Later on, in another police territory, this same official hemmed in and enmeshed by the exacting system which he had allowed to make him a slave, fell a victim to the Vice Trust and was sacrificed with much pomp of public investigation on the altars of the temple of vice and graft to appease the unseen god of public wrath and indignation.
Another example of how the graft system reaches out and destroys the upright, is the following:—
Another captain of police was sent to take command of the police district including the South side levee. A clean-minded chief of police ordered him to clean up the district. He ordered him to place men in the resorts where there were flagrant violations of the rules regulating the district.
The police official did so. The resort keepers tried to reason with him, argue with him and plead with him, but he refused to listen. “I shall carry out my orders,” he said firmly. Then they predicted his transfer from the police station. They predicted that within thirty days he would be in command at another station. They missed their calculations by but one day. He was transferred to a district where his honesty could do no harm. Beyond and above the chief of police ruled a power—the political power of the Directorate of Ten, that made the final ruling.
A chief of police in a strange manner has admitted the power of the vice combine which he was sworn to annihilate. As a sergeant of police he was powerless to stem the tide of sin and vice. When he received the highest executive office in the department, the Vice Trust compelled him to move from the home in which he had lived on the South side for twenty-five years. The music from the dives floated into the precincts of his home and disturbed his rest; the unfortunate women carried on their immoral profession within a stone’s throw of where his innocent daughter slept; drunken men reeled past his door going to and from the vice haunts. He was surrounded by scarlet women and vicious men. For the salvation of his family he was obliged to seek other quarters.
AND TO THE WOMAN?—DEATH!
Oh you that are the children of our flesh and blood, you over whom anxious mothers have watched through the long, weary hours of the night when the shadow of sickness was upon you, you whose lips are still undefiled by the kiss of unclean lips, you who still kneel at night and in the solitude of your chambers, call upon the Master to hold your hearts in the mighty hollow of His hand, bend your heads in meditation on the truth that is hideous, but must be known.
You mothers and fathers, sacrificing every hour of your lives for your daughters, praying for their purity, guarding their chastity, leading them in the paths of righteousness, turn not from the truth that you must know, but listen and take warning.
IN THE LIGHT OF MODERNITY IGNORANCE IS NO LONGER INNOCENCE. IGNORANCE IS CRIME: IGNORANCE IS SIN: THE SIN OF OMISSION AND NEGLECT.
In no age, has a people faced a social problem as vital and crucial as the one facing the American people today. Our rapid progress in the paths of commerce has robbed us of a clear moral conscience; it has made the almighty dollar the ideal, to the detriment of the soul and heart: it has built taller houses of industry while the church steeples have grown shorter.