“I have often thought,” said a man who was connected with the city police for some ten years, a man of great good sense and wide general reading, “that the people who speak in condemnation of the social evil do not dwell sufficiently on the actual revolting facts connected with the life of a woman of the town. I have read sensational newspaper articles, and I have heard preachers’ sermons on the subject, but in all there is a lack of practical treatment. After you have read or heard them, a person who does not know the facts would think that a house of ill-fame was the abode of wicked and unholy but yet picturesque passion. In spite of themselves they succeed in surrounding the unsavory mess with a halo of romance, than which there could be nothing further from the facts. There is no romance in the lives of evil women. Everything about them is gross, sordid and mercenary. The master passion of their lives is not sensuality, but a greed for money and display conjoined with envy and all uncharitableness. They are the slaves of the vile women who keep the houses in which they live. While they are new to the life, pretty and popular, they are allowed certain latitude. These are the ones whom you see parading the streets, sitting in the houses of entertainment, and driving to the races. But when THEIR WITHERING LIVES begin to tell upon their good looks, their days of merriment are over. They now become slaves in the vilest sense of the word. The money for which they sell their souls is the constant prey of the hoary old brothel-keeper to whom they are in bondage. The majority of the men who visit their dens are in liquor. Is there anything picturesque about half-a-dozen dull-eyed creatures being roused out of their sleep in the small hours of the morning to be marshalled before an old brute with rum-laden breath and filthy person whose sottish fancy has led him here? Is it possible to conceive a woman with a single vestige of pride left consenting to be at the pick and choose of such a loathsome creature? Yet this is a frequent sight in these houses of hell. Is there any romance about that? And when the choice is made the other five are eaten with envy. But it is envy, spitefulness, and all uncharitableness, morning, noon and night with them. The demon of hatred is the presiding spirit of their sunless habitations. She who has good looks and youth is a continual eyesore to the woman whose lustre of girlhood is a thing now of memory. She is hated and slandered, and she glories in the fact because it is a tribute to qualities which she has that they have not. But her hour comes too soon and too surely, and a younger rival hurries her down the slope, to be herself displaced in turn as the months go by, leaving their impress of dissipation.