HELL AT MIDNIGHT 
 
 IN SPRINGFIELD 
 
 or A Burning History of the Sin and Shame 
 Of the Capital City of Illinois 
 
 . . ^ -c 
 
 This is the only book ever published exposing Benedictine, the infamous dope made by 
 the Monks in their monasteries and sold in dives and brothels throughout the slums of the 
 world. It is a terrible story. Don't miss it. 
 
 BY 
 
 WM. LLOYD CLARX 
 MILAN, ILLINOIS 
 f 924 
 
 FIFTH EDITION 
 
 PRICE 25 CENTS
 
 OR1CAL SURVEY 
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 In publishing this book the author makes no pretense whatever of liter- 
 ary merit. The contents have been compiled in haste, often during the mid- 
 night hour, after delivering a lecture, or on the train while speeding from 
 place to place. No apology is made for producing a book of this kind. The 
 author strikes bravely at what he believes to be a menace to good govern- 
 ment, and which threatens the life of the nation. The book and its author 
 will be roundly cursed by the doers of evil deeds, and warmly welcomed by 
 all who have the courage to think and act for the right. Advance orders 
 prove that this book will have a tremendous sale, and it is sent out on its 
 mission with a fervent prayer that it will do much good in shaping public 
 sentiment along right lines, not only in Illinois, but throughout the nation. 
 
 WM. LLOYD CLARK. 
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 We published the first edition of this book three years ago because we 
 felt that the criminal and lawless conditions, both in the city of Springfield 
 and throughout the state, justified plain speaking. 
 
 We now go to press with the second edition, for the same reasons, and 
 we serve notice on the rotten bunch of time serving politicians, that so long 
 as the saloon, the brothel, the gambling hell, and the Roman Catholic Hier- 
 archy continue their fearful work of degrading and debauching humanity 
 this, book will be circulated, and its author will be tireless in his campaign 
 for better conditions. 
 
 For advertising the first edition of this book through the mails I was 
 indicted, tried and fined in a Federal Court, Peoria, 111., October 20, 1911. 
 Judge Humphreys, a citizen of Springfield, assessed a fine of $400.00 and 
 costs on the author of this book ; and this in the face of the fact that in this 
 country there is published and sent through the mails tons of salacious fic- 
 tion, appealing to every dormant pruriency of boy or girl; but you must not 
 publish THE TRUTH concerning actual, horrible, ruinous conditions, as 
 they now exist, although your motive is to save pure girls from falling into 
 an earthly hell. We are going to push the circulation of this book so hated 
 by brothel madams, the whiskey devil, and the Christless, time serving politi- 
 cians, to the absolute limit of our ability. 
 
 When the federal authorities persecuted the author and publisher ef 
 this book by assessing against him a heavy fine, they won and without ques- 
 tion received the hearty approval of every keeper of a scarlet house, every 
 pimp, and thug, and gambler, and saloonkeeper, and the whole history of 
 this shameful judicial farce is told in the last chapter of this edition.
 
 3 
 
 CSV h 
 
 I tore the mask from some of their boon political companions and exposed 
 the criminal workings of political Romanism in this state and they must 
 have revenge. They are welcome to it, for when these time servers who take 
 no part in the great nation-wide movement for better things, are dead, rotten 
 and forgotten, the people will remember with gratitude and kindness the men 
 who fought their battles, and whose sacrifices ushered in a better day. 
 
 Yours for truth, justice and liberty, 
 
 WM. LLOYD CLARK. 
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION 
 
 We are printing another edition of this book for the reason that orders 
 continue to come in for it though it was first printed ten years ago and con- 
 sists mainly of exposures of conditions as they existed at that time in the 
 capitol city of Illinois. The book will not stop because its message is needed 
 today as much as when first published. There is only a slight change at the 
 Capitol. The saloon has been transformed into a hooch joint and the bar 
 tender into a bootlegger. The red light district has moved into the 
 rooming houses, hotels and assignation resorts. The Roman Hierarchy is as 
 powerful and defiant today as ever. Only a few months ago the city police 
 went down the street and smashed news stands that were selling papers that 
 told the truth about present conditions. Owing to the fact that the Knights 
 of Columbus and the Papal Hierarchy are fighting with every weapon at 
 their command for the restoration of the saloon the truths contained in this 
 book should be placed in the hands of every liberty loving man and woman 
 in the nation. This new edition is sent out with an earnest hope that it will 
 aid in the fight for the redemption of the nation and the restoration of right 
 principles. 
 
 Faithfully yours, 
 
 WM. LLOYD CLARK.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Every patriotic citizen is interested in the welfare of his country — the 
 country where he must live, and where his children must live after him. 
 The reformer naturally turns his attention to the great city. It is the nerve 
 center of American society and American politics. 
 
 Since the partial redemption of Kansas City, Kansas, and other populous 
 centers, public attention has been directed to the increasing importance of 
 cities to their peculiar perils, to their domination by the worst classes 
 through the neglect of the better classes, to the possibility of their political 
 salvation — which many have doubted until recently — and to the continual 
 necessity for municipal reform. 
 
 We do not write of the conditions existing in Springfield with a vicious 
 motive, as some of the daily papers would have people believe; but in the 
 interest of truth, to arouse the conscience of her better manhood to a real- 
 ization of impending peril. It is that viciousness may be dethroned, and law 
 and order established in the Capitol city of our rich and splendid common- 
 wealth, and with an earnest prayer that the leprous spots may be purged 
 from this otherwise fair city that this book is written. 
 
 In a work of this kind we have a right to expect the hearty co-operation 
 of every patriotic citizen, and brave words of cheer from every Christian 
 man, woman and child. 
 
 The corruption of our large cities imperils the purity of American youth, 
 and in the interest of millions of pure girls and boys we demand that the 
 cities of this country purge themselves of their moral filth. The soul and 
 character of one honest lad will, in the eternal justice, outweigh all the 
 blood money ever received by the government from the bloated hands of the 
 whiskey plutocrats. 
 
 The great evils have fortified themselves in the centers of population 
 and under the reign of purchasable and corrupt Mayors, Aldermen and 
 Police, threaten the overthrow of law and order. 
 
 The greatest duty which confronts the citizen today is to do all that lies 
 within his power to redeem our cities from the reign of demagogues. To 
 save our nation and give to posterity a country where an honest lad will be 
 free from temptation and the vices which ruin honest manhood.
 
 ON THE BORDERS OF HELL 
 
 The children used to point at Dante and say, "There's a man who has 
 been in Hell." The same could have been said of me at midnight, on July 1st, 
 1909, for I had scouted six long weary hours through the "bad lands" of this 
 great prairie city, the proud and wicked capitol of the richest commonwealth 
 in the republic. And you can be sure I saw things — for they can be seen 
 by everybody except the man in a policeman's uniform, or the Christian 
 voter on election day. If all the death that the saloons of the nation dealt 
 out on this one day could be brought together and scattered through the 
 streets and byways of one great city all at one time; the wretches fighting 
 back the imaginary demons of delirium tremens in unpadded cells, until the 
 shattered bones of broken hands clashed against prison bars, and mashed and 
 battered skulls sank bleeding against prison walls; the air filled with the 
 shrieks of rum-made maniacs; babies with their brains knocked out by 
 drunken fathers, or overlain and smothered in the night by drunken mothers; 
 scattered through dirty hallways and tenement shacks — 20,000 of them; the 
 streets clogged with murdered children, murdered men and murdered women 
 and heartbroken wives, mothers and sisters; if all this misery, pain, heart- 
 ache and death that has been vomited out upon the highways or into the 
 criminal courts of the nation for just one day by the licensed and legalized 
 gin mills could be brought together in one city at one time it would rival the 
 scenes in the streets of Paris on the morning of St. Bartholomew's massacre. 
 
 John G. Woolley had the same thought in the following word picture, 
 portraying the concentrated horrors and infamies of the liquor traffic when 
 he said: "Now I understand that cry, what a cry! A city as large as New 
 York, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Balti- 
 more. Six millions of people and not a happy home; thousands of miles of 
 streets and not a cheery face; multitudes of madmen, epileptics, idiots, pau- 
 pers, criminals, and no escape. A walled city first — an outer wall of 
 mountains; then a wall of distilleries, which in a street of solid masonry 
 would reach from Boston to Omaha; then one of breweries nearly as long; 
 then mad houses nearly as long; then brothels nearly as long; then gambling 
 houses nearly as long; then a double row of dram shops; and ravening 
 through all the labyrinth, the minotaur of alcoholic conversation of ribald 
 and filthy society, rotten altogether vile. Seven days of personal liberty — 
 drunkenness, a week; no sweet night's rest. No Sunday, no church, no God. 
 Two hundred men die drunk there every day. And all the foul infections 
 and contagious fester and spread and kill and drive men and women mad. 
 It is like the leper colonies of the Pacific Islands, multiplied by a million 
 horrors. It is like a colossal madhouse with the added horror of locking in 
 thousands of sane but broken-hearted women who refuse to be rescued be- 
 cause they love the brutish, red-eyed, pimply madmen who never touch them 
 but to wound, and never speak to them but in the dialect of hell." 
 
 Northeast from the corner of Sixth and Washington Streets for many 
 blocks the city of Springfield is a mass of dive saloons, pawn shops, question- 
 able hotels, fourth rate lodging houses and assignation resorts, stenchful 
 restaurants and brothels from the lowest ramshackle hovels to the most 
 richly and elaborately equipped which can be found anywhere in the State.
 
