From the second-class house the lost woman passes into one of the bagnios of the “red-light district” or some similar place. Here her lot is infinitely more wretched. Her companions are the vilest of her class, and the visitors are among the lowest order of men who cannot gain admittance into places such as she has left. She finds herself a slave to the keeper of the house, who is often a burly ruffian, and even more brutal than a woman would be in the same position. She is robbed of her earnings, is beaten, and often falls into the hands of the police. She becomes familiar with the courts, the bridewell, and whatever of womanly feeling remained to her is crushed out of her. She is a brute simply. She remains in Green, Peoria or some other like street for a year or two—human nature cannot bear up longer under such a life—and is then unfit to remain even there. Would you seek her after this you will find her in the terrible dens and living hells—even in places of infamy and degredation that a former Mayor was compelled to stamp out, so utterly repugnant was it to even the lowest instincts of man. To the burning disgrace of Chicago, some of these pestiferous vice-breeding places are allowed to exist by the “stink-pots” who govern the city. These poor, vile, repulsive women, slowly dying from their bodily ailments, and the effects of drink and drugs, have reached the bottom of the ladder, and can go no lower. She knows it, and in a sort of dumbly, desperate way, is glad it is so. Life is such a daily torture to her, that death only offers her any relief. She is really a living corpse. The end soon comes. Some die from the effects of their terrible lives, and oh! such fearful deaths; and others are killed or fatally injured in drunken brawls which so often occur in this locality; and others still seek an end of their miserable existence in the dark waters of Lake Michigan. I draw no exaggerated picture of the gradual but inevitable descent of a fallen woman in Chicago. Every detail is true to life. Seven years is the average life of an abandoned woman in the great city. She may begin her career with all the eclat possible, she may queen it by nature of her beauty and charms in some fashionable house, at the beginning, and may even outlast the average term at such places; it matters not; her doom is certain. The time will come when she must leave the aristocracy of shame, must take the second step in her terrible career. Seven years for the majority of these women, then death in its most horrible form. Some may, and do, anticipate the end of it by suicide; few ever escape from it.