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  THE VICE BONDAGE OF A GREAT CITY

  OR

  The Wickedest City in the World

  --By--
  ROBERT O. HARLAND.

  The Reign of Vice, Graft and Political Corruption.

  Expose of the monstrous Vice Trust. Its personnel.
  Graft by the Vice Trust from the Army of Sin for
  protection. A score of forms of vice graft.
  Horrifying revelations of the life of the Scarlet
  Woman. New lights on White Slavery. Protected
  Gambling and the blind police. The inside story of
  an enslaved police department. A warning to the
  parents. How to save YOUR GIRL or BOY.

  ALSO remedies to cure the Municipal Evil that in one
  city alone fills the pockets of not more than ten
  Vice Lords with $15,000,000, annually, made from the
  sins of 50,000 unfortunate men and women; an evil
  that is blasting our nation's decency and prosperity
  and is eating into the very vitals of our Republic.

  Save the growing generation of men and women.

  A book to create public and saving opinion, to destroy
  lethargy and inoculate the germ of activity; to enlist
  every aid to wipe out the curse of this nation.




  Copyright, 1912,
  by
  ROBERT O. HARLAND.

  PUBLISHED BY
  THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S CIVIC LEAGUE
  301-305 Security Building
  Chicago, Ill.




This book is a recital of sin, crime and graft. It is fact, not fiction.
Commercialized crime, police collusion with underworld power and the
barter of men's and women's souls is going on today.

The investigation conducted by the Civil Service Commission, which has
resulted in the discharge of several police inspectors and a number of
subordinates, has tended to minimize, temporarily, the vice conditions.

The vice lords have sneaked away to their lairs, and are waiting until the
brooms of the municipal house-cleaners are stacked away in a corner.

The "town is closed," to use the vernacular.

That fact does not detract from the moral value of this expose.

Why?

Because the storm will blow over.

The axe of the Civil Service Commission has hacked deep into the trunk of
the Vice-Graft tree, but the roots from which the sap of crime flows still
live and flourish.

A few policemen have been thrown into the discard, the victims of the
System that is still unharmed.

The Temple of Crime, Vice and Graft will be rebuilded. The foundation is
intact.

The conditions which are exposed in this book flourished until a few
months ago. Their human causes still live, but craven with fear.

The Vice Trust shall thrive on men's souls and women's bodies again.

It shall exist until the root of evil is killed--until corrupt and ruling
politics is hounded out of the city--to death!




CONTENTS.


  Preface                                                           Page 9

  CHAPTER I. THE VICE TRUST, ITS KINGDOM AND POWER.

    The Story of Chicago's Subjugation to Political and Police
    Corruption.--The Corrupt Ballot Box.--The Mechanism of the
    Trust.--The Prices of Sin and Vice.--The Horror of Ruined
    and Purchased Lives.--The Remedy                                    15

  CHAPTER II. THE DEBAUCHERY OF THE BALLOT.

    The Sacredness of the Ballot.--Its Corruption by the Vice
    Trust.--Methods of Corruption.--Affidavits Showing
    Corruption.--A Cleansed Ballot Box, A Cleansed City                 47

  CHAPTER III. COME AND SEE. A City Defiled.

    The First Step.--State Street and Its Pitfalls.--The Stages
    of Sin.--The Borderland of Hell.--The Cafe Evil.--The Rich
    Man's Girl Trap.--Crimes that Thrive by Night                       63

  CHAPTER IV. THE "REDLIGHT" DISTRICT.

    Houses of Infamy.--The Feeders of the "Redlight" District.--
    The Life of a Prostitute.--The Big Palaces of Vice.--The
    Blood Price.--Hidden Tragedies.--The Polluted Grave                 87

  CHAPTER V. WHAT WILL YOU BID FOR THIS WOMAN?

    White Slavery.--The Trapping of the Prey.--Price of a Body
    and Soul.--Hell's Bondage.--The "Cadet" Master.--Death the
    Penalty                                                            100

  CHAPTER VI. VICE AND GRAFT.

    Police Collectors.--The Triumvirate.--Figures that Freeze
    the Blood.--Graft that Feeds on Flesh and Blood.--The
    Prostitute's Graft Price.--The Kimona Trust.--The Laundry
    Trust.--The Criminal Doctor.--The Prostitute and the Beer
    Graft.--The Woman and the "Cadet."--Terrible Examples.--Lure
    of the Life.--The Pace that Kills.--To the Woman:
    Death.--How about Your Daughter?                                   108

  CHAPTER VII. SIDE GRAFTS OF THE SOCIAL EVIL.

