Robert O. Harland

“ Thousands tired from the day’s occupation, turn to peaceful sleep for relief.
Innocent children are tucked into their little, white beds. The kiss from loving lips goes with them into the land of dreams. The future has no terror for them, because they know not.
While thousands sleep, thousands sin and perish in Chicago!
Crime loves the protection of darkness. Vice breathes more freely in the night.
From his cavern, creeps forth the monster Vice with sun-down.
He is hungry for his victims. They have been fattened for him. The hour has come for the nightly sacrifice on the altars of debauchery. ”

“ Bohemian cafe to see the sights and taste the wine. She goes back again and again. Beyond her confines are the forbidden sins, luring and coaxing. She will taste of them, promising herself that she will go back to her former life and never venture into the pathways of sin again. The step is taken and the barrier erects itself behind her—she can never come back. Gradually she drifts down to the hell haunts and with recklessness as to the future, becomes an inmate of a dive.
There is no standing still in any phase of life—good or evil. There is no stationary point in vice. ”

“ The trail of graft has been followed from the ballot box to the dive, from the dive to the house of prostitution, from the house of prostitution to the gambling hole and on up to the houses of those debased public men and people-appointed guardians of the law, who are today weighted down with the gold, created by the melting of vice, sin and crime in the melting pot of the underworld. ”

“ It is our intention to demonstrate to the world the machinations of the corporation of crime, its political power, its enslavery of 5,000 fallen women in the segregated districts and twice as many more at large within the city, its annual earnings from a toleration of vice and crime, its prostitution of the police department, and its hideous and myriad ways of trapping new victims to take the places of those whom it had driven to despair and untimely death. ”

“ The wages of sin is Death! If once a woman or a man is enslaved in any one of the traps set by the Vice Trust then death lies at the end of a short path. Yearly, thousands of young and pure girls and ambitious and clean young men, come to Chicago as to the city of dreams, pleasure and glory. Yearly, thousands are trapped and soon pay the awful penalty. The city boy and the city girl are not immune. ”

“ Graft, graft,—every kind from every dreamed-of source!
The Vampire Trust is one of the novelties of Chicago’s crime-world. It is of recent creation. It is a subsidiary corporation of the “big combine.”
One hundred women, it is estimated, form its rank and file. They are women of luring, attractive appearance, insidious “good-fellows,” smartly educated and vice’s students of human nature.
Like vultures they prey on Chicago’s wealthy visitors. They infest the lobbies, restaurants and cafés of Chicago’s most exclusive hotels. ”

“ Give unto the men and women of Chicago, the strength and power to rise up and destroy the Vice Trust and its members, so that the sun may shine on a spotless city, and love, happiness, purity, and the brotherhood and sisterhood of man may reign supreme! ”

“ And this White Slave Trust, taking the money from these ill-fated women, turns part of its profits over to the magnates of the great Vice Trust,—to men who stand high in the world of politics, to men to whom we intrust the task of making our laws and administering them!
The law stands without and makes no effort to stem the tide of infamous traffic in women. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hundreds of street walkers, new to Chicago, who have not been registered regularly by the vice lords and are not paying the regulation protection, are victimized by the policeman on his beat. They are compelled to give him a mere pittance to cover up their sins and ease his hunger for filthy money.
Even in the police department itself there is a constant bickering and quarreling over the division of graft. They are like a lot of hungry vultures circling about their loathsome carcass of dead meat. One police official wars against the entrance of another police official within his territory. ”

“ Down the corridors we walk until we enter the portals of a new vice palace. It is a cafe scene but not of the character witnessed at the place first visited. Everything bespeaks luxury. The music is subtly and softly sensuous. Obsequious waiters tread softly from table to table, taking their orders from rich patrons.
The men sitting about bear the marks of wealth and prosperity. They are money lords, feasting at the table of life and toying away the moments with women who are ready to be purchased for pretty clothes, suppers with wines, and hard, cold dollars and cents. ”

“ Even the present laws governing the primary elections seem to abet the crime.
According to the primary law it is not a fraud to buy votes!
It is a crime punishable by imprisonment to sell a vote!
[Pg 60] The Vice Trust evidently had a hand in the creation of that travesty on justice. The tentacles of the octopus reach into Springfield, the State capital!
To the agents of the Vice Trust who pay tainted dollars for votes, freedom and prosperity!
To the starving, human wretches, forgetful of their birthrights, who sell their votes for the price of food or drink—shame and prison cells! ”

