The girl who a year ago knew comparatively nothing of the world outside of her harmless, narrow sphere, can point to the pictures and give you the names with dangerous accuracy. They are now a part of her Bohemian world. She boasts today of familiarity with them.
Late in the night, or to speak accurately, at early dawn, the cafes empty their drunken revelers into the streets. In pairs they stagger away, some to houses of assignation, others to the disorderly hotels where they live, and still others to the “redlight” districts of the city, of which we shall soon speak.
That is the cafe evil of today. It is the outward threads of the enmeshing web of the insidious and poisonous spider-Vice. Once trapped, redemption is scarcely possible.
Two hundred department store girls, according to a reform association’s statistics, take the first downward step each year, in these cafes.
It is the outside trap, with luring bait, set by the Vice Trust for the unsuspecting victims. The girls from out of the city are drawn to it for the pleasures of life because other avenues of enjoyment are not open to them. A conscious or unconscious emissary of the vice lords lures them to these cesspools, robs them of their senses by subtle intoxicants and destroys that same night their virginal purity. In a night they have fallen from the highest estate to the bottomless pit of a living hell; they have been stripped of their robes of innocence and clothed in the shameful, sinful, scarlet garb of the thousands of women who have fallen before them.
No mother, no father, who kisses a daughter goodbye as she leaves the fireside to plunge into the foaming sea of Chicago life, can be certain that the child of his or her flesh and blood will return to the fireside undefiled, pure of body and clean of heart, as long as those cancers fester and flourish in the city of Chicago.
We have treated of the girl problem and the cafe.
What of our boys?—you ask.
It is a sociological axiom that a nation’s integrity depends on its womanhood.
The depraved woman means the depraved man. Each night thousands of youths, full of physical strength, mental energy and ambition, seek recreation in the cafes. It is there they meet or take the lost women. It is there they wreck bright futures, sow the seed of crime, deaden their moral consciences, and contract fatal diseases and rush unthinking down the path that leads to ruin and to death.