It is our intention to demonstrate to the world the machinations of the corporation of crime, its political power, its enslavery of 5,000 fallen women in the segregated districts and twice as many more at large within the city, its annual earnings from a toleration of vice and crime, its prostitution of the police department, and its hideous and myriad ways of trapping new victims to take the places of those whom it had driven to despair and untimely death. The story is shocking to your moral sense; paralyzing to your brain; but it is the Truth. It should be known. Too long have we groped blindly in the dark. An hour of awakening is needed. Vice might be eradicated if the vast system, whose existence we are about to describe, could be first obliterated. Unless the root be removed, the evil will grow rapidly again, despite sincere and persistent reforms. It is our intention to show by logical narration of facts how the annual tribute paid to the Vice Trust for protection and nourishment by the hordes of living demons in the city of Chicago is at least $15,000,000. The life-blood of women, bought and sold on the auction block of the Vice Combine, the innocent girls who barter their lives of purity for a sip of the poison of the bitter wine of life, the men who drag the shackles of sin on their limbs, and the hellish fiends who serve Satan on earth, prostrate before the directorate of the Vice Trust, offer their tribute to the over lords of the city's degradation. This book is not the fantastic, lurid picturing of the shames of women and the crimes of men. It is an expose of how not more than ten men whom we call the Directorate of Ten, create, organize, mobilize and lead, and derive almost fabulous profits from, an army of thousands of unfortunates. It is the story of a power wrested from the people at the debauched ballot boxes and used as the weapon to murder men and women annually. This is not the dream of an overzealous mind seeking sincerely to right a terrible wrong. It is a cold, statistical narration of facts. It is the observations of one who for ten years has studied every phase of the demoniacal system, who has been intimately associated with the Directorate of Ten, who has stood by and watched the never-ending procession of the men and women slaves who have done the monster's bidding and fallen inevitably into the charnal houses of the dead. The average Chicago man or woman knows of the thousand and one forms of vice that flourish in Chicago, but he or she does not know that the entire vice system works in harmony like the most delicate piece of mechanism. The voters do not know that vice is more perfectly organized in Chicago today than any corporation in existence. The writer has set out to show in the glaring, white light of truth the real causes of the present social evil.