Babylon had its vices; so, too, Alexandria. Greece and Rome struggled and died in a national moral degeneracy they had created. Chicago has surpassed them in wickedness. Nay, Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by the wrath of Heaven, were pure when compared to Chicago. Paris and its lure of vice is tame by the side of Chicago. There is no parallel in history. There is no adequate comparison. Chicago leads the world in evil today. She stalks at the head of the Army of Sin:--a beautiful, sensuous mistress and paramour to a personalized god of named and unnamed Crime. The army is composed of bodies and souls that Hell has claimed but not called. Their destinies are still unfinished on earth. And why is Chicago the Hell-hole of the world? Because she has taken the failings, sins, defects, crimes, miseries and vices of humanity, hurled them into a seething caldron of infamy, melted them, amalgamated them and commercialized them. A Vice-Graft system has been created. It has been formed along the lines of modern commerce and finance. Today the institution is stronger, more powerful, more impregnable than the biggest financial or industrial combine in the United States! In fact, it has absorbed many and invaded mysteriously and secretly every other enterprise founded on decency and honesty. It is living off every legitimate trade, business and industry in Chicago. That is the limitless scope of the Vice Trust of Chicago, unincorporated, but possessing a capital running high into the millions of dollars and souls. There are three stockholders, speaking in a collective sense, in Chicago's Vice Trust, namely:-- The inhabitants of the highways and byways and gilded houses of infamy. The police department of the city. A coterie of politicians. These form the board of directors of the ruthless, merciless, parasitic, powerful corporation of Vice, Graft, Crime & Co. Scarcely an individual, scarcely an industry fails to yield its life-blood to that infamous trust! It feeds like a great octopus on the entire city. Many of us are its unconscious victims! CHICAGO--THE LIVING, BREATHING HELL. "Leave behind all hope, all ye who enter here." Dante dreamed he saw that line above the fiery gates of Hell. To those who know and understand, that line flames as if written by the fiery finger of Fate, in the heavens above Chicago. You, all of you, dwelling without its polluted precincts, cannot enter it without being trapped into the meshes of the Vice-Graft combine! Spider-like, it has woven its web over and about the city. Enter and you are entangled, consciously or unconsciously. There is no escape. We shall prove this broad, sweeping statement. From the depot to the cab, from the cab to the hotel, from the hotel to the dining room, barber shop, manicure room or other places, the monster trails you. The Vice Trust's agents are forever lurking in your shadow.