WHAT BECOMES OF THEM?
We shudder as we answer that question.
Many of them seek the river as a last resting place and their bodies are cast ashore to lie in the county morgue a week, and then to be buried in the paupers’ field.
Many of them go insane and are taken to state institutions where death soon mercifully comes and wipes out their useless lives.
Many of them are cast forth from the dens where they have turned their every drop of blood to gold for their masters, and are picked up dead in the alleys and streets of the city.
Some are sent to other cities to die, and leave no reflections on the men and women that turned them out.
God has destroyed cities for lesser evils, but Chicago lives on, fattening on the dead bodies of these victims!
As the parade of lost women moves slowly to the grave the tributaries pour more souls into the lake of infamy and there is no place left unfilled!
No woman going down there knows of the terrible possibilities until it is too late. That is the secret of vice; its lying lips belch forth the truth only when its shackles are welded about the limbs of its victims.
Lust beckons. The eternal woman answers and approaches the poisoned spring and drinks. The eternal man is there. On and on he leads her, casts her away when he has tired, and the Vice Trust with its directorate of powerful politicians, debased men, takes her and reaps its awful profit from her.
Vice first: then Graft. Graft formulated in the minds of men: Vice born in the blood of women.
Death—dishonored death to the woman.
Wealth—overflowing wealth to the Grafter.
We have seen the city in many phases. We have not taken into consideration the army of women who maintain superficial respectability, who live at homes, some of them with husbands and children, and who yielding to temptation are carrying on liaisons.
They are called “clandestine” women. They may be found in all walks of life.
There are, normally estimated, 15,000 women of this type in the city of Chicago!
Are you convinced that Chicago is the “wickedest city in the world”?
CHAPTER V.
What Will You Bid for This Woman?
White Slavery—Price of a Body and Soul—Hell’s Bondage—The “Cadet” Master—Death the Penalty—The Trapping of the Prey.
Thirty-three per cent of the women fed to the insatiable god of lust in the “redlight” districts of Chicago are White Slaves!
Nearly two thousand women, annually, are sold to the highest vice bidders!
They are procured from every imaginable source and by every imaginable method.
Thousands of women drift yearly into a life of prostitution, driven to it by hunger and want primarily.
Why then must others be sought out, trapped, brought, bound and tied, stood on the auction blocks of vice and sold to the thump of the gavel?
Because the demand is far greater than the supply!
Hell is always hungry; the taste of blood on the lips of the monster Vice, drives him mad with desire for more blood; the crushing of bones and the morsels of white woman’s flesh, frenzies him for other bodies!
More women! more women!—that is the cry.
It is a difficult problem. The question arises, is it simply a feeding of men’s passions that must be satisfied or is it a desire to make men hunger and buy because the women are placed in their pathways, so that the vice lords may reap the harvest?
We believe the latter is God’s truth, or rather the devil’s truth!
Many a man would not be the brute of unrestrained passion that he is, if his paths were clear of temptations.
The temptations are placed, the White Slaves are purchased to make gold and silver for the wretches who create, nourish and commercialize vice.
It isn’t vice that is robbing homes of innocent girls each year. It is the Commerce and Traffic of Sin.
The White Slave Trust is a perfect organization existing in the city of Chicago today.
Its agents procure the flesh and blood product from every source, its agents peddle the human article, from house of ill fame to house of ill fame; sell it, take the profit and divide with the members of an infamous combine.