Word: slaving
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This lurid episode may be a cliché of a thousand Sunday supplement stories about the "white slave" trade, but it actually happened innumerable times in the vociferously moralistic setting of Victorian England. The nature, extent and eventual destruction of the white slave trade in England are described in detail in this modest monograph by a British novelist, Charles (The Neon Rainbow) Terrot. Between mild beige covers, in mild beige prose, he has told a story that makes the ghastliest passages of Dickens read like a parish calendar...
Ladies & Gentlemen. Under these favorable conditions, says Author Terrot, white-slave traders managed every year to beguile or betray thousands of young English women into lives of commercial vice. Their methods of recruiting were many and ingenious. The proprietors of the padding kens were on the payroll, as were the managers of "baby farms." Procurers worked hand in glove with society dressmakers, who sent hundreds of girls from the sweatshops to the knocking-shops. The flesh merchants also posed as theatrical agents. One of them, a rogue named Klyberg, assured stagestruck beauties that in Brussels they would "become actresses . . . ladies...
...Majesty's government feebly attempted to save face by railroading Editor Stead to jail on a technicality, but after a few months the law was enforced and the white-slave operation smashed in England. In other parts of the world, particularly in Asia, it continues on a vast scale. How vast? The prudish horror of the Victorian era is matched by the let-a-commission-do-it approach of unshockable modern society. No statistics are available...
Just what sort of creature is the modern-day commuter? If he travels by rail, he is a man (few women are commuters) of almost inflexible habits. A slave to the timetable, he is often up before the farmers, and into bed before his teen-age sons...
...prosecution charged that he "actively sought to employ concentration-camp inmates and for that purpose built factories near the camps of Markstaedt and Auschwitz." Though witnesses said that 100,000 camp inmates and P.W.s worked in Krupp plants, no one knows how many were Jews. Of the Jewish slave laborers, an unknown number died in the Nazi gas ovens. In the whole federal republic, there are now only 30,000 Jews. Krupp officials estimate that there will be some 1,200 valid claims; the Claims Conference believes that there may be as many...