ments.

The girls are attracted to the unregulated dance halls not only by a
love of pleasure but by a sense of adventure, and it is in these places
that they are most easily recruited for a vicious life. Unfortunately
there are three hundred and twenty-eight public dance halls in Chicago,
one hundred and ninety of them connect directly with saloons, while
liquor is openly sold in most of the others. This consumption of liquor
enormously increases the danger to young people. A girl after a long
day's work is easily induced to believe that a drink will dispel her
lassitude. There is plenty of time between the dances to persuade her,
as the intermissions are long, fifteen to twenty minutes, and the dances
short, occupying but four or five minutes; moreover the halls are hot
and dusty and it is almost impossible to obtain a drink of water. Often
the entire purpose of the dance hall, with its carefully arranged
intermissions, is the selling of liquor to the people it has brought
together. After the girl has begun to drink, the way of the procurer,
who is often in league with the "spieler" who frequents the dance hall,
is comparatively easy. He assumes one of two roles, that of the
sympathetic older man or that of the eager young lover. In the character
of the former, he tells "the down-trodden working girl" that her wages
are a mere pittance and that he can procure a better place for her with
higher wages if she will trust him. He often makes allusions to the
shabbiness or cheapness of her clothing and considers it "a shame that
such a pretty girl cannot dress better." In the second role he
apparently falls in love with her, tells of his rich parents,
complaining that they want him to marry, "a society swell," but that he
really prefers a working girl like herself. In either case he
establishes friendly relations, exalted in the girl's mind, through the
excitement of the liquor and the dance, into a new sense of intimate
understanding and protection.

Later in the evening, she leaves the hall with him for a restaurant
because, as he truthfully says, she is exhausted and in need of food. At
the supper, however, she drinks much more, and it is not surprising that
she is at last persuaded that it is too late to go home and in the end
consents to spend the rest of the night in a nearby lodging house. Six
young girls, each accompanied by a "spieler" from a dance hall, were
recently followed to a chop suey restaurant and then to