FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED.
To be prepared for life’s battle is the first victory.
If your daughter in the future is to make her living in the big city, prepare her for the temptations that will beset her.
The truth may be an awful revelation to her, but the facts set forth in this book, showing the fate of the scarlet woman who dreamed of love, luxury and pleasure, and plunged into the lake of infamy, may save her from a similar fate.
If you will save yourself, mother and father, from sitting about the fireplace, wondering in the aching sorrow of your heart, as to where your rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed daughter is, teach her the facts as we have set them forth.
Teach her that it is not the White Slave Traffic she must dread alone. Teach her that it is the place of amusement that seems innocent, the drinking of pleasant drinks, the association with characterless men.
Once she tastes the fruit that is forbidden, the rest is days and nights of drifting on and on until the whirlpool of vice swallows her.
For the sake of a glorious motherhood, for the sake of a new generation of men and women who shall make earth a picture of the eternal Paradise, let your daughter know the horrors of sin in a large city.
All that has been said of the girl applies to the parent and the boy.
The boy here and the one who comes to Chicago must also know of the paths, luring and attractive, that lead direct to the gates of Hell.
As you tuck your darling into his bed tonight, think of his future.
To be great he must be honest. To be a leader he must be pure of heart. To be a true citizen he must be filled with the love of a true and chaste womanhood, a despiser of mercenary ideals, an advocate of good government and a supporter of inflexible and just laws.
He will carry on his struggle in the maelstrom of a large city, possibly Chicago.
Is it fair to hurl him into the midst of temptations without weapons to fight the demons of sin, crime, vice and corruption?
Tell him the truth. Let him read the truth.
Every young man should know the evils which wait ever ready to trap him.
He should know of the great Vice Trust, of its system of slavery, of its power and scope of operation, of its daily bartering of flesh and blood, of its alliance with the dishonest gambling combine.
Then he will be prepared to gain the ranks of those who will battle unwearyingly and ceaselessly against the monster.
Better that your daughter should sleep today underneath the green sward in the country church yard, in the city cemetery, than be the slave of a dastardly vice system, wearing her flesh away, damning her soul and eating out her heart for her vice masters.
Better that your boy should be taken from you in the flush of early manhood than that he should grow up to fall a hopeless victim to the curse of a great city.
God gave you your child. He gave you a terrible responsibility—the salvation of that child’s soul.
Therefore, prepare him or her for the battle “that goeth on unending to the tomb.”
We have told the story of a City Defiled, of a city given over to the powers of darkness. We have shown the existence of a Vice Body and how it protects and feeds its thousands of slaves, permitting them to live to turn more drops of blood into gold for them.