f that time thirty thousand pure young girls, gathered from prairie homes
and village firesides and from out of our own suburban and city families,
must march out into this great Soul Market to take the place of the broken
wretches whose decaying bodies are cast into the refuse of our alleys and
sewers to become the menace of every girl and boy and drunken man who
comes within their clutches or sets foot within their alley hovels.

THE END OF THE WAY.

At about ten o'clock on Saturday evening, September 19th, I boarded a West
Madison street car and, transferring north at Halsted street, alighted at
Lake and walked west to Lewinsky's saloon at the corner of Lake and Green
streets. Going around to the side entrance on Green street, I discovered
in the wine and back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of perhaps fifty
drunken, dirty, diseased men and women, most of them foul-smelling, young
white girls huddled in with the worst mob of negroes, whites and Chinese I
have seen in Chicago's slums, all cursing, drinking, singing and
blaspheming in plain view and hearing of the street. I stopped a moment to
make sure I was making no mistake in what I saw and then crossed the
street to interview the dark-eyed little foreign girl who at its door was
boldly soliciting trade for the saloon and its adjacent evils, just
opposite.

I walked on down to Peoria and south on that notorious street.

In the row of houses running from Lake to Randolph street there are
approximately six hundred White Slaves, and diseased, crippled prostitutes
of the lowest class, dumped from the city's cleaner dives, and on that
night it was almost impossible to push one's way through the mass of men
and boys--whites, negroes, Turks, Polocks, etc., gathered in front of
these places of public abomination. At the corner of Randolph and Peoria
streets several earnest men and women were holding a little gospel
meeting, and, stopping with them, I counted during the thirty minutes I
stayed there six hundred and forty (approximately) men and boys stop in
front of or enter this horrible flesh market.

As I left the scene, a young girl in a drunken, filthy, diseased condition
slipped out of an alley and followed me, asking me to help her, and as we
sat on the steps of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, corner of Washington
boulevard and Peoria street, she told me the worst, most heart-breaking
story of wrong and vice and ruin I have ever listened to (see note.)[4]