There is within the community a slowly awakening civic conscience. It shall arouse itself to deathless activity and wrest the Windy City from the forces that prey upon it. That is our prophecy. The religious thought, the religious mind, the religious heart are ready to do battle for the God of righteousness. Behind the telling of this story of Vice, Graft and Political Corruption has been but one predominating idea, the revelation of the truth about Chicago today. There has been but one hope:--the arousing of Chicagoans to the fight against corruption by revealing the terrible evils thriving about them and the delivering of a warning to those in and out of the great metropolis who, innocent and unsuspecting, might be trapped in the lures of sin, evil and shame. On the great white, festering ulcer of Chicago's world of crime and vice, we have turned the burning searchlight of truth. Into all the dark corners, the pitfalls, the covered abysses and the paths that lure and lead to Hell, has the light, blinding in its intensity, been thrown. In the beginning we started out to demonstrate the theory that vice and crime as they exist and flourish today are so, because infamous and degraded men have commercialized them. It has been shown that thousands of innocent girls and women are hurled into the bottomless pits of Hell annually, not because of a social viciousness that has no palliative, but because a coterie of Godless creatures value their bodies and souls at so many dollars and cents. It has been shown that back of all the wickedness and evil of Chicago is the monumental and gigantic Vice Trust. The body, composed of a directorate of ten men who for years have fattened off the sins of fallen women and the crimes of inhuman men, has been vivisected and analyzed in all its component parts. Truly, we have painted Chicago as the wickedest city in the world. We have not held it up and cried "Shame" for the sake of sensation. We have sought to teach a lesson and utter a warning of vital import. If the reading of this book turns the thousands of women who yearly stand on the brink of destruction, and saves them as an honor to the motherhood of the race, then this book will have been of infinite value. CHICAGO--WICKEDEST CITY IN THE WORLD. Its wickedness is the outgrowth of the terrible irreligious system of commercialism that has reduced the sacred things of life to a filthy gold and silver valuation. As long as men whose consciences are stifled by gold dust, whose souls are Godless, and whose hearts are dry and hard as rock, control our ballot box, so long shall Chicago live under an infamous stigma. When the ballot box is cleansed of fraud, then the forces of sin will be dissipated and the Vice Combine of today dissolved.