envelopes, dirty and diseased, bacteria-bearing paper money and grimy silver are handed in the dark or the light to policemen or outside collectors to be turned over to the Directorate of Ten.

Let the figure $15,000,000 in tribute burn into the recesses of your brain if you would realize the gigantic and almost indescribable character of crime in Chicago.

It is estimated that the $15,000,000 annual vice tribute is less than half a year’s aggregate earnings.

Do you realize that $15,000,000 is five per cent of $300,000,000?

A VICE CAPITAL OF FLESH AND BLOOD.

Think of it!

Almost half a billion dollars!

But the capital in this business is not so many dollars. It is human flesh, human souls, human blood! Can they be measured in dollars?

There is no capital in this hideous trust that stands in banks. The real capital must be turned over and over. The exhausted bodies of men and women fill the incurable disease wards of the hospital, the crippled and broken down inhabit the shacks of the tenements, and thousands are buried in paupers’ graves.

This is the price of the slaves!

There is nothing but the world of infamy. Nothing but the aching, diseased bodies of women. Nothing but the outraged purity of childhood. Nothing but the toiling, unrestrained passions of fiends. Nothing but the lust that is insatiable, the desire that fattens on the poisons it eats.

After years of investigation, acquiring information from politicians, police officials and their subordinates, gamblers, habitues of the levees, and nearly five hundred more vassals of the vice trust, we have placed the protection figure at $15,000,000.

Attorney W. W. Wheelock, counsel for the Civil Service Commission and the man who attempted to break up the Vice-Police-Political graft combine, in speaking of this subject, said:

“I have as yet only scratched the veneer and the surface of this terrifying evil, but the results have made me reel in horror and amazement. At this time I estimate that the yearly graft is $15,000,000.

“The true figure, when all things are considered, must run far above that. It is evident that at least eighty per cent of the police, at some time or other, are grafters. The system of tribute and graft burrows into every legitimate pursuit and finds some undreamed of channel of graft.”

And Ellis Geiger, an alderman, made an astounding statement in full council session, when the subject of appropriation to aid in the police graft investigation was before that body. He said:—

“From the reports of investigators and men who have knowledge of conditions in our city, vice pays tribute of $15,000,000 annually to the police for its liberty of existence.”

Both these men are citizens of high repute, men of intelligence and understanding. Both have placed the vice-graft at a tremendous figure, but they have not carefully studied all the sources of collection. These when considered, make $15,000,000 a very conservative estimate.

What must be the murderous heart and the demon’s soul of a monster that is willing to pay such a price to wallow in the trough of moral filth and physical bestiality!

THE EVILS OF A WORLD IN A MELTING POT.

“Name a vice, a crime, a sin, that was known from the Beginning to the present day, and I’ll show it to you in Chicago today.”

Several years ago when the agents of the system were bolder in their depravity, a “guide” stood outside the Polk street depot, waited for the “gentlemen of the long green” and excited curiosity by the above pronouncement.

He could truthfully shout it from the housetops today.

To it he would add, if he were to tell the entire truth:—

“I will show you not only every crime, but I will tell you the price of its existence paid to members of Chicago’s police department, and other collectors of the Vice Trust.”

Search and you can find:—

Salient shows, obscene amusement houses, houses of prostitution, segregated and otherwise, fashionable “flats” in choice neighborhoods, dens of reeking infamy for the congregation of humanity’s lowest dregs, rendezvous for degenerate white women and negro men, clubs and resorts where degeneracy in its most revolting forms are practiced, professional beggars, rich pickpockets, pretty shoplifters, leering street-walkers, cocaine, morphine and opium dens, fake palmists and fortune tellers, and gambling in its hundreds of luring, deceptive forms.

That is Chicago’s generic crime list. If we omit, name the sin and it can be found. That is the army that pays the graft to the police and other creatures of the Vice Trust.

Then, there are walking the streets of Chicago, known to the police, a score of bomb throwers, men under pay of the gamblers, who have the police as partners, who threw over half a hundred bombs that destroyed nearly $1,000,000 worth of property.

THE UNDERWORLD CONTRIBUTORS.

Two thousand gamblers pay their blood money.

Five thousand women, offered as slaves on the auction block of prostitution, give their lives to make up the hellish tolls.

More than five hundred keepers of houses of ill fame contribute their blood-dripping dollars.

Owners of five hundred “flats” or assignation houses pay their “life-price.”

We have said that every form of evil exists. We shall show in this book the amounts of money paid by the minions and promoters of each vice for police and political protection.

Our figures are accurate. They are founded on the statements of men who once paid blood-money to live. They are the prices demanded by the Vice Trust today.

The graft scale is so astonishing as to be almost unbelievable.

Cold figures are set down by the over lords; cold dollars are paid by the lawless. Failure to pay means ruin. Grace is rarely given. The new man or woman seeking to open a vice-business must pay a high entrance fee to the political powers. Their protection price is always higher than that exacted from the “old timers.” The more hideous the crime-business the higher the protective compensation for it. The greater the profits accruing, the more the weight of the gold and silver poured into the coffers of the corrupt politicians and their allies.

In the white palaces of hidden sin, where degeneracy boasts of its infamous acts, and where men of wealth and women of fashion congregate to turn loose their insane lusts without fear of detection or restraint, the price of existence runs into the thousands of dollars.

In several vice emporiums, fitted as sumptuously as the homes of millionaires on Lake Shore Drive, the protection for traffic in white, delicate and beautiful bodies of young girls is $1,000 a month!

From the elegantly furnished roulette parlor to the den of quarreling, cursing negroes in the “black belt,”—from the highest place of gaming to the lowest—the price to go on filching thousands of men and women is paid, and paid willingly.

THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC ANDS ITS LIFE-PRICE.

The White Slave Traffic—the most infamous, foulest, lowest and destructive feature of Chicago’s wickedness,—pays a terrible price to the lords of the underworld.

Police protection is granted it at terrible risk to the police and politicians themselves. For this reason the price is high.

We all know what the White Slave Traffic signifies.

In a word it is:—

The buying, by insidious means, of thousands of pure, trusting and innocent girls, the casting