Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent of the John Worthy School (which is the local municipal juvenile reformatory), reported that one-third of the street boys sent to him were suffering from the loathsome diseases and distempers of the red-light district, nor is this to be wondered at when we consider the fact that sexual commerce may be purchased almost anywhere in the South State street and West Side alleys for the remarkably low price of ten cents, or even a glass of beer or whisky from the gonorrheal and syphilitic denizens thrown out long ago from the better class houses of prostitution to live off the half drunken men and young boys to be found in swarms along South State, Halsted and South Clark streets. Almost invariably the street boy hunting these underworld sections of our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half rotten, yet painted vampires of the street whose only care or hope is a crust of free lunch and enough whisky or “dope” to drown for a time at least, the last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a few days longer within her wretched body, and the boy, having purchased for the small fee his own destruction, trails out again into the night and on into disease and crime and prison, and finally death. The average parent of today has little idea of the temptations which constantly surround and beset the growing boy. I recall a case in Des Moines, Iowa, where a little degenerate girl of sixteen, caused the moral, and in several cases physical, ruin of five young boys, all this happening in an exclusive east side neighborhood and under the watchful care of honest parents and friends, so what must be the temptation thrown out to the young boys of our city when through block after block of our certain districts they must come in direct contact with those whose only mission is to ruin and debauch. It should be the direct object morally and politically, of every father and mother in this city to banish these human parasites—these leeches who suck the life blood of our boys—from Chicago’s streets. Listen, father, mother, there are twenty-two thousand poor, dearly-beloved young girls growing up in our midst today who within five years must, under the present business system of white slavery, put aside father, mother, home, friends and honor and march into Chicago’s ghastly flesh market to take the place of the twenty-two thousand helpless, hopeless, decaying chattles who now daily behind bolts and bars and steel screens, satisfy the abominable lust of (approximately) two hundred and ten thousand brutal, drunken adulterers.