    The Rent Graft.--Saloon Graft.--Dance Halls and Protective
    Prices.--Graft from the Vice Palaces.--The Massage
    Parlor.--The Drug Crime.--The Vampire Trust                        143

  CHAPTER VIII. GAMBLING AND ITS GRAFT.

    The Gambler's Fate.--The Handbook.--Other Games of Chance
    and Their Protection.--Police Profit.--All Gambling
    Crooked.--A Warning                                                156

  CHAPTER IX. TEARING OFF THE POLICE MASK.

    A Story of the Hypocrisy of the Police Department.--Its
    Neglect of Duty.--Its Protection of Crime.--The Fate of One
    Police Official.--The Lost Child that is Never Found.--The
    Exposure of Big Crimes.--"Tipped Off" Raids.--Strange
    Ignorance of Police.--The Fate of the Honest
    Policeman.--Collusion of the Police and Thieves                    174

  CHAPTER X. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

    The Cause of the Great Evils.--A Warning.--The Duty of
    Parents.--Young Girls and Boys Should Know the Truth.--
    Conclusion                                                         190




Preface.


Seventy-five years have elapsed since Chicago became an incorporated city.

From a trading post with Fort Dearborn standing guard over its small
population, Chicago has grown until today she ranks among the great
metropoles of the world.

Today her name is reckoned with in every country. Her industries are the
supply houses of the nations; her manufacturing plants deal with all
peoples; her financial institutions figure vitally in the world's
exchanges.

Chicago is the most cosmopolitan city on the globe. The children of all
races have been attracted to her because of the thousands of opportunities
in all walks of life.

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.

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 story is shocking to your moral sense; paralyzing to your brain; but
it is the Truth. It should be known. Too long have we groped blindly in
the dark. An hour of awakening is needed.

Vice might be eradicated if the vast system, whose existence we are about
to describe, could be first obliterated. Unless the root be removed, the
evil will grow rapidly again, despite sincere and persistent reforms. It
is our intention to show by logical narration of facts how the annual
tribute paid to the Vice Trust for protection and nourishment by the
hordes of living demons in the city of Chicago is at least $15,000,000.

The life-blood of women, bought and sold on the auction block of the Vice
Combine, the innocent girls who barter their lives of purity for a sip of
the poison of the bitter wine of life, the men who drag the shackles of
sin on their limbs, and the hellish fiends who serve Satan on earth,
prostrate before the directorate of the Vice Trust, offer their tribute to
the over lords of the city's degradation.

This book is not the fantastic, lurid picturing of the shames of women and
the crimes of men. It is an expose of how not more than ten men whom we
call the Directorate of Ten, create, organize, mobilize and lead, and
derive almost fabulous profits from, an army of thousands of unfortunates.

It is the story of a power wrested from the people at the debauched ballot
boxes and used as the weapon to murder men and women annually. This is not
the dream of an overzealous mind seeking sincerely to right a terrible
wrong. It is a cold, statistical narration of facts. It is the
observations of one who for ten years has studied every phase of the
demoniacal system, who has been intimately associated with the Directorate
of Ten, who has stood by and watched the never-ending procession of the
men and women slaves who have done the monster's bidding and fallen
inevitably into the charnal houses of the dead.

The average Chicago man or woman knows of the thousand and one forms of
vice that flourish in Chicago, but he or she does not know that the entire
vice system works in harmony like the most delicate piece of mechanism.
The voters do not know that vice is more perfectly organized in Chicago
today than any corporation in existence. The writer has set out to show
in the glaring, white light of truth the real causes of the present
social evil.

The social evil today does not find its ultimate reason in unrestrained
passions, human viciousness and weakness; it finds its reason in the
commercialization of debased creatures and the enslavement of them in
profitable labors to their masters, until death.

The Vice Trust to increase constantly its profits has a thousand lures for
the unwary. The masters of these infamous pitfalls are the lieutenants of
this monstrous trust. The writer knows of all these chasms and has studied
the horrifying details of the men and women traps. He has attempted to set
them forth and nail the sign of warning above them.