 Let me say here — once and for all — it is not the workingman whe gives 
 to the slum that patronage necessary to keep it alive. It is true, working- 
 men are there by the thousands, dissipating away their hard earned wages, 
 while their families suffer in poverty and their children are deprived of an 
 education. But the slum must have its rich devotees who can buy champagne 
 at four dollars a throw and pay fancy prices for fancy women. And Spring- 
 field is not wanting in rich and shameless debauches. At all hours from ten 
 o'clock in the evening to four o'clock in the morning, the cabs, carriages and 
 automobiles can be seen stopping in front of Madam Browning's richly and 
 luxuriously furnished place, or* the palatial brothel presided over by the old 
 Jezebel known as Helen Paine. 
 
 I think it was about 10:30 I saw an auto loaded with fashionably dressed 
 men and women stop in front of Dave O'Connor's "House of David" on 
 North Sixth Street. They ordered the drinks delivered, and out in the public 
 street laughed and shamelessly quaffed the beverages of Hell. And down 
 through the red light district the "Red Devil" carried its load of rich and 
 dissipated merrymakers, stopping and ordering drinks from the lowest 
 shambles. Some day, before a just God, these stewards of wealth must ren- 
 der an account. But do they think of this? 
 
 The saloon dominates this entire district. It is true the house of shame is 
 there, but if the saloon is closed tonight, the brothel will move out tomorrow. 
 In nearly every one of these saloons there is a side stairway so arranged 
 that one can pass from the bar room into a hallway and upstairs without 
 passing out upon the street. Looking at these upstair apartments from the 
 hallway or the street there is almost no evidence of life, but watch them 
 closely for a while and you will see people pass up. Sometimes young men, 
 often older men. Sometimes a girl in her teens, in company with a man old 
 enough to be her father. In almost every case these places are used for 
 gambling or prostitution, or they are assignation houses. 
 
 About ten o'clock the street woman makes her appearance. They are most- 
 ly girls who have served an apprenticeship in the house of shame and have 
 become sufficiently brazen to solicit men in the public street. Many of them 
 are girls whose beauty has faded until they are no longer desirable for 
 brothel service and the brothel madam, after her bank book is smeared with 
 their flesh and blood, kicks them into the street to tread the cinder path of sin 
 onward toward death and hell. And around the dusty stairway of some old 
 shack you will peer into the spectral and ghastly face of some old hag, once 
 a sweet pure girl, the light and hope of a mother's life, but the liquor traffic 
 had a place for her, and this great rich republic needed revenue, and the city 
 needed blood money to reduce the tax of Dives, and the policeman on his 
 beat, a dirty nondescript, needed a rake-off, and there she stands — "a rag 
 and a bone and a hank of hair" — with one foot in the grave, the hideous 
 mockery of a grin upon her shriveled and wasted face, beckoning you to 
 follow her into Hell. She is but one of a thousand; the life is very short. 
 In a little while she drains the cup to its bitter dregs, and in an unmarked 
 span of earth she lies dead and forgotten. 
 
 Paul James Duff thus describes her: "In many of the 'Tenderloin' con- 
 cert saloons and beer gardens, one sees not once, but often, the form of the 
 Venus Milo, and the face of Cleopatra.
 
 Rich silks froufrou over the dusty floors, and gems of high price flash in 
 the electric glare. 
 
 Song bubbles from painted and swollen lips. Laughter, false, hollow, 
 strained and a little harsh, is everywhere. 
 
 To one who sees no deeper than the surface, it is a pleasing and attrac- 
 tive scene. 
 
 At midnight the crowd is thinned. At one in the morning only the un- 
 successful remain to walk their beat so weary up and down, to and for, with 
 an eye open for the policeman. 
 
 Tramp, tramp, tramp, from saloon to saloon, occasionally getting some 
 young blood to 'set 'em up.' These are older than their lucky sisters, whom 
 they jostle, but could not outbid earlier in the night. Their faces are paler, 
 wan and lined. Their eyelids are red, their features are set in the stoniness 
 of despair. 
 
 Poor lost angels! They have had their day. They have quaffed the 
 purple wine in the wild hours of the night. They have arrived at the dregs. 
 Deeper and deeper into the slough of poverty and the slum of vice they 
 plunge, night after night, and month after month. 
 
 No one to save — none to rescue them. Every vain-glorious Dive ridicules 
 their plight of misfortune begotten in a state of sin. These women feel that 
 they are social outcasts, that their sins are as scarlet. They believe they 
 are past reform. 
 
 The consequence? Death from consumption, pneumonia, general disease, 
 syphilitic rheumatism, and all the hydra-headed forms of that most fright- 
 ful of all diseases — syphilis, waits for them at the end of the long journey. 
 
 Still the hopeless leer into the whiskey redened faces of men, who reel 
 by them with curses, or stop and stagger and sway, and greet them with 
 coarse, nameless jibes. 
 
 Still the pained, fixed smile, the gnawing of physical hunger, the mad- 
 dening desire for drink! 
 
 The achings of fatigue and sin struck home to the heart, the tearing fangs 
 of despair. 
 
 We are tired of the stroll — the sights of it and not the distance, have 
 fatigued us. 
 
 Let us take one of the faded, hopeless, unsuccessful ones and put a little 
 brief joy into her life. 
 
 The bar-room glares with colored lights and mirrors and chandeliers of 
 crystal. Back of it the 'ladies' entrance' to a cozy room, stands suspiciously 
 open — but very inviting. 
 
 All is revelry within, and the thought of a future is not tolerated. No 
 place for croakers or moralists — in the very throes of pleasure. 
 
 'Come Birdie and get a drink!' See! her hand trembles as she unfastens 
 the cheap plush coat made in imitation of sealskin. Her face pales under the 
 rouge as she takes a seat at one of the wine tables. 'Quick, barkeeper, a 
 long tall glass of absinthe frappe!' That's her tipple. 
 
 The red comes slowly back to the worn face, and the eyes brighten. The 
 lashes have been darkened with graphite to make her look seductive. Poor 
 devil! She spent a long time before her cracked looking glass this evening, 
 doing her hair and face, that she might coax back some of her lost beauty
 
 8 
 
 — that she might seem fair and beautiful in the eyes of some stranger of 
 the streets. 
 
 Poor, poor devil! 'Another glass of absinthe barkeeper, and make it 
 strong.' Give her the few dollars that would have been my change. 
 
 See the thin fingers close on the money eagerly! That means room rent 
 for a week or more — a shelter from the icy, snarling winds of winter, and 
 a bed for throbbing limbs, even though she goes hungry. She is in the hands 
 of helping friends — not wolves. She shall talk. 
 
 Listen! You shall hear in her words the story of one of ten thousand 
 tragedies that happen about us. Deep as a pitless hell, and black as night, 
 and sad as the voice of the waves that mourn about the dead beauty of the 
 cyclodes. 
 
 Good night! Good night! God pity you, weak, foolish, fluttering, striv- 
 ing, beating, despairing victim of man's rapacity. 
 
 But this wicked traffic goes on, while the idle bacchanal laughs and "des- 
 pair in vain sits brooding o'er the putrid eggs of hope." 
 
 On Washington Street from the corner of the Court House square east 
 to the Wabash depot one passes twenty-five saloons, most of them so vile 
 and stenchful that it is utterly impossible to describe them. And this is a 
 main thoroughfare over which hundreds, or possibly thousands of men, 
 women and children pass daily. Negro dive saloons, Bohemian saloons where 
 the English language is never spoken. Blazing lighthouses of Hell and re- 
 cruiting stations for the penitentiary. You enter one of these places and 
 low browed brutish red eyed animal-men will stare at you. The air is foul 
 and stifling. Faded, vulgar pictures look down at you from dirty, dust- 
 covered walls. The mirrors behind the bar are so covered with fly specks 
 and other accumulations of filth that you can scarcely see your reflection. 
 Low-browed, pig-eyed, pug-nosed, pot-bellied products of the saloon with 
 shirts unbottoned in front and breeches bagging at the knees are lined up 
 at the bar, drinking goblets of sheeny booze. The glasses are greasy and 
 dirty from the filth that sticks to them from the hands of the bartender. 
 
 Over nearly every door hangs the unpronounceable name of a Roman 
 Catholic foreigner, and in and around these places loaf the porch-climber 
 and yeggman, who would take your life for a dollar. Sandwiched in be- 
 tween everywhere are sheeny pawnshops. Hogan's place is one of the worst 
 booze joints in the row; a large, dirty bar room in front, back of which is 
 a larger room fitted up for gambling, and where not long ago I counted 
 forty men playing cards at one time. This is one of the worst criminal 
 schools in the state, but under Democratic and Republican government alike 
 it receives Uncle Sam's permit at the City Hall to further degrade and de- 
 bauch its victims. 
 
 You do not find the swell politicians, the tony young sport or the pros- 
 perous looking business man in these dives. They pull the political wire 
 from the high toned joints up on North Fifth street, while the ward heeler 
 and the party boss bumps elbows with the bums down in the dives, deliver 
 their votes at so much a head for the candidate most favorable to the Gin 
 Mill business, and by fraud, intimidation and ballot box stuffing the saloon 
 buys another lease of life, and for another term can continue the nefarious 
 business of producing criminals, wrecking homes, breaking women's hearts, 
 fattening graveyards and peopling Hell with lost and damned souls.
 
