To sum up, the Army Slum Department is doing valuable work in the slums, tending the sick, exercising and bringing out some of the better traits of humanity, and offering relief in times of need; but it suffers from an over-desire to spread its own peculiar doctrines of salvation, and from the lack of grasping the whole situation which is characteristic of its workers. FOOTNOTES: [87] This number has continued the same for five years. CHAPTER V. THE SALVATION ARMY RESCUE DEPARTMENT. In the United States and Great Britain, the question of the social evil has never been thoroughly investigated and faced systematically as a whole. In some of the large cities in the United States, notably in Chicago and New York, the question has been taken up in various ways by different reform societies. Probably the best investigation made thus far has been the work of the Committee of Fifteen, in New York City, which issued its report in the year 1902, but the problem does not appear to have been faced by us as a nation as it might have been. Other countries, especially France, have paid a great deal of attention to this form of vice. Nearly every phase of the question has been examined by some French investigator and reported on, but when we look for reports or investigations on the part of American or English students, we find very little of value. As regards the United States, all attempts at reaching a true estimate of the extent of this evil have failed. Apparently, there is no way of obtaining such information. We have seen estimates regarding some of the cities in past years, and such estimates are given as 40,000 prostitutes for New York City,[88] 30,000 for Chicago and 35,000 for San Francisco. But these figures have evidently been derived in a very unscientific way. The evil is probably worse in the Western states than in the Eastern, but we are not satisfied of the accuracy of such estimates as 35,000 for San Francisco and only 30,000 for Chicago.