There are 4,000 members of the department of police in Chicago today. There are a chief of police, twenty captains, numerous lieutenants and sergeants and at least 3,800 patrolmen. Through this body of men, many of whom promised their God and their own conscience to do their duty, are men sold body and soul to the vice lords who, it has been shown, control Chicago and derive fortunes from the exploitation of vice. These are the men to whom every law abiding citizen trusts his or her life year in and year out. These are the men appointed to protect property against criminal depredation, to make the streets clean of crime, and to watch over our children. And yet, investigation has shown that the executive heads of this big law enforcing system, in many instances, are crooked, corrupt and purchased. Many of the men holding high positions in the police department are there because the Vice Trust has found them of service and because they are ready ever to do the bidding of their masters. The politics of the department is largely a matter of the politics of the Vice Trust, as has been shown by recent investigations. Gambling runs full blast, houses of prostitution openly carry on their immoral practices, street walkers wink at the policemen on their beats, pickpockets laugh at the plain clothes men, robbers loot homes and places of business, crimes of every conceivable description are committed, a gambling war is allowed to terrorize Chicago, because the police department is sold body and soul, revolver and star, to the masters of the underworld. The hundred and one duties of the policeman are neglected daily because he is busy helping some vicious criminal friend of the Vice Trust. The history of the Chicago police department today is a history of a duty neglected and a sacred responsibility shirked. Even if certain members of the police force desired to do their duty, the meshes have so tightened about them, they are so compromised with the big lieutenants of vice and sin, that to save themselves and their families, they must go on violating their sacred oath of office and living a life of cowardice and hypocrisy. If the police department was not a subsidized body, the Vice Trust would have a hard time carrying out its plans. It could not whip into line the varied and complicated characters of sin with which it deals to lucrative advantage. THE FATE OF ONE POLICE OFFICIAL. Its subsidy was proven clearly in the recent conviction of a West side inspector of police for the acceptance of protection money. He was one of hundreds. He was not of a really bad stripe. Circumstances gave him scarcely any other alternative. [Illustration: Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission. Used by permission of owners of copyright. Where one escapes the toils of vice and sin, thousands perish as slaves to the inexorable Vice Trust.]