in our
leading houses are expect to be posted, and to act as escorts sad
chaperones in this wine-guzzling tour. Indeed, so much is this
disgraceful feature recognized in some large business houses, that the
proprietors make an allowance to their salesmen for this purpose.

The proprietresses of these houses are all impervious to shame, and
carry on their trade with the sole ambition of realizing money. Many of
them have summer establishments and suburban villas at the
watering-places, and carry on their nefarious business at Saratoga, Long
Branch, Coney Island, Newport and Cape May during the summer mouths.
Many of them own handsome equipages, in which, gorgeously attired, with
liveried menials, they show themselves in Central Park to the envy of
the virtuous and honest of womankind. It is in the places kept by these
women, where the inmates are usually handsome young girls between the
ages of fifteen and thirty, that the precocious and well-to-do young men
of this city fall an easy prey to vice, and become in time the haggard
and dissolute man of the town, or degenerate into the forger, the bank
defaulter or the swindler.

The bar and basement brothels, profusely scattered over the lower
portions of the city, present the most miserable phase of this
disgusting evil. Nearly all these places are kept by men, though
nominally under control of their mistresses and wives, who are generally
hideous specimens of womanhood, and whose features present the traits of
sensuality, cruelty and avarice as clearly expressed as if traced there
by Belial himself. The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby
features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and
other places of public resort, and loud in appearance as they are
obscene in talk, are, in the estimation of every self-respecting man,
eminently fitted by Lucifer for laboring in the State-prison quarries
for the term of their natural lives.

The inmates of these basement brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth.
Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive
of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting
assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and
renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the
successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly
mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the
foul, degraded beings of those h