We live in a sordid age of commercialism suffering from intense neurasthenia. We have made our factories and our places of business our temples. We have enthroned the dollar-god, and fawning, have paid worship to it seeking its gold and silver in return.
It has been said by an English philosopher that the optic nerve of the American people has been paralyzed by the glitter of gold. That is true of Chicago. It is true that our moral sense has been warped. Morality has lost its value except as it subserves our financial and material interests.
Vice has been co-existent with human consciousness. An abuse of natural laws affecting the race through the individual, is vice in its broadest interpretation. In the annals of the world’s history we find moral degradation triumphant on one page and defeated on the next. There seems to be a constant balancing of the moral and social scale.
In all ages vice has been, in a sense, commercialized. The vicious have always lived off it, fattened upon it, and died of its slow insidious poison.
It remained for this industrial and much-vaunted age systematically to commercialize vice.
Chicago with its 2,000,000 inhabitants, its vicious element of unfortunate men and women, its haunts of degradation and shame, its wealth and its poverty, and its democratic form of government, was the experimental place of a “scientific,” systematized commercialization of sin.
God knows and men are beginning to realize how well the experiment has succeeded!
There is no excuse or reason for trumpeting a city’s shame if the conditions are simply the result of isolated vice and terrible social environments. If that were all, this book would never have been written.
Tersely, we have come to our task with a solemn duty and moral obligation in our heart, mind and soul, viz:—
To show the world at large that Chicago is today the Wickedest City in the World, because a small body of men, invested with a sacred power, political and social, has created a gigantic and ever-growing Vice Trust, annually becoming richer and more dangerous off the sins and crimes of degraded men and abandoned women.