“ 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. ”

“ In one night while the music pleases the senses, while song brings an ephemeral joy, while drink quickens the pulse, while the atmosphere lulls the conscience to sleep, innocent young girls, barely out of school, are inoculated with the poison of forbidden fruit.
Every year, hundreds of young girls, undefiled and pure, drift into the wickedest city in the world, are carried away by the glare of the “Great White Way” and the sensuous lures of the dazzling cafes and the [Pg 68] Bohemian pleasures, and become unconsciously, the recruits of the great absorbing Vice Trust. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It isn’t vice that is robbing homes of innocent girls each year. It is the Commerce and Traffic of Sin.
The White Slave Trust is a perfect organization existing in the city of Chicago today.
Its agents procure the flesh and blood product from every source, its agents peddle the human article, from house of ill fame to house of ill fame; sell it, take the profit and divide with the members of an infamous combine. ”

“ Yearly, thousands of young men are hurled to financial ruin, sent or headed to the penitentiary because of the gambling houses in the city of Chicago that run full blast with the officers of the law walking blindly past their open doors.
The gambling vice grasps its victims in a clutch as powerful as the grip of the drug habit or as unyielding as the toils of immorality.
[Pg 158] The gambling combine in Chicago is as strong as the most powerful house of finance. It is bulwarked by every possible protection. ”

“ Chicago policemen, high and low,—we venture to say eighty per cent of them,—are today by virtue of the collection and tribute system the confederates of every species of criminal, of every exploiter of every known kind of vice.
They aid, abet and allow these law violators to thrive.
Vice and crime must pay its tribute to the police. The police must turn over the bulk of the proceeds to their political masters. No criminal can continue in his nefarious business without paying the price. It is called Police Protection. ”

“ We have spoken of the cafe evil, the dance hall, the cheap theater and the vicious hotel. These are the major channels. Yearly, hundreds of girls go from one grade of badness to a lower, until there is nothing left but the house of ill fame in which to hide their shame, feed their passions and nourish their broken-down bodies.
The girl clerk in the department store tires of trying to live on her six dollars a week salary; grows envious of the women who have pretty clothes and costly jewelry, and sets about to sell her young body to buy the luxuries of life. ”

“ Gambling runs full blast, houses of prostitution openly carry on their immoral practices, street walkers [Pg 176] wink at the policemen on their beats, pickpockets laugh at the plain clothes men, robbers loot homes and places of business, crimes of every conceivable description are committed, a gambling war is allowed to terrorize Chicago, because the police department is sold body and soul, revolver and star, to the masters of the underworld.
The hundred and one duties of the policeman are neglected daily because he is busy helping some vicious criminal friend of the Vice Trust. ”

“ Vice, crime and graft are heinous offenses in the body municipal, but they are secondary to the debauchery of the ballot.
“Corrupt that and you sweep all things to ruin. Honest elections mean honest officials and the end of vice conditions. You cannot solve the social problems nor remedy the social wrongs until you have cleansed the ballot box of its pollution. I believe that today 50,000 illegal names stand on Chicago’s election books. That means 50,000 votes for crime, graft and ultimate ruination.” ”

“ POLITICS, POLICE AND VICE.
Political power is the greatest of all power. It can subjugate with iron hand all other powers.
The Directorate of Ten found willing agents in the police department of Chicago. It has them today, and if needs be, can find more. Human souls are easily purchased.
Today the system is intricate. So intricate that the combine has received the appellation,—the Vice System.
To exist, vice, in any one of its thousand forms, must pay tribute. The tribute is shared with the police for protection. ”

“ Take away from man the open temptation; cleanse his paths of the thousand lures to evil; bar his coming in contact with the lost woman as far as it is possible and you will minimize vice to a marvelous degree.
It is on the fallacy and sophistry of the theory that passions of men must be satisfied, that Chicago today carries on its terrible exploitation of vice.
It is on that theory that the Vice Trust has built its superstructure, created its gigantic business, [Pg 109] bartered its thousands of women for flesh-prices and harvested millions of dollars annually. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The pages of history are dotted with evidences of gambling in every age. Gambling has passed through a million forms. In our present day life it is looked upon by the general public as a sport.
It is the purpose here not to dissertate on gambling as a moral and commercial evil alone, but to show that it is nothing today but another asset of the Vice Trust, stolen out of the not too plethoric pocket of the sucker public. ”