G. took the bread and fed her children and to-day
up on the top floor of the tenement in Plymouth Court, again deserted and
hungry and helpless, she cries and prays and makes button-holes, and waits
and waits with fear and wretchedness the coming of another little child.

[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing 2-ton weight steel
door connecting sound-proof dungeon cell with blind passage-way, between
114 and 116 Custom House Place]

The proprietor of the great resort on the corner of 21st and Dearborn
streets said not long ago to a co-worker of mine who forced her way into
his infamous dive:

"Don't come here to bother my girls; it is of no use; they are rotten
and ripe for H----. Soon I will throw them out myself. Go to the
department stores and the sweatshops and help the underpaid,
friendless girl _there_ if you must work. I could write a book as
large as that (pointing to the City Directory) filled with shrieks
and groans of women _after they are lost_, but what good would it do?
They are gone then _forever_."

In a great measure, the man told the truth. It is hard to reach a woman
after she has once entered a life of prostitution; for, like the Inferno
of old, there should be emblazoned in letters of blood above the barred
door of every White Slave mart in America, the ancient warning:

"Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here."

There's many a girl homeless and tempted, underpaid and destitute, who
might be saved from a life of ill-fame if a helping hand and a shelter
were offered her in her hour of indecision and hunger and despair.

In the south wall of the basement of 114 Federal Street, formerly known as
Custom House Place, that congested, central Redlight District of three
years ago, there was a blind passage-way between 114 and 116 Custom House
Place, 116 being the notorious dive "The California" now located at ----
Armour Avenue. On the inside, this door opened into a large dungeon,
windowless, sound-proof (about 7x10 feet) and it is alleged that it was
through the alley and into this blind passage-way that the unwilling
victims of White Slavers (the same syndicate now operating with Chicago as
headquarters) were carried into this little solitary cell to be "broken
in" by fiendish, brute force to a life of shame.

[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing heavy steel screen
used inside the iron-barred windows of the houses of prostitutio