 Just off Washington, on North Eighth Street is Mackey's place, where 
 you get a meal, a bed or a bath for ten cents. - The whole place looks as dirty 
 as the price is cheap, and in any well regulated city this ramshackle would 
 come under the ban of the board of health. Next door, appropriately near 
 by, is located an undertaking establishment, and this brings us to the mam- 
 moth brick and brown stone front building where Madam Helen Paine con- 
 ducts the most fashionable and the most extensively equipped brothel in the 
 state capital. Suppose we enter. Madam Helen Paine opens the door with 
 a welcome smile and asks you if you desire to see any girl in particular. If 
 not, she calls in her bevy, of which she possesses a rare collection ; from girls 
 that look to be in their teens up to wise old sirens who know all the ropes 
 that will help a fool to part with his money. You are ushe/ed down a long 
 hallway into a room that is worthy of special notice. Some of you prosper- 
 ous people of Springfield could put all your fine furniture into this room and 
 still it would hold more. Its floors are of hard wood highly polished and 
 waxed. Around the walls are costly couches and divans. Pictures, ques- 
 tionable too, look down at you from the richly papered walls. The Madam 
 has ushered you to a seat, it is early and but few girls have company. She 
 touches a button in the wall and instantly her inmates commence to arrive; 
 they come down the stairway, up from the basement, from everywhere. 
 They seat themselves about the room. Some one will start a conversation, 
 usually they want to know if you are a stranger in the city. You are soon 
 informed that you must choose your company, time is money — and girls come 
 high in this place. If you want to see how beautifully the rooms are fur- 
 nished upstairs it will cost you five or ten, or if you are not careful it will 
 cost you your entire pocketbook. Suppose that while you are chatting in this 
 great reception room, the door bell rings and another caller appears, rest as- 
 sured you will never see him. He will be directed to another room just 
 as large and just as fine in its furnishings, and another bevy of girls ushered 
 in for his entertainment. Men are never allowed to face each other inside 
 this place unless they came to the house together. It is not considered safe, 
 as brother might meet brother, father might meet son; for it is said that not 
 long ago there came near being a tragedy when a young man came face to 
 face with the husband of his own sister in a Springfield brothel. But why 
 are some of these rooms so large and commodious? Let us drop down there 
 at midnight when the automobiles have been stopping in front and enter and 
 we will see these large rooms turned into dance halls, and we will see young 
 men from the first homes of Springfield folded in the voluptuous embraces of 
 fallen women. 
 
 You, Christian fathers and mothers of Springfield, and of Illinois, what do 
 you think of this? These places are so terrible that it beggars the English 
 language to describe them. They exist to damn your boy and seduce and 
 sell your girl into a life of shame. They exist in violation of the ordinances 
 of Springfield and the statutes of Illinois. They exist with a full knowledge 
 of the Governor, the Mayor, the Sheriff, the Chief of Police, the Prosecuting 
 Attorney, and the whole miserable mess of time servers who hold their honor 
 below par and sell the manhood of the state and city to the saloon and brothel 
 in exchange for a miserable mess of political pottage. 
 
 Is your boy secure? I will show you how secure he is. At ten minutes 
 before twelve o'clock on the 1st of July, 1909, two boys, not over twenty
 
 10 
 
 years of age, emerged from this great brothel and went direct past the Court 
 House square, out under the shadow of the executive mansion where Gover- 
 nor Deneen, by grace of the saloon and Christian vote, united at the ballot 
 box, holds the reins of power — on out into the resident district; one of them 
 went into a beautiful home, the other passing on a few blocks, turned into his 
 father's house. Both homes give evidence of wealth and culture and re- 
 finement, but while the parents slept, their boys found the company of her 
 whose feet take hold upon Hell, and while sowing their wild oats they are 
 sowing germs of diseases that are visited upon their children to the third and 
 fourth generation. 
 
 A sequel to the future of either of these Springfield boys may be found 
 in the following narrative that was told to me over thirty years ago in one of 
 the large cities of this state in the parlor of a rich and cultured home, the 
 home of one of the richest men of the great commonwealth of Illinois. It was 
 during my college days. I was a lad then about the age of these Spring- 
 field boys and I hated the saloon as intensely as I do now. It was a common 
 thing for the boys to make temperance speeches in our college debating 
 clubs, and on nearly every Sunday afternoon when weather conditions were 
 
 right, I delivered a lecture in the public square. I also wrote and published 
 my first temperance books, and they were read extensively throughout the 
 city and country. This activity on my part attracted the attention of a very 
 aged and retired business man of the city. In fact I had often noticed this 
 dignified old man and his faithful wife in my audiences when announced to 
 speak against the saloon. At the close of an open air temperance address 
 one Sunday afternoon in the public square, this old man approached me and 
 urged me to accompany him to his home, as he desired a conversation, and 
 would impart to me information that might prove of great value in my 
 chosen work. After reaching his home he secured from me a solemn promise 
 that in using this narrative I would never divulge the family name. This 
 promise I have faithfully kept. I will now give you this fragment of human 
 history as I have given it to many thousands from the lecture platform : 
 
 Their union was blessed with only one child. He was the idol of a happy 
 home. The mother was a church woman and very devoted to church work. 
 The father was a very thrifty business man, so devoted to business matters 
 that he allowed his son to grow to young manhood without giving him a 
 father's attention and the counsel and advice which every boy should receive 
 from his father. Even Sundays, God's day of rest, was occupied by the 
 
 father in reviewing his books and looking over the business affairs of a bank 
 of which he was an officer. He accumulated wealth until he became a mil- 
 lionaire, but sitting there in the ashes of his old age he declared that money 
 getting had been the curse of his life and he would gladly give up every 
 dollar, if in so doing he could buy the privilege of looking again in the face 
 of his boy. While every hour of his life was devoted to accumulating money, 
 his boy was going to the devil through the agencies of dissipation. At last 
 their eyes were opened to the danger that surrounded their son — they had 
 been careless. He was their son, with good loyal Puritan blood in his veins, 
 therefore he would do nothing wrong. They allowed him to seek his own 
 companions and form his own environment, and he had drifted from his 
 better moorings and gone the way of many thousands, through the cigarette, 
 the billiard hall, the gambling room, the saloon and the brothel; he had fallen
 
 11 
 
 dead in love with sin. When he should have been the mainstay uf his 
 father in business matters he was dissipated and worthless. In an un- 
 expected moment when the old father was engaged in a business con- 
 versation in the private rooms of the bank the son entered; his eyes were 
 wild and the fumes of rum upon his breath. He instantly informed 
 his father that he was sick and must have money to pay for treatment 
 The father was angered and spoke harshly to his son for interrupting 
 an important business discussion. This angered the son and he spoke to his 
 father in this manner: "I know I am bad and unworthy, but I am not alone 
 to blame for it. I have never had a father's counsel or advice. You never 
 had an hour to give me, not even on the Sabbath day. You never warned 
 me against evil companions or the consequences of social sin, and after four 
 years of dissipation I have come back to you, rotten from the top of my head 
 to the bottom of my feet with the vile disease of the harlot. You can't dis- 
 miss me now for I am suffering the tortures of the damned. The hair is falling 
 from my head, great sores cover my body, and unless you furnish me money 
 to go to the Hot Springs of Arkansas and be cured I will blow my brains 
 out before sundown." The father was alarmed, and for cause. He dismissed 
 all business engagements and hurried with his boy to the family physician 
 who advised that the boy be allowed to go to the Springs that he might have 
 the benefit of the curative waters there. He received the treatment of this 
 famous resort for a year and came home believing that he was a sound man. 
 He refused to meet his old companions and settled down into a steady busi- 
 ness life and became an officer in his father's bank. "How happy we were," 
 declared the old man at this part of his story. "I felt my boy was safe, that 
 in business matters he would follow in my footsteps and take up the responsi- 
 bilities as coming age compelled me to lay them down. He won the love of 
 a beautiful, accomplished girl, and made her his wife. Three years had gone 
 by since his return from the Springs. From every evidence ho was a cured 
 and sound man. We cannot forget how sweet and fresh his girl bride looked 
 that June morning, with the roses in her hands and on her hair, when she 
 stood at the altar of the church and gave to our boy her pure young life. 
 And how strong and brave and manly our boy looked. Our lives were all 
 very happy that day for all seemed well and the future secure." 
 
 Until this time the gray haired old mother sat in an easy chair and 
 listened while her husband unfolded the terrible narrative, but she could 
 stand it no longer, and with tears streaming from her eyes, she left the room. 
 Oh! the mothers whose hearts are breaking tonight because of the terrible 
 places of sin. The young huisband built a beautiful home for his young 
 wife. There was not a cloud to mar the sunshine of their happy lives. Time 
 passed by and all hearts became anxious, for the young and beautiful wife 
 must pass down into the valley of the shadow of death and usher in a new 
 life. 
 
 Stitch by stitch she had prepared its little garments and every stitch 
 was a stitch of love. But oh! what a fearful thing awaited them. The babe 
 was born but it was a syphilitic babe. The flesh was eaten from the tips of 
 its little fingers. One ear was eaten away, and the nose and upper lip was 
 partially gone. It lived a few hours and died; its little body was covered 
 with the terrible ulcerous sores like the ones on its father's body before he 
 went to the Springs for treatment. The treatment had cured him only on
 
 12 
 
 the surface. Death lurked in every drop of blood that flowed in his poor 
 polluted body. "Can you save my wife?" asked the young husband, for he 
 now understood it all and was suffering terrible mental agony. "One chance 
 in a thousand — her condition is bad," was the doctor's frank reply. 
 
 A week of suffering, terrible, even worse than the agonies of hydrophobia ; 
 the windows of this rich home here drawn tight, but at midnight the 
 neighbors a block away were aroused from their slumbers by the fearful 
 shrieks of this poor girl wife dying a syphilitic death. They put the bridal 
 robes back on her poor body, the roses back in her hands and on her hair, 
 and there she lay sleeping, the sleep eternal, looking as sweet and fresh as 
 she looked just one year before at the sacred shrine where she pledged her 
 love and lovalty to the man who had murdered her by the dissipated life he 
 had lived while "sowing his wild oats." Early in the morning they placed her 
 in a beautiful casket, my boy stood by her side and could not be taken away. 
 Such agony I have never seen before, nor since. After he had stood by the 
 silent form of his beautiful wife for many hours, and after others had failed 
 to lead him away from her, I approached him and spoke to him. He was 
 looking down into her face, his eyes were wild, I walked up to him and spoke 
 and laid my hand on his left shoulder and was going to place my arm about 
 him, for his face was white as ashes and I believed he was going to fall. 
 His eyes had hardly closed in sleep since the night of his baby's birth. His 
 right hand hung below the casket and I did not see that it firmly gripped 
 the handle of a Colts revolver, but when I interrupted him he threw the 
 muzzle of the gun against his head and pulled the trigger. The blood gushed 
 from a great hole in his temple and he fell bleeding and dying into my arms. 
 
