THE BALLOT-CONTROL OF VICE.
One man on election day can easily cast ten votes under ten names of ten dissolute women, who live in the hotels under cognomens, giving initials for their first names.
One hundred men can cast 1,000 illicit votes. That is sufficient to carry an aldermanic election.
One thousand men can cast 10,000 ballots!
That, in a pinch, could sweep honesty from the highest office in the city, and crown a Vice Trust vassal,—mayor!
This is how the Vice Trust wields the balance of power in Chicago, a power that can crush any business, any man, can remove to the “woods” any policeman or police official who refuses to obey its decrees, and so on without limit.
Destroy this and Chicago might once more rear her head in pride. It is the clutch that sets in motion all the machinery of evil.
Wreck that clutch and the delicate, subtle mechanism of concerted crime would disintegrate.
Chicago is blind to the terrible evil of the plethoric ballot box, but the eyes of thousands are being slowly opened.
The “prostitute-repeating” system is but one of the means employed to gain and sustain political control. Hundreds of other methods are in vogue today and working their evil effects.
“Stamp out Vice and Evil. Eliminate the red-lighted, tinsel Houses of Shame; give our city to God.”
This is the cry of the churches, led by their praiseworthy pastors.
Oh, ye with eyes that see not, and ears that are deaf to the voices of hell, strike now and strike hard.
But strike not at the thousands of fallen women, nor at the brothel keepers, nor at the dive owners, nor at the panderers, not yet, at least.
STRIKE, FIRST, AT THE POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT CONTROLS ALL AND REIGNS OVER ALL.
Destroy the foundation and the superstructure will topple over of itself.
Break the power that begins and ends at the ballot box. Break the power that sucks at the veins of the myriad army of the lost, and lives on the white ways of decency.
That is the evil! Kill it!
In showing the Unbroken Circle of Iniquity we have shown where the control of crime is begotten.
And now the parts, interlocked so finely that the connecting points are lost, are to be revealed.
Once political power is assured, all else is inevitable by the nature of things.