We are not dealing with the thieving contractors who rob the citizens through fixed contracts. We treat only of the crime that the police are sworn to slay. $15,000,000 put into the coffers of men supposed to be representing the people that the donors may go on destroying the souls and bodies of women, the souls and bodies of men! That astounding offering to appease the human Juggernauts and to sow in the youths and maidens of our nation the seeds of incurable diseases! That sum in the blood-stained hands of demagogues to blast a city's decency and prosperity and to eat into the very vitals of our Republic! In small envelopes, dirty and diseased, bacteria-bearing paper money and grimy silver are handed in the dark or the light to policemen or outside collectors to be turned over to the Directorate of Ten. Let the figure $15,000,000 in tribute burn into the recesses of your brain if you would realize the gigantic and almost indescribable character of crime in Chicago. It is estimated that the $15,000,000 annual vice tribute is less than half a year's aggregate earnings. Do you realize that $15,000,000 is five per cent of $300,000,000? A VICE CAPITAL OF FLESH AND BLOOD. Think of it! Almost half a billion dollars! But the capital in this business is not so many dollars. It is human flesh, human souls, human blood! Can they be measured in dollars? There is no capital in this hideous trust that stands in banks. The real capital must be turned over and over. The exhausted bodies of men and women fill the incurable disease wards of the hospital, the crippled and broken down inhabit the shacks of the tenements, and thousands are buried in paupers' graves. This is the price of the slaves! There is nothing but the world of infamy. Nothing but the aching, diseased bodies of women. Nothing but the outraged purity of childhood. Nothing but the toiling, unrestrained passions of fiends. Nothing but the lust that is insatiable, the desire that fattens on the poisons it eats. After years of investigation, acquiring information from politicians, police officials and their subordinates, gamblers, habitues of the levees, and nearly five hundred more vassals of the vice trust, we have placed the protection figure at $15,000,000. Attorney W. W. Wheelock, counsel for the Civil Service Commission and the man who attempted to break up the Vice-Police-Political graft combine, in speaking of this subject, said: "I have as yet only scratched the veneer and the surface of this terrifying evil, but the results have made me reel in horror and amazement. At this time I estimate that the yearly graft is $15,000,000. "The true figure, when all things are considered, must run far above that. It is evident that at least eighty per cent of the police, at some time or other, are grafters. The system of tribute and graft burrows into every legitimate pursuit and finds some undreamed of channel of graft."