 A year almost to a day, from the time we saw them stand at the mar- 
 riage altar, we laid them to rest; side by side they sleep out yonder. We 
 keep their graves green, and every year on the bridal day we lay flowers on 
 their graves. It is all we can do. My poor wife has never smiled since her 
 boy died. All the sunshine has gone out of our lives. God, I hope, has for- 
 given me for the carelessness in the bringing up of my boy. But oh! young 
 man, go on in this work. Tell this history wherever you can. Plead with 
 fathers to guard their boys from these temptations, and plead with the boys 
 to shun the life that leads to sure destruction." 
 
 I could weave in many details if time would permit, but may the God of 
 Heaven, who sees all and knows all, have mercy on the officers of the law 
 who have forgotten Him; who have forgotten their oaths of office; who have 
 blood upon their hands, because they have the power, the law and the 
 authority, and refuse to use it, refuse to close such places as described in 
 this chapter, places that spread diseases worse than leprosy into the homes 
 and lives of God's innocent children, causing them to die. It is murder, and 
 the most cowardly form of murder. It is letting these lawless places run, 
 knowing that their existence means sure death and untold agony to innocent 
 wives and children. 
 
 You, minions of the law, Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Sheriff, Mr. 
 Prosecuting Attorney, when you refuse to close these places, is not the blood 
 of their murdered victims upon your hands? Answer this question fairly, 
 squarely and honestly. You dare not do it. You are guilty and you know 
 it. They destroy human life and you know it. Where does Madam Paine 
 get her authority to run the largest brothel in the state outside of Chicago?
 
 13 
 
 She is running an illegal institution. One word from any official in authority 
 and she must close. What are the relations between this brothel Madam, 
 this female outlaw and the officials of Springfield that this word is not 
 spoken? 
 
 THE WAIL OF A LOST SOUL 
 
 It has been no pleasant duty to probe the iniquities of Springfield vices 
 which flourish under a wide open policy. I have personally visited almost 
 every den in the city. I have heard the obscene and vile language of the 
 beasts of the bar-room until sick at heart, I have wondered how man, made 
 in the image of God, could become so vile and pass down so far below the 
 brute creation. I have studied Springfield life in that part of the city where 
 the lights burn brightest at midnight. In the interest of truth, that I might 
 tell honest fathers and pure mothers of the danger which imperils the future 
 of their girls and boys, I became for a short time the companion of the 
 brutish, pimply madmen, the common patrons of the house of shame. They 
 never speak to their victims but in the dialect of Hell and never touch them 
 but to wound. In houses that gave evidence of wealth I drew from parched 
 and bloated lips the stories of these girls, stories that would kindle pity in 
 Hell. 
 
 Talking with a girl that had not long ago been very beautiful, I spoke 
 to her of the purity of her girlhood and the love of a faithful mother. "For 
 God's sake, stop," she said. ''I don't want any religion. Christ is all right, 
 but men are the devil. I was a farmer's daughter, a good pure girl and went 
 to Sunday School. But it is no use talking to me now. There is no hope for 
 such as I. I have given up hope. I am going down hill as fast as possible. 
 I use cigarettes, opium, and drink all the liquor I can get." Here she broke 
 off with the information that if I was a preacher I might as well trouble her 
 no more. "You would be too good to get me a bottle?" "I might if you 
 would give me a history of your life. But doesn't beer get stale? Wouldn't 
 you like something a little better? Got any benedictine?" Her eyes bright- 
 ened and I knew I was on the trail of valuable information. In a few 
 minutes she stood before me holding in her hand a stained glass bottle. On 
 its outer wrapper was clearly revealed a picture of the Savior of man, the 
 shepherd's crook and the cross of Christ. Benedictine wine, made by the 
 Benedictine Monks, with all the insignia of the Church of Rome on every 
 bottle. The church of the Pope is making millions as the manufacturer of 
 the common beverage of the house of shame. The Mother of Harlots has 
 added the crowning infamy to an already infamous record. And yet there 
 are temperance people, who in their ignorance of the deceptions of Romanism 
 will give out mild apologies for this church drunken with the blood of the 
 martyrs of Jesus. 
 
 All about me as I write are scattered the bottles and decanters containing 
 this criminal product of modern Romanism. Each bottle carries proof as to 
 its origin and character. "It was a touching story and as tragic as life that 
 she told me at midnight in that tawdry parlor. The jingling piano was 
 going in the next room where the girls were dancing, and the air was full 
 of the reek of beer and tobacco. She told her story without any pretense or 
 appeal for sympathy, and I give it here as a page, soiled and grimy, but
 
 14 
 
 nevertheless a veritable page torn from the book of life." 
 
 "I was born in a village in Wisconsin, the oldest of a family of seven 
 children. There was a mortgage on our little home and father was trying 
 to lift it. I decided to help my parents, and corresponding with an employ- 
 ment agency in Chicago, secured a clerkship in a department store in that 
 city at a salary of $4 per week. Board was secured in a cheap lodging house 
 at $3 per week. This -left one dollar per week for laundry and all personal 
 expenses. After three months a raise of 50 cents per week was secured. By 
 renting a room in partnership with another girl and living on bread and 
 water and depriving myself of every luxury and most of the comforts of life, 
 it was possible to send home to mother one dollar each week. 
 
 A young man came to my counter almost every day, making slight pur- 
 chases* and using the time while waiting for change to cultivate my acquain- 
 tance. After a long time he asked my company for the evening and we went 
 to the theater, afterward he gave me an oyster supper. Though he turned 
 out to be a perfect devil, still I remember how I longed for his visits, for 
 they came like rays of sunshine into my poor life. Finally he took me out 
 two or three times a week. From what he told me I thought him to be the 
 son of a rich Chicago merchant. He was very kind and lavish with his 
 money. He offered me relief as he knew my life was a struggle. His money 
 was refused as I had no right to take it, then he told me that he loved me; 
 all seemed fair, for we had been in each other's company almost constantly 
 for over six months and I gave him in return the rich strong love of my 
 pure young girlhood. Then there came one of the darkest hours of my life. 
 Had I known more of the world I would have broken off the engagement 
 and been saved. He asked that I surrender on the altar of man's lust the 
 jewel of a woman's soul, her purity and self respect. I cried until it seemed 
 my heart would break. Then he petted me and asked me to forgive him, 
 and we would soon be married and be happy. I objected to the marriage 
 being performed without my parents' knowledge, but he reasoned with me 
 that he had planned a great surprise for my parents. That as soon as we 
 were married I could use his money and send enough home to lift the 
 mortgage on my father's farm. That night he took me to some beautiful 
 rooms and introduced me to the man they called the preacher. The other 
 two gentlemen were to be witnesses. The elegant lady to whom he intro- 
 duced me, he said was his sister. We were married. Three weeks later he 
 left me. The whole thing was a mock marriage. The Madam deliberately 
 told me I was deserted and was the inmate of a house of shame and was 
 not too good to stay and do what the other girls were doing. 
 
 Day by day I walked the stony streets looking in the faces of men, hoping 
 to find the devil, for I loved him still. One night my strength gave away 
 and I sank down in the street. Two girls — common street walkers — found 
 me and their hearts were stirred with pity. They took me to their rooms, 
 and there I stayed until baby was born. How glad I have always been that 
 it only lived a few days; they took the little thing and buried it in the 
 potter's field. (At this part of her story her parched lips trembled with 
 emotion.) When able to travel the girls gave me the money and I went out 
 to find work. Day after day I searched for something to do until my last 
 cent was gone and I stood hungry and alone on the street. I could not go 
 back to my mother, I was not fit.
 
 15 
 
 That night I walked the streets cold, hungry, and with a breaking* heart. 
 A policeman approached me and asked me who I was. When he saw my 
 distress he took me to a house, ordered me cared for and on the following day 
 he called on me, and for food and clothes, my starving body consenting, I 
 became a mistress. As soon as I could get a little money I left him and 
 went to Milwaukee. Here I got work as a dish washer in a restaurant. 
 After a while, my personal appearance being greatly improved, a position 
 was secured as a waiter in a first-class hotel. Things looked brighter now. 
 A letter was written home, the first one for over two years. I was thoroughly 
 determined to reform. One day my heart sank within me. There came 
 into the dining room a man who used to frequent the house where I staid 
 while the mistress of the Chicago policeman. I determined to be brave. 
 When the traveling man settled his bill he said: "Where did you get that 
 girl? She in a prostitute from a house in Chicago." I lost my position, and 
 homeless and friendless, I again tramped the streets of the city. I could 
 not go to mother for her pure eyes would have detected what I was and it 
 would have killed her. At this part of her history the tears rolled down 
 her powdered face, and as she wiped them away she said : 'They are the first 
 ones for a good while, for when I think of my baby or my mother I rush for 
 liquor.' Then all the truth relative to her lost condition crowded in upon 
 her mind and she cried : "Oh ! God what have they done with my life." 
 Then she poured great drafts of the liquor down her throat. "After I lost 
 my position in the hotel I lost hope, I went straight to a house of shame, 
 after a year in Milwaukee, I went back to Chicago, then I came to Spring- 
 field. The majority of men who come to see us here are drunken and brutal. 
 I have lost hope, am drinking harder every day and going to the devil as 
 fast as I can. It is only the opinion of a lost and fallen woman, but a man 
 who will ruin a girl's life ought to be hung for it, for it is worse than mur- 
 der." 
 
