Its habitues, with few exceptions, are the overflow, the outcasts of the levee, or the women who seek a few moments of so-called relaxation from their labors of sin. All night this place reeks with infamy; all night orgies impossible to portray are carried on; all night the saturnalia of vice wrings the blood from women's hearts and crushes life in its ever grinding mill. South of the street where we have stopped, the cafes continue. Again they take on an air of respectability and trap the young and innocent girls and with hands dripping with blood the vampires of vice push them on and on, until they reach the point where we have stopped. We are on the shores of a Lake of Infamy. The tributaries flow from the north, the south and the west, coursing through every section of the city, sweeping their victims in a surging current, without hope of rescue to the waters, whose eddies close forever over the drowned. The cafes and disorderly saloons and dance halls are the traps at the beginning of the avenues of vice. They are the feeders to the infamous hotels. The chain has no missing link. The Vice Trust has made it in perfect manner. We are standing on the shores of a lake--that lake is one of the "redlight" districts of Chicago. [Illustration: EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY ... AND TOMORROW? By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily Journal.] CHAPTER IV. The "Redlight" District. The "Redlight" District--Houses of Infamy--The Life of a Prostitute--The Blood Price--Hidden Tragedies--The Polluted Grave. Chicago possesses four "redlight" districts: one on the South side, one on the West side, one on the North side and the Strand of South Chicago. For the sake of description we have taken the one situated on the South side,--running from Eighteenth street on the north to Twenty-second street on the south, and from Wabash avenue on the east to Armour avenue on the west. It came into existence in 1905 when Mayor Carter H. Harrison, the present city executive, cleaned out old Custom House place, Plymouth court and South Clark street, the nest of vice, bounding the south end of the commercial district. It established a new territory and flourishes as prosperously today as it did in its old haunts. Within the zone described 250 houses of ill fame house the unfortunate women, lure men of all conditions in life, grow rich on sin and on the practice of every form of bestial degeneracy. [Illustration: SUGGESTED BY A PROMINENT NEWS STORY OF THE MOMENT By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily Journal.] There are 2,000 enslaved, scarlet women in these infectious prisons! They are of every nation in the world! They are young girls in their teens; women in mature years and hags who have outlived their usefulness to the god of lust! There is an army of 500 to 800 human vultures--"cadets" who live within this district, prodding these women on in the paths of evil!