my horror upon inquiry I learned that in the rush hours of business this helpless, painracked young woman was open to all comers holding an accredited room check.” My friends, there are true stories heard and known every day around the city’s seething, blood-red soul market that cannot be put in print—stories though, that, were they to become known, would make decent Chicago rise as one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort Sumpter, “White Slavery in Chicago and America must cease!” During my years of study of this question of prostitution I learned to know personally many of the characteristic white slaves of the west and south side “levees.” One “Alice” I shall never, never forget. Beautiful, aside from her dissipation, a high-school graduate, grammar and syntax perfect, manner exquisite, “Alice,” seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-one away down the line in the west side levee underworld. I used to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the “house” on Peoria street that gave her shelter, awaiting her call of “next” to go “upstairs” with whatsoever—negro, white or Chinese—might buy possession for one dollar (one of our dollars of the Republic on which is eternally stamped the blessed words, “In God we trust”) of her beautiful body for one hour. Smoking, always smoking her doped Turkish cigarette, Alice told me much of her life, both in years gone forever and of a daily “levee” existence. She told me of a father and mother and a beautiful home, of a lover who came into it and led her away by night into “levee” slavery—of awful disgrace and inheritance, of a little baby that she only knew one hour, of hours of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and scream and scream with mental pain until some whoremonger knocked her senseless, and then she told me how she would crawl away to a nearby shanty saloon and drink herself helpless, to forget. As far as I know, Alice is still on Peoria street, and oh, men and women, there are twenty-two thousand of these “Alices,” your sisters and mine, in Chicago’s great blasting soul market today. United States Attorney Sims puts the average life of a prostitute at ten years or less, while other excellent authorities as low as five years, as these women must constantly drink any and all drinks purchased for them (as much of the business revenue is from the sale of these drinks) by visitors, thus forcing them at all times into a continual half-drunken condition, rendering them helpless to control or resist the abnormal, sickening, mind and body-wrecking demands made upon them. Very few women live therein an average more than three, four or six years, and at the end of that time twenty-two thousand pure young girls gathered from prairie homes and village firesides and from our own suburban and city families must march out in this great soul market to take the place of the broken wretches whose decaying bodies are cast into the refuse of