 I thanked her kindly for her narrative, but when I tried to intimate that 
 there was hope for even such as she, and if she would make an honest effort 
 I would send her to friends — she shut me off quick and sharp. She poured 
 another glass of Benedictine down her throat and touched a match to a 
 dainty cigarette which she had carefully rolled while talking. Passing out 
 I looked back at her, and through wreaths of smoke saw the outlines of a 
 face, beautiful still, even in its dissipation. 
 
 "ONE OF THE IMAGES YE HAVE MADE OF ME." 
 
 HUMAN AGONY REPRESENTED IN DOLLARS THAT ARE 
 
 BLISTERED WITH TEARS AND THAT DRIP 
 
 WITH BLOOD 
 
 What is the attitude of modern municipal government toward that vast 
 accumulation of destroyed womanhood that populates the red light districts? 
 Like the inhuman Spanish monster, Weyler, the modern city boss establishes 
 a policy of reconcentration, and forces these lost units of the human race 
 into specified territories known as "red light districts," there to tread the 
 cinder path of sin down to Death and Hell without a ray of hope in all the 
 midnight of their poor blackened and blasted lives. And worse still, they
 
 16 
 
 brand every shattered body with a price. Municipal grafters levy a black- 
 mail upon them and sets the price for which they may, in the markets of 
 shame, sell both soul and body to libertines "who never touch them but to 
 wound and who never speak to them but in the dialect of Hell." Their 
 treasuries are polluted with the shame-gold of the brothel and the blood 
 money of the saloon. 
 
 Your covenant with death shall be disannulled and your agreement with 
 Hell shall not stand. — Isaiah. 
 
 Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood and establish a city by in- 
 iquity. — Habakkuk. 
 
 Of all the low, infamous grafts in practice, the one that extorts money 
 from tha fallen woman is the most infamous and unholy. A clan of muni- 
 cipal grafters who will do this are the most conscienceless pack of scoundrels 
 that ever cut a throat or scuttled a ship. All students of social problems 
 know that these poor women, most of them victims of too much faith in man, 
 suffer every day of their lives all the tortures and miseries of the damned, 
 the infamous vultures who fatten on the graft-money of the brothel eat 
 human flesh and sail on seas of human blood. Every dollar is blistered with 
 tears and represents untold agony crushed from human hearts. 
 
 There never was, in the lowest regions of the most orthodox-Hell, a pit 
 half hot enough to sufficiently punish the officials of a city who are so utterly 
 lost to every instinct, human and divine, as to go into a compact like that. 
 
 In Springfield scores of these shambles of shame run every day and night 
 of the year in absolute violation of the ordinances of the city and the laws 
 of the state. 
 
 Vast property, mammoth buildings, a large section of the city, scores of 
 human lives are represented in Springfield's red light district. 
 
 This whole thing runs in violation of both state and federal law. 
 " And this has continued until Springfield has gained the reputation of 
 being one of the most lawless and notorious cities of its size in the United 
 States. 
 
 But you say, the brothel is a necessary evil and what can we do? No! 
 In God's universe there is no such thing as a "necessary evil." No city, 
 state, or federal government has any moral or legal right to go into partner- 
 ship with that which blights character and ruins life. Any system of official 
 license is virtually an authorization of vice by the state. "This is the way, 
 walk ye in it" would be written up over the broad and easy way which leads 
 to the house of debauchery. 
 
 The immediate consequence of any system of regulation or municipal 
 authorization of houses of debauchery, is to teach every citizen that vice is 
 necessary and lawful, and to encourage the delusion that freedom from 
 disease is guaranteed to debauches by the government, as many of the cities 
 force the inmates to submit to a physical examination at the time of collect- 
 ing the blackmail fees or fines that they may be given a certificate by the 
 Police Doctor, certifying that they are free from venereal diseases. This 
 system is detested by all inmates, as it makes them the bondslaves of the 
 police doctors. This is an outrageous farce, as no system of examination 
 can ever succees in keeping down these loathsome diseases when applied to 
 only one sex. Under and city law, but with a perfect knowledge of all
 
 17 
 
 state and city officials and patrolled by the police every hour both day and 
 
 night. 
 
 The Mayor, the City Attorney, every Alderman, every Policeman, and the 
 officials of every city court, the Governor of the state, the County Prosecuting 
 Attorney, the Sheriff of Sangamon County and every Deputy Sheriff possesses 
 absolute knowledge as to what is going on. They know exactly what the 
 law is and they know to what a fearful and wholesale extent the law is 
 being violated. 
 
 The Mayor of the city and the Governor of the state and all their sub- 
 ordinate officers took an oath to uphold the majesty of the Law. but the 
 oath of office died on their faithless lips, and the law they swore to uphold 
 has been trampled beneath the feet of saloon bosses and brothel madams. 
 
 Will these faithless officials please explain to the people, the tax payers 
 whose servants they are, under what kind of an agreement, understanding 
 or midnight compact these saloons and brothels are allowed to violate, under 
 the eyes of the police every law of God and man? 
 
 The beer dive flaunts its defiance of law in the face of Christian civil- 
 ization. 
 
 The brothel flaunts its shame in the face of decency. 
 
 All this in violation of the laws of the state and city. 
 
 Under this system the officers of the law become school masters to lead 
 men to the brothel. 
 
 Many cabmen are the active agents of the house of ill-repute. Their 
 carriages are seen late at night in front of theaters, oyster houses, wine 
 rooms, saloons, dance halls, and at almost any time in the late hours of the 
 night rows of cabs stand in front of Madam Browning's palatial brothel. 
 A libertine has succeed in getting an innocent girl under the influence of 
 wine, calls a cab under the pretense of taking her home, tips the driver, and 
 after a slow drive of a couple of hours the scoundrel has overcome his vic- 
 tim, whose sense of propriety was benumbed by wine, and he has accom- 
 plished what ought to send a pang to his accursed heart, and the girl goes to 
 an assignation house and a life of shame, and the scoundrel goes back into 
 society and is soon on the trail of another victim. 
 
 The procuress plies her trade in Springfield as in all other similar cities. 
 They haunt the dance halls, theaters and parks. There are girls in Spring- 
 field houses of ill-fame who have been taken there by plausible ladies who 
 know of such nice lodgings, or some other specious reason. They did not 
 know until it was too late. These girls are as innocent of any wish to go 
 wrong as the deer is innocent of any wish to be shot or snared. 
 
 Another method of railroading girls to the brothel is here revealed : 
 "I lived at home," said a girl in a house of ill-repute, "and had a mother and 
 sister to support on $5 a week. One time, my mother got ill and I could not 
 get the necessary medicine for her. Then a young man whom I knew, and 
 who came quite frequently to my counter to buy goods, offered me a good 
 deal of money if I would go with him to an assignation house. I wanted 
 the money for my mother and so I went. Having gone once, I went again, 
 until I gradually drifted into a house of prostitution." 
 
 "Once they are started either by force, fraud, or ill-luck, there is no way of 
 getting back. They have to go through with it to the bitter end. They 
 bury the memories of the past by drinking the waters of that temporary
 
 18 
 
 leath which men call strong drink, and quiet their conscience by the thought 
 that after all they are no worse than the highly respectable men who visit 
 them, and what they are able by suffering these things, to help relatives who 
 would otherwise often be in great straits." 
 
 Our great cities have become foreign colonies on American soil. They 
 are the hotbeds of vice. The cheap Sunday excursion, the beer garden, the 
 saloon, the dime-novel den where vile literature is sold, the immoral hotel, 
 the dance hall, the gambling den, the brothel, the Papal parochial school 
 where thousands of children are taught loyalty to a foreign potentate, are 
 all kindred evils, either one of which would die if not supported by the 
 others. 
 
 "It is the duty of the government to make it easy for the people to do 
 right and hard for them to do wrong," said Wm. Gladstone, of England. 
 Springfield's city government reverses this policy and offers the people abso- 
 lute liberty to plunge into every form of licentiousness and debauchery 
 known to modern life. 
 
 The fair haired boy with bright blue eyes and noble brow who says 
 farewell to mother and comes across the hill and field into the great city to 
 win fame and fortune, will find on almost every corner and at every turn, 
 the open door of the drink shop with its blear-eyed, bull-necked, pot-bellied 
 agent of the city who has paid the price asked at the city hall for the piece 
 of paper which gives him the right to debauch that boy and send him back 
 to his mother's arms a ruined and bloated wreck. And upstairs, and in the 
 rear, and at the side door, he will find her whose feet take hold upon Hell. 
 Surely we have discarded the theory of Gladstone, and the philosophy of 
 Burke, who said "What is morally wrong can never be politically right." 
 
 We have traded the Puritan Sabbath of our fathers for the German 
 beer garden. We have traded the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost for 
 the blessed trinity of beer cheese, and sauerkraut. 
 
 In the streets, in hotels, in the operas, in boarding houses, in saloons — 
 everywhere — one is confronted with the professional prostitute. 
 
 The social evil has become deeply rooted in American life. There are 
 300,000 "felled" girls in our country, one-half of them from Christian homes 
 or Sunday Schools, and the rest from country homes. They have been gotten 
 into the haunts of shame through the trickery and wiles of those engaged in 
 the "Traffic in Girls" which is caused by the traffic in drink. Their average 
 life is five years — 60,000 girls dragged down to this life every year; 5,000 
 a month; 170 every day, or a young life blasted in our blessed land every 
 eight minutes! 
 
