THE EVILS OF A WORLD IN A MELTING POT.
“Name a vice, a crime, a sin, that was known from the Beginning to the present day, and I’ll show it to you in Chicago today.”
Several years ago when the agents of the system were bolder in their depravity, a “guide” stood outside the Polk street depot, waited for the “gentlemen of the long green” and excited curiosity by the above pronouncement.
He could truthfully shout it from the housetops today.
To it he would add, if he were to tell the entire truth:—
“I will show you not only every crime, but I will tell you the price of its existence paid to members of Chicago’s police department, and other collectors of the Vice Trust.”
Search and you can find:—
Salient shows, obscene amusement houses, houses of prostitution, segregated and otherwise, fashionable “flats” in choice neighborhoods, dens of reeking infamy for the congregation of humanity’s lowest dregs, rendezvous for degenerate white women and negro men, clubs and resorts where degeneracy in its most revolting forms are practiced, professional beggars, rich pickpockets, pretty shoplifters, leering street-walkers, cocaine, morphine and opium dens, fake palmists and fortune tellers, and gambling in its hundreds of luring, deceptive forms.
That is Chicago’s generic crime list. If we omit, name the sin and it can be found. That is the army that pays the graft to the police and other creatures of the Vice Trust.
Then, there are walking the streets of Chicago, known to the police, a score of bomb throwers, men under pay of the gamblers, who have the police as partners, who threw over half a hundred bombs that destroyed nearly $1,000,000 worth of property.