The graft for police protection is not always paid to policemen. High officials, fearing that their hand may show in corrupt and incriminating transactions, hire private and debased citizens to carry on this pernicious work of collecting from the resort keepers and from those whose business depends on the resorts. That is the graft exacted for the simple existence of prostitution and the carrying on of the trade in women's bodies. The more the earnings of the house of ill fame, the higher the value of the women enslaved, the more liberty granted to make hellish profits, the greater the protective graft. As a corroboration of our flat statement we have scores of men of prominence in every walk of life who have first-hand knowledge of the existence of this alliance of vice and graft. Recently, an attorney whose business takes him into the "redlight" district on the South side, made the following statement in a Chicago daily paper: "There is one police official who should be punished for his activity in collecting tribute for the protection he dispenses to levee resort keepers. He is a smooth article, however, and he goes straight to headquarters in a fine show of indignation whenever anyone makes any charges against him. "My business takes me into the district and I know that there is a regular tax levied on these people. It all depends on the size of the establishment and the amount of business done. The collecting is done by plain clothes men who turn it over to a police official and he takes or sends it to a higher official and after he takes out his share the balance goes to a city official. I've had that told me so many times by so many different persons, some of them policemen, that I know it is true. "But you couldn't get a person in the district to talk; they are run out of the district as soon as they threaten trouble." The man who made the above statement is one of the most prominent attorneys in Chicago. He is simply corroborating our charge of the existence of the practice of protection. The high city official to whom the money goes and to whom he refers is one of the organizers of the great Vice and Graft Trust; a man who has made thousands of dollars by corrupting the power placed in his hands, and who today continues in the face of reform movements, to instruct his sycophantic police officials to allow vice to flourish just as long as it pours its gold into his coffers. [Illustration: THE DRUGGED CONSCIENCE. Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission. Used by permission of owners of copyright. Steeped in iniquity.--Blind to his sin.--One step from eternal ruin.] As an instance that vice is shut down when it fails to make its tribute, we quote the following story from a well known criminal lawyer. It is astonishing in its features and in its revelations. This man said:--