 Is there any American citizen so insane that he will for one minute be- 
 lieve that American women are so bad that they are voluntarily going to 
 the bow-wows at the rate of 60,000 every year without some powerful agency 
 to assist them on the downward trend? Not by any means. There is in 
 this country an organization known as the "Traffic in Girls," which buys and 
 sells in the haunts of shame, thousands of white slaves every year. 
 
 Prostitution is organized and millions of dollars are expended annually 
 in keeping up the business and equipping new houses. This thing goes on 
 because twelve million voters, and four million of them Christian (?) fathers 
 are by their ballot, authorizing 250,000 saloonkeepers to pour the liquid 
 damnation of intoxicating drink down the throats of their own sons and
 
 19 
 
 daughters, and every one knows the physiological influence of alcohol. It 
 always goes to the base of the brain, the cerebellum, to the lower nature, 
 and those men who are naturally chivalrous in their feelings toward 
 womanhood (as most men are), when alcohol takes possession of brain 
 and heart, there leaps to the lips the unclean jest, and there enters the heart 
 the unholy motive towards woman. 
 
 When strong drink goes, the house of shame will go. Once, in a large 
 city, it was determined that no beer at a dollar a bottle, or champagne 
 at five dollars a bottle, should be sold in houses of shame, and the keepers of 
 these houses went to the mayor and told him they could not carry on their 
 business unless allowed to sell liquor. "Why can't you?" asked the mayor. 
 "Because men would not do such things if they were not under the influence 
 of drink, and we must sell them drink or our business is ruined." 
 
 From these poor white slaves the task-masters of Springfield extort 
 blackmail in the form of dollars that are coined from the blood and bone and 
 sinew of mothers' girls. 
 
 One leaves this district with a soul filled with anguish. If the pen of a 
 Hugo could paint the misery of these brothel blocks of Springfield life just 
 as it is lived year after year, with its grist of death and misery, it would 
 rival Dante's Inferno. 
 
 BENEDICTINE 
 
 What is it? It is the most infamous concoction that was ever invented 
 to assist the Devil in the destruction of the integrity of the human race. 
 It is a creation of the Benedictine Monks of the Roman Catholic Church. 
 I have in my possession a collection of the bottles and printed literature 
 used to advertise this infamous stuff. It is a criminal product of the Roman 
 Catholic Church and relies altogether on the saloon and brothel as dis- 
 tributing stations. Nearly every saloon carries it in stock. The bottles can 
 be seen behind the bars of the dive saloons of Springfield, especially in the 
 Eagle and establishments of that class. The Monks hold the secret of its 
 compounding. As a beverage it instantly kills all that is good and noble in 
 man and arouses in him every desire that is low, vulgar and criminal. 
 
 It is used for the purpose of arousing an abnormal criminal passion. 
 It has been the great curse of the black race in the Southern states. The 
 Southern cross road beer dive has been one of its great market centers. Since 
 the Civil War 35,000 white women have suffered the terrible agony of out- 
 rage at the hands of black fiendg and in nearly every case these black men 
 were transformed into fiends by the use of this drug. Southern custom has 
 established an unwritten law to the effect that if a black man sullies the body 
 of a white woman he must die without the expense of Judge or Jury. The 
 Negro enjoys life as well as any other man and is not going to commit 
 suicide by becoming a rapist if he is in his right mind. These crimes com- 
 mitted by patrons of the saloon who become doped with this stuff until 
 reason is dethroned and a criminal, unnatural passion takes possession of 
 the man and drives him to the commission of a crime that he would never 
 commit if in his right mind. 
 
 In my travels through the South I have made it a point to investigate, 
 and I h^ve found this drug on sale wherever there was a saloon to sell it. 
 It is noticeable that the crime of rape has decreased just in the proportion
 
 20 
 
 that the saloons have been closed. When the saloon goes Negroes will be- 
 come useful citizens, and our families will be safe. 
 
 The drug is also used by dissolute women to dope the fools who are de- 
 coyed into their tawdry parlors. The man then becomes an easy victim of 
 the siren, who empties his pocketbook and then kicks him out into the street, 
 where a policeman finds him and lands him in the city prison. 
 
 The main manufacturing center of this stuff is FaComp, France. A. 
 LaGrand Anine is the principal distributor and importer. Millions of bot- 
 tles are imported into this country every year and finds a sale through 
 American saloons and brothels. It threatens to become to American what 
 Absinthe has been to many European countries. 
 
 You are instructed that on the wax seal covering the cork you will find 
 an image of Christ bearing a shepherd's crook ; that on the side of each bot- 
 tle will be found the Papal coat of arms, breast plate, Pope's Tiara, Shep- 
 herd's crook and the Shamrock; that on the leaden ligature surrounding the 
 neck of the bottle will be found the following: fVERITABLE BENE- 
 DICTINE MONK LIQUEURf; that on each side of the bottle will be found 
 the initials of a Latin Church maxim — D. O. M., which in Latin 
 reads as follows: "Deo Optimo Maximo;" in English, "To God the 
 Greatest and the Best." On the back of each bottle we find in raised glass 
 type the following fBenedictinef. Every bottle of this most infamous stuff 
 is literally covered with insignia of 'the Roman Catholic Church. 
 
 A large wrapper is found around every bottle asi it is removed from the 
 shipping case. This wrapper contains instructions in Latin, English, Ger- 
 man, French and Spanish as to where to examine the bottles to be sure you 
 are purchasing the genuine products of the Benedictine Monks of the Holy 
 Roman Catholic Church. These Imps of Hell seem to fear rivalry in their 
 infamous business. 
 
 The Roman Church will stoop to any depths of infamy for gold, and 
 she is reaping a golden harvest be debauching thousands of our American 
 men and boys through the sale of her criminal concoctions. And in the face 
 of these terrible and startling truths we have some lukewarm Protestants, 
 some temperance workers and Prohibitionists who are silent on Romanism; 
 who actually bow before the Mother of Harlots, drunken for centuries on the 
 blood of the martyrs of Jesus Christ. 
 
 James Gibbons, John Ireland and all Roman Ecclesiastics have recently 
 declared their vigorous opposition to prohibition of the Gin-Mill. No wonder 
 when 80 per cent of these vile dens are run by Irish Catholic thugs and 
 Rome is making millions of dollars through the sale of her vile poisons. 
 Americans, wake up ! Romanism is the insatiable octopus that is sapping the 
 life blood of the American Republic. 
 
 The Roman Church mobs speakers for telling the truth. 
 
 So does the saloon. 
 
 The Roman Church takes the lives of those who have the courage to ex- 
 pose her iniquities. 
 
 So does the saloon. 
 
 The Roman Church corrupts politics. 
 
 So does the saloon. 
 
 The Roman Church corrupts the morals of the people. 
 
 So does the saloon.
 
 * ■- 
 
 21 
 
 The Roman Church has a close relation to the slums. 
 
 So does the saloon. 
 
 The Roman Church fills the people's minds with superstition. 
 
 The saloon fills their minds with corrupt ideas. 
 
 The Roman Church hates the public school because it teaches the truths 
 of history. 
 
 The saloon hates the public school because it teaches the effects of alcohol 
 on the human system. 
 
 The Roman Church maintains a system of convent prisons where women 
 have been outraged to gratify the lusts of drunken Priests. 
 
 The saloon is responsible for the maintenance of a brothel system where 
 white slave girls are maintained for criminal purposes. 
 
 The Roman Church is foreign to American soil. 
 
 So is the saloon. 
 
 The great majority of Roman Priests are foreigners. 
 
 So are the saloonkeepers. 
 
 The Roman Church robs the people and gives them only poverty in ex- 
 change for their money. 
 
 So does the saloon. 
 
 The stronger the Roman Church the more misery and poverty among the 
 
 people. 
 
 The same is true in regard to the saloon. 
 
 The Roman Church unfurls a foreign flag. 
 
 The saloon fosters the red flag. 
 
 The Roman Church maintains its own system of government. 
 
 If the saloon possessed the power it would annihiliate all government. 
 
 Rome fears the truth. 
 
 The saloon hates the light. 
 
 Rome opposes the Bible in the public schools. 
 
 The saloon opposes it everywhere. 
 
 Most Priests have red noses. 
 
 Bartenders ditto. 
 
 Rome helps no great moral reform. 
 
 The saloon opposes everything good. 
 
 Put a cross on the chimney and a dog collar on the bartender and you 
 have transformed a saloon into a Roman Church. 
 
 I will speak against Romanism as long as I live. 
 
 Because Rome invented every instrument of crime and cruelty with which 
 to search for every nerve of pain in the human body. 
 
 Because the Roman church is a gigantic system of graft, robbing and 
 impoverishing millions of confiding and innocent people in the name of 
 religion. 
 
 Because this rotten system is founded on the erring traditions of men 
 and not the living word of God. 
 
 Because it has bathed the world in the richest blood of Christian man- 
 hood. 
 
 Because it built the Inquisition, the stake, the rack, and the dungeon. 
 
 Because it has arraigned itself in opposition to every righteous principle 
 of government.
 
 22 
 
 Because it is dumping the riffraff of Europe upon our shores and filling 
 our cities with an indigestible horde of fgnorant foreigners. 
 
 Because it insults our flag by unfurling a foreign rag as a substitute for 
 the banner of freedom. 
 
 Because it insults our free schools system by substituting for it a paro- 
 chial school, which is graduating thousands of assassins for future mayors, 
 governors and presidents. 
 
 Because it teaches the boycott and justifies mob rule, which means future 
 strikes to tie up the business and commerce of the nation. 
 
 Because Catholic wards are the slum wards of every city. 
 
 Because Rum, Romanism and Prostitution go hand in hand. 
 
 Because Rome opposes free speech, free press and a free conscience. 
 
