At length, managers of resorts, saloons and gambling dens in notorious Custom House Place calculated that each hour we worked they lost $250, and they determined to give us "the worst of it" even if they had to hire thugs to slug me. We kept steadily calling upon God and faithfully preaching His truth. At length, near the end of October, such representations were made to Chief Collins that he ordered our meetings stopped at ten o'clock—when they began—on the ground that we were disturbing the sleep of lodgers in hotels two blocks away!
Thereupon, accompanied by Mr. Arthur Burrage Farwell, Miss Lucy Page Gaston, Deaconess Lucy A. Hall, Miss Eva Marshall Shonts and others, eleven in all, we called upon the chief of police, explained our surprise at being stopped in our work, which was entirely lawful, and requested him to cleanse that street of resorts which were entirely unlawful. This he immediately promised to do, on condition that we would not stir the newspapers or arouse public sentiment to compel him to do it. We accepted his word and awaited fulfillment. Two months later—namely, at Christmas, 1905, he notified the resorts, and published in the newspapers, that they must vacate on the first of May, 1906.
THE DIVES OFFER A BRIBE OF $50,000.
During the intervening months the white slave traders, gamblers, keepers of the worst disorderly saloons and some property owners and real estate agents who made money out of that precinct of perdition, raised a slush fund, employed an attorney and used every device in their power to gain a continuance of their nefarious traffic in the heart of Chicago—for they were between the Federal building containing the post office, and the Dearborn passenger station, used by the Erie, Grand Trunk, Santa Fe and Monon railways.
Mayor Dunne told Pastor Boynton and myself, at the Sherman House on the evening of March 15, 1907, when his political enemies were accusing him falsely of being the friend of vice, that the divekeepers offered him $50,000 if he would allow them to remain four months more in Custom House Place. Mayor Dunne, a man of the highest character, attested this statement by an appeal to God. Chief Collins had previously told me that the dives had made this offer but he had replied to them, "If you had Marshall Field's money you cannot stay there after the first of May, if I am chief of police, so help me God." No political or other influence could induce him to waver or to reverse his order, and when the first of May came he drove them out with a mailed fist.
Mayor Dunne told us that while he was on the bench the case of a Polish girl came before him, which had prepared his mind to act against the resorts if he should ever have power. This innocent immigrant girl had arrived at the Dearborn station and had been lured into one of the adjacent dens, her clothes taken from her, and herself made a white slave.
ON THE WEST SIDE.
In 1906 we worked principally on the vice-ridden streets of the West Side. After the earthquake in San Francisco many depraved women, with their parasites, took refuge in Chicago. These were very brazen women, and the vile young men who lived on their shameful earnings were cunning in thwarting the police. Conditions became insufferable. So wide open was the district that a secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association in walking four blocks on the sidewalk was solicited by sixty-two women from their open doors and windows. A police court justice was accused of assessing petty fines against these offenders when the police brought them into court.
We steadily preached the word and prayed to God to abolish those frightful traps for boys. We learned of one boy, a choir boy in a Methodist church, who was dragged forcibly into one of those dens, and infected with a disease from which he soon died.