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. Many of them meet similar fates. If the
writer can stem the rush of these young souls to the fires of living hells
he will feel well rewarded for his task. He has endeavored, by placing the
responsibility for the social evil on corrupt politics that has created a
grafting, robbing, and murdering Vice Trust, to put the subject in a new
and interesting light. To the men and women who sleep not, because their
children, young and undefiled, are growing up within the reach of an
insatiable monster, does the writer particularly appeal. He has attempted
to show that the Vice Trust, the secret cause of municipal degradation, is
the monster that must be annihilated.

The Chicago police department is an inefficient and corrupted body today,
that is protecting vice and not destroying it, because a majority of its
members are enslaved by the Vice Trust. Every vice, every sin, every crime
has its price of toleration. This is the reign of the triumvirate of vice,
graft and political corruption.

To all men of character and worth, to every father and every mother with
the welfare of their children at heart, the writer appeals in the battle
against this hideous evil.

One soul saved, one man helped, one woman turned from the pathway of hell
will give this volume a human value. The author in conclusion asks a
thorough consideration of the facts related and hopes that all to whom
this book may come, may feel its message of truth and join the ranks of
the army of righteous men and women who have pledged their lives to make
Chicago a city after man's highest conception, a place where our children
may grow to maturity imbued with the spirit and character that make true
American men and women.

[Illustration: LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF HISTORY.

By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily News.

WHAT DANTE MISSED.]




CHAPTER I.

The Vice Trust, its Kingdom and its Power.

The Story of Chicago's Subjugation to Political and Police Corruption--The
Corrupt Ballot Box--The Mechanism of the Trust--The Prices of Sin and
Vice--The Horror of Ruined and Purchased Lives--The Remedy.


Seventy-five years ago a body of pioneer souls who dared death for the
dream of individual liberty, wealth and happiness, founded a city, and
after the manner of the times, adopted an Indian name and called it
Chicago.

The city grew, prospered, flourished; likewise did the inhabitants. Nature
seemed to bless all who settled within her boundaries. Resources undreamed
of were discovered.

The lake breezes fanned the tiny flame of future greatness and the sun
warmed the ambitious blood of the early inhabitants. She became the golden
gate to the unexplored West. She became the cosmopolitan and central point
of a world power. Chicago was talked of, considered, bargained with from
East to West, and North to South.

With vastness came power; with power, abuse; with abuse, vice; with vice,
crime; with crime, graft.

It is of CHICAGO, TODAY, we write.

Truth sears, eats, destroys that which is but veneer and golden covering.

Chicago has blinded herself to the hideous truth. She has hidden her head,
closed her eyes and cried out:

"I will not see!"

Vice, like some slimy, hideous, mephitic, green-eyed monster from the
deepest abyss of Hell has crept, sinuous and noiseless, on an unsuspecting
people.

It has battened upon red, pure life-blood. It has fattened on white flesh.
It has destroyed virginal purity, public morals and political honesty.

The monster has been insatiable. Satan, king of the damned dead since the
Beginning, urged on the monster Vice.

His political minions kneeled and offered sacrifice to the incarnate Evil
of the World. To save themselves they fed him of the rich and sacred
stores of the city. They took their portion.

They are still taking their share.

They still feed the monster. They are its slaves; they, appointed by the
people to safeguard them and to make their laws.

The monster Vice is fed by the police and politicians, who, under cover of
night and darkness, plunder, steal, cheat and murder to satisfy its greed.

We speak not in metaphor; this is the literal truth. We shall prove it.

If Satan came out of the depths of his Inferno, away from the shrieks of
the lost millions, he would wander from city to city until he reached
Chicago.

Then, in this twentieth century of culture, refinement and progress, he
would stand outside the gates, smile in triumph and speak this,--the
living, shameful, naked truth:

This is the CITY ACCURSED! This is the CITY OF THE LIVING DAMNED! This is
the CITY OF MY DESIRE! This is the CITY AFTER MY OWN HEART! VICE, CRIME,
CORRUPTION RULE:--MY TRIUMVIRATE!

This is THE MOST WICKED CITY IN THE WORLD!

Satan would tell the truth.

Chicago today is the most wicked city in the world.

Babylon had its vices; so, too, Alexandria. Greece and Rome struggled and
died in a national moral degeneracy they had created.

Chicago has surpassed them in wickedness.

Nay, Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by the wrath of Heaven, were pure when
compared to Chicago.

Paris and its lure of vice is tame by the side of Chicago.

There is no parallel in history. There is no adequate comparison.

Chicago leads the world in evil today. She stalks at the head of the Army
of Sin:--a beautiful, sensuous mistress