 Because Rome is the uncompromising enemy of our free public schools. 
 
 Because Rome places the canon laws of the church above the constitution 
 of the United States. 
 
 Because every priest is an anarchist opposing our free institutions and 
 holding oath-bound allegiance to a foreign potentate. 
 
 Because the Popes of Rome have been the vilest monsters of the world, 
 committing every crime in the calender of error. 
 
 Because Rome blesses saloonkeepers who deal out death and damnation, 
 and at the same time, eternally damns honest parents who send their children 
 to public schools. 
 
 Because Romanism is in the majority in every prison, reformatory and 
 penitentiary in the United States. 
 
 Because Rome gave us Bath House John, Hinkey Dink, Johnny Powers, 
 and ninety per cent of the red-nosed, plug uglies who debauch the politics of 
 our nation. 
 
 Because Rome gave the Molly Maguires, the Clan-na-gaels, the Hiber- 
 nians; and is the spawning bed of crime in this country. 
 
 Because Romanism debauches, damns and destroys the civilization of 
 every nation where it gains control. 
 
 Because a priest will take the last dollar from the bleeding and calloused 
 hand of an Irish widow, to pray the soul of a dead husband out of purgatory, 
 and in so doing becomes an imposter and a humbug. 
 
 Because a Roman priest is no better than a highwayman. A high- 
 wayman puts his pistol in your face and says, "Give me your money or I 
 will blow out your brains," while a priest puts his catechism in your face 
 and says, "Give me your brains and I will blow in your money." 
 
 Because when John L. Sullivan, the supreme bully of the world, was 
 supposed to be dying in a Boston hospital, they performed "extreme unction" 
 on him and declared him fit for heaven. 
 
 Because it endeavors to transplant the word of God with such monstrous 
 absurdities as purgatory, infallibility, auricular confession, image worship, 
 Mary worship, celibacy, transsubstantiation, extreme unction, holy beads, 
 holy grease, holy water, holy scapulars, holy relics, holy prayer books, etc. 
 
 Because it furnished the inhuman monsters who assassinated Carter 
 Harrison, Wm. McKinley and the immortal Lincoln. 
 
 Because authentic history proves that Rome has slain 70,550,114 Pro- 
 testant martyrs, as follows:
 
 
 23 
 
 Killed under Pope Julian 200,000 
 
 By the French Massacre 109,000 
 
 By the wars of Waldenses 150,000 
 
 By the war of Albigenses 150,000 
 
 By Jesuit mobs and tortures 900,000 
 
 By Duke of Alva's orders 136,000 
 
 By tortures of the Inquisition 150,000 
 
 By Irish Massacre 150,000 
 
 By wars of Moors in Spain 1,5000,000 
 
 By wars of Jews in Europe 1,100,000 
 
 In Mexico, 'South America and Cuba 15,000,000 
 
 Under Queen Mary 23,000 
 
 East Indies, Europe, America 50,000,000 
 
 In Mexico in the year 1895 by torture and fire 14 
 
 Because through all history she has proven herself the mother of ignor- 
 ance, intolerance and superstition. 
 
 Because the Roman Catholic church is today what she always was — the 
 intolerant, blood-thirsty tiger. On her own testimony she cannot change. 
 
 "Et Semper Eadem." 
 
 For these and a thousand other reasons, I will, while I live, hold up the 
 glories of Protestantism and oppose and denounce the infamies of Romanism. 
 
 THE SPRINGFIELD RIOTS 
 
 A mob is a sad discord in American civilization. It is the concentrated 
 essence of Anarchy and fiendish malice. It is the vilest viper that ever 
 reared its hydra head in the atmosphere of a free nation. Any individual 
 who participates in a mob or by word or deed fans the fury of the mob be- 
 comes an Anarchist, red handed and damnable and forfeits his right to live 
 in a free country. The mob raves, it does not reason. It punishes the in- 
 nocent with the guilty. It unnecessarily endangers life and property. It 
 goes back beyond the primitive savage for means and methods. It usurps 
 the court and strikes its devilish blows at the very foundations of the nation. 
 It raises its red hand dripping with innocent blood and levels its sword at 
 Columbia's heart. 
 
 The hand of the mob rested on the cruel bludgeon that felled Charles 
 Summer to the floor in the Senate Chamber of the United States. The mob 
 shed the blood of Lovejoy at Alton; endeavored to tear William Lloyd Gar- 
 rison limb from limb in the streets of Boston, and assailed Wendell Phillips 
 and John B. Gough in the Cradle of Liberty. 
 
 There are two forms of Anarchy in this country at the present time 
 which seriously threaten the stability of the Government. 
 
 One is represented by that type of time-serving politician, who, when 
 elected to positions of trust, takes the oath of office to enforce the law and 
 then maliciously and deliberately tramples upon the law and makes it a 
 thing of contempt. The other is represented* by another lawless element 
 which endeavors to administer the law by mob violence. The former Anarch- 
 ist produces the latter. The ignorant rabble learns disregard of law very 
 readily from the illustrious outlaws in office.
 
 24 
 
 Springfield is the state capital of a great and glorious commonwealth. 
 Under the very observation of the Governor this capital city has become 
 notorious as a center for all forms of vice and lawlessness. The mayor's 
 office has been equally blind in relation to the criminal conditions of the city. 
 
 There is a law on the statute books of Illinois and in the ordinance book 
 of Springfield prohibiting houses of shame. Yet in spite of these laws 
 Springfield criminally tolerates one of the most notorious red light districts 
 to be found in any city of its class in the United States. 
 
 Standing in the door of the Police Court of Springfield one can fire a 
 pistol ball over several solid blocks of places of ill-repute ranging from the 
 lowest and dirtiest dives imaginable to the most luxurious and aristocratic 
 palaces of sin. They exist in violation of law, under police surveillance and 
 by virtue of the vilest system of toleration ever devised by the vampires of 
 the under-world. The trend of municipal government seems to be toward 
 grand larceny. 
 
 The State Government is no better. Governor Deneen, though in full 
 knowledge of the lawlessness of the capital city, has offered no protest. 
 And why should he when his picture hung in the windows of the lowest 
 dives in Springfield and Chicago as the favorite candidate of the short hairs 
 and silk stockings during the recent campaign. 
 
 The brothel pimps, gamblers and saloonkeepers lined up for this man 
 because from him they had nothing to fear. 
 
 When Governor Frank J. Hanley of Indiana came to Springfield to 
 speak against the saloons in the Local Option campaign of 1908, Governor 
 Deneen insulted him by refusing to appear on the same platform with him 
 during this great fight for civic righteousness in the capital city of Illinois. 
 
 The most disgraceful spectacle in the history of Illinois was the Yates- 
 Deneen campaign before the primaries. If what these two men have said 
 about each other is true they are the two biggest rascals that ever escaped a 
 felon's cell, and if what they said about each other is not true they should 
 go on record at the two champion liars of this universe. And one of these 
 men, through the difference of good citizens and the unity of bad ones, fills, 
 or tries to fill, the Governor's chair at Springfield. 
 
 Years of lawlessness by Mayors and Governors who refuse to enforce 
 the law, and who for political expediency wink at the men who violate the 
 law, has educated the masses down to a level of their low standard of politi- 
 cal conduct. 
 
 For years the houses of ill-fame have flaunted their brazeness in the face 
 of society in violation of law and with the full consent of the public officials. 
 
 For years the saloons have run with wine rooms in connection, in viola- 
 violation of law and with a full consent of the officials. 
 
 For years the saloons have run with wine rooms inconnection, in viola- 
 tion of law and with full consent of the officials. 
 
 For years the saloons have been selling liquor to minors and habitual 
 drunkards in violation of law and under the observation of the police and 
 with a full knowledge of all city officials. 
 
 For years gambling has flourished in violation of law, under the observa- 
 tion of the police and with full knowledge of the officials. 
 
 For years mere lads in their teens have been patronizing the brothels
 
 25 
 
 under the observation of the police and with a full knowledge of all city 
 officials. 
 
 All these forms of vice and crime run wide open under the toleration and 
 often with the encouragement of state and city officials has been an open 
 school of crime from which the people, the citizenship, have to a fright- 
 ful extent graduated into an utter disregard for law. 
 
 The city has reaped its reward in a mighty whirlwind of death and 
 blood, resulting in a reign of terror, the loss of a vast amount of property, 
 including various places of business, the burning of forty residences and the 
 loss of seven human lives, also the killing of a boy by the military while on 
 their way to the city. 
 
 And still the old conditions prevail. The saloons are still harboring 
 prostitutes. The brothels are still running in the same old shameless man- 
 ner, and municipal reform is needed today as much as ever. 
 
 The better class of citizens in Springfield realize the situation and are 
 fighting for better conditions. 
 
 Hon. E. L. Chapin, president of the Springfield Business Men's Associa- 
 tion, who was chosen as president of the state association of the Y. M. C. A., 
 in his address declared that a cowardly spirit was shown by the officials of 
 Springfield during the recent riots and that the same spirit was much in 
 evidence in the jury box during the trials of those who were charged with 
 having taken an active part in the riots. 
 
 In a few well pointed remarks he stated that the riots had disgraced the 
 fair name of Springfield and hoped that the presence of several hundred 
 Christian young men in the city would have a beneficial influence on its 
 citizens. 
 
 But some who do not care for or respect the tradition and principles of 
 American law and civilization have said that the colored problem entered in- 
 to this situation and altered the case — -not at all. A man is not to blame 
 for the color of his skin, the shape of his nose or the kink in his hair. He 
 is a human being, a creature made by the hand of God, and as an American 
 citizen is entitled to the full protection of the law. 
 
 All men, black and white, should obey the law, and all men, black and 
 white, should be impartially punished when they violate the law. 
 
