Chicago leads the world in evil today. She stalks at the head of the Army of Sin:—a beautiful, sensuous mistress and paramour to a personalized god of named and unnamed Crime. The army is composed of bodies and souls that Hell has claimed but not called. Their destinies are still unfinished on earth.
And why is Chicago the Hell-hole of the world?
Because she has taken the failings, sins, defects, crimes, miseries and vices of humanity, hurled them into a seething caldron of infamy, melted them, amalgamated them and commercialized them.
A Vice-Graft system has been created. It has been formed along the lines of modern commerce and finance.
Today the institution is stronger, more powerful, more impregnable than the biggest financial or industrial combine in the United States!
In fact, it has absorbed many and invaded mysteriously and secretly every other enterprise founded on decency and honesty. It is living off every legitimate trade, business and industry in Chicago.
That is the limitless scope of the Vice Trust of Chicago, unincorporated, but possessing a capital running high into the millions of dollars and souls.
There are three stockholders, speaking in a collective sense, in Chicago’s Vice Trust, namely:—
The inhabitants of the highways and byways and gilded houses of infamy.
The police department of the city.