The Girl That Disappears/Chapter 8
VIII
A TYPICAL "CADET" HISTORY
THE American born cadet, of Irish, Italian, or Jewish extraction, as a rule, is a graduate of the street gang. Usually he is familiar with the whole business of prostitution from his early childhood, and became immoral himself before he was fifteen.
Consider a typical history, a youth whose childhood was spent in an Irish-American neighborhood in the vicinity of Cherry Hill in New York. As the boy played around the front door of his tenement or climbed the stairs to his home he was often accosted by showily dressed women and girls who paid him liberally, according to his standards, to run errands to grocery or corner saloon. While still pathetically young the boy learned the nature of the trade of these women. He earned many quarters by standing on a saloon corner after school and handing their business cards to men passersby.
At twelve a loyal member of a neighborhood gang, the boy was thoroughly sophisticated, entirely cynical in his moral point of view. He had a social ideal which demanded as many of the material comforts and pleasures of life as came within his knowledge without the necessity of purchasing these things with his own labor.