illimitable past, on through countless aeons and the million summers of future ripening and unfolding, develops with ever clearer note in the Tennysonian poesy, from his ‘Maud,’ his first ‘Locksley Hall,’ and ‘De Profundis,’ down to his ‘Locksley Hall Sixty years After’ and to his poems ‘By an Evolutionist,’ ‘The Dawn,’ and ‘The Making of Man,’ written as an octogenarian.
"Tennyson in all of his doubts, his sense of the pathos of the struggle and of the slow movements of civilization was always an optimist. He said: ‘I believe in progress and I would conserve the bones of the race.’"
Gets After Wicked Preachers
"The Devil’s Roundup" was the subject of a sermon by the Rev. W. B. Leach in Joyce Methodist Episcopal church. Among those who, he said, are to be gathered into "everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels," are men who have been "unclean, drunkards, liars, dishonest, cheaters, graft-versy perverters of laws, destroyers of Sabbaths, haters of churches and God, revilers, backbiters, scoffers, hypocrites, don’t cares, self-righteous, licentious, wife beaters, and corrupt politicians."
"Preachers there?" he added. "Surely the devil has no cinch on a preacher. They are or ought to be enemies. I see them, though, in the roundup — preachers who have violated their solemn oath to God to be pure and holy, pure in thought, in act, virtuous in all action, not leaders of silly women to hell or to be led of them, but uplifters to better things. Preachers who deny the bible in part or whole as being God’s word are in it, too.