 All men must stand equally before the law. 
 
 We cannot maintain a government of race distinctions. The sacred dust 
 of Lincoln is at rest under a splendid monument in the suburbs of Spring- 
 field. The pilgrims pause to worship at his shrine. I imagine I see him 
 now, walking the streets of Richmond, laying his hand on the bowed and 
 weeping heads of the freshly emancipated slaves and telling them not to 
 kneel before him, but to stand erect before the world and prove the worth 
 of their freedom. 
 
 Lincoln, the noblest, truest, tenderest man whose feet have pressed the 
 soil of this earth since the sandaled feet of Christ struggled up the rough 
 and stony path of martyrdom on Calvary's brow. He was a friend of the 
 race that has produced a Fred Douglas and a Paul Laurence Dunbar. 
 
 The colored people naturally and justly looked upon Lincoln as their 
 savior, and naturally many hundreds of them were drawn to Springfield, 
 the city honored as the resting place of him who broke the fetters from 
 their limbs. These colored people settled in certain neighborhoods through-
 
 26 
 
 out the city. When the eternal greed for gold caused a chain of low, vicious 
 dives to be planted in these localities, and naturally hundreds of these colored 
 people were debauched and became "undesirable citizens." These same con- 
 ditions would have come about had any other race of people been located in 
 these neighborhoods. No people can maintain their integrity environed by 
 the saloon. 
 
 We have a large class of American citizens who have amassed a con- 
 siderable amount of property, who have good bank accounts; who strut in 
 good clothes, sport in clubs and select society, occupy special boxes at the 
 opera and look pious in the cushioned pews of a fashionable church on Sun- 
 day with Dr. Dodgethetruth for a pastor; who believe in the saloon — not 
 located in their aristocratic neighborhood but located down in the ward 
 where working men and colored people live; for who cares if their sons and 
 daughters are corrupted? 
 
 They believe that the saloon is a financial benefit, inasmuch as it is be- 
 lieved to reduce their taxes and furnish a revenue for the operation of the 
 city government. And by keeping the saloon out of their select localities 
 they imagine that they are escaping its baneful influences. 
 
 Oh! how this illusion would be dispelled my Springfield citizens, if you 
 could have been with me on a midnight tour of inspection through the slums 
 of your city and seen as I did, sons, and sometimes daughters, from the first 
 families of the city treading the very quicksands of Hell, entering the dives, 
 the Chop Suey houses and doing the sights of the red light district. 
 
 In debauching these colored districts a whole city has been debauched, 
 black and white alike. The negro is criticised because of the crimes he com- 
 mitted against womanhood. Alcohol is the direct or indirect cause in nearly 
 every case. In the city of Springfield these dive saloons have been vomiting 
 out upon the streets a lot of young toughs, white brutes or man-animals, 
 who, if they see a negro girl on the streets who is at all attractive in face 
 or form will trail her with vile insults to the very door of her home. All 
 this human depravity comes direct from the saloon. 
 
 The saloon is the cause of Springfield's degradation today. 
 
 The saloon is the cause of mob rule and the loss of life and property. 
 
 The saloon is the cause of corrupt politics. 
 
 The saloon is the cause of a prostituted public conscience. 
 
 The saloon has degraded both black and white citizens and engendered 
 this bitter race hatred. 
 
 The saloon is the school that graduates the thief, the thug, the high- 
 wayman and the murderer. 
 
 The saloon is the home of the lewd picture, the obscene song and the vile 
 story. 
 
 The saloon is the cause of the unspeakable traffic in white slave girls. 
 
 Wipe out the saloon and you settle the race question. Any number of 
 black and white men can live peaceably in this country sober, but no number 
 of black and white men can live in this country peaceably if they are made 
 drunken in the saloon. 
 
 The following from a Springfield Daily shows the manner in which in- 
 jured people are asking the city to make good the losses sustained during 
 the riots. All this expense and litigation might have been saved had the
 
 27 
 
 people some years ago elected honest men to office, enforced the law and 
 closed the dives. 
 
 Damage suits aggregating $50,000 were filed in the Sangamon circuit 
 court by persons who had sustained damage to property at the hands of 
 the mob which ran riot in the city during the nights of August 14 and 15. 
 
 A damage suit for $20,000 was filed by Harry T. Loper against the city 
 of Springfield. Loper is suing for the destruction of his place of business 
 by the rioters on the night of August 14. The entire restaurant, buffet and 
 automobile were destroyed by the mob that had gathered in front of his place 
 to wreak vengeance for taking two negro prisoners out of the city. 
 
 William Smith, Sr., and William Smith, Jr., both filed suits against the 
 city of Springfield for $5,000 each. The parties claim that they were in- 
 jured during the riot. Oswald Donnigan, son of William Donnigan, the 
 negro lynched the night of August 15, would like to collect $5,000 for injuries 
 sustained on the night of August 15, during the riot. He claims he was shot 
 that night by members of the mob. 
 
 Emma Ballard, Blanche Ballard and Marie Ballard sue Jacob Olion, et al, 
 for $5,000 for selling liquor to Jos James, who later killed their husband and 
 father. 
 
 Rollin G. Sturgiss, the waiter at Loper's restaurant, who was injured 
 on the night of the riot in front of the restaurant, sued the city for $5,000. 
 
 I will close the chapter with the brave, strong words of Frank J. Hanley 
 of Indiana. 
 
 "I hate the traffic in intoxicating liquors. I hate it for its arrogance. 
 I hate it for its hypocrisy. I hate it for its craft and false pretense. I hate 
 it for its commercialism. I hate it for its greed and avarice. I hate it for 
 its sordid love of gain at any price. I hate it for its domination in politics. 
 I hate it for corrupting influence in civic affairs. I hate it for its incessant 
 effort to debauch the suffrage of the country; for the cowards it makes of 
 public men. I hate it for its utter disregard of law. I hate it for its ruth- 
 less trampling of the solemn compacts of state constitutions. I hate it 
 for the load it straps to labor's back; for the palsied hands it gives to toil; 
 for its wounds to genius; for the tragedy of its might-have-beens. I hate 
 it for the human wrecks it has caused. I hate it for the alms-houses it 
 peoples; for the prisons it fills; for the insanity it begets; for its countless 
 graves in Potter's fields. I hate it for the mental ruin it imposes upon its 
 victims; for its spiritual blight; for its moral degradation. I hate it for the 
 crimes it has committed. I hate it for the homes it has destroyed. I hate 
 it for the hearts it has broken. I hate it for the malice it has planted in the 
 hearts of men — for its poison, for its bitterness — for the dead sea fruit 
 with which it starves their souls. 
 
 "I hate it for the grief it causes womanhood — the scalding tears; the 
 hopes deferred; the strangled aspirations; the burdens of want and care. 
 
 "I hate it for 1 the heartless cruelty to the aged, the infirm and the help- 
 less ; for the shadow it throws upon the lives of children ; for its monstrous 
 injustice to little ones. 
 
 "I hate it as virtue hates vice; as truth hates error; as righteousness 
 hates sin; as justice hates wrong; as liberty hates tyranny; as freedom hates 
 despotism."
 
 28 
 THE WHISKEY DEVIL 
 
 The aristocratic den is the most dangerous of the two. Men and boys 
 who have self-respect will enter the high-toned place, but will not enter 
 the low dive. The dive saloon finishes the work the high-toned saloon has 
 
 commenced. . , 
 
 For every dollar received by the government as a license revenue tor the 
 liquor traffic, the taxpayers of the nation are put to an expense of ten dollars 
 to care for the orphans, paupers, criminals, and epileptics resulting directly 
 
 from the drink traffic. ji.i_.lx. 
 
 Their revenue is the bribe money that buys the right to debauch the 
 
 Tuition's conscience. 
 
 Their millions is but the shame-gold blistered with the hot tears that have 
 fallen from the eyes of millions of broken-hearted wives and mothers. 
 
 The clink of the distiller's gold may drown the orphan's cry, and the 
 widow's moan, but in the hour of death this King of Hell's worse business, 
 in the Gethsemane agony of a tortured conscience, will see on his own hands 
 the red blood of rum-murdered victims. 
 
 In the splendid words of Robert Ingersoll : "I believe that from the time 
 it issues from the coiled and poisonous worm in the distillery until it empties 
 into the hell of death, dishonor and crime, it demoralizes everybody that 
 touches it, from its source to where it ends." 
 
 "The wreck of a man on the sidewalk." has become a sight so common 
 on the streets of American cities, that the public conscience is seared. In 
 the early morning not long ago as I was passing a low Springfield groggery, 
 the door was thrust open and a man was thrown out upon the walk. He 
 staggered against the building and in a moment fell heavily upon the 
 pavement. A morbid crowd soon gathered. The poor fellow begged for some 
 one to help him toward home, and was answered only by jibes and jeers of a 
 heartless crowd. The lost will-power and manhood of the poor drunkard to- 
 gether with the lack of human sympathy on the part of a large crowd of his 
 fellow citizens made up one of the saddest scenes upon which my eyes ever 
 rested. I learned later that he went about the city earning his drinks by 
 sweeping floors and cleaning spittoons and these words of Lowell came to 
 me as a fitting description of the scene: 
 
 "The good Father of us all had doubtless intrusted to the keeping of 
 this child of His certain faculties of a constructive kind. He had put in him 
 a share of that vital force, the nicest economy of every minute atom of which 
 is necessary to the perfect development of humanity. He had given him a 
 brain and heart and so had equipped his soul with the two strong wings of 
 knowledge and love, whereby it can mount to hang its nest under the eaves 
 of heaven. And this child, so dowered, He had intrusted to the keeping of 
 his vicar, the State. How stands the account of that stewardship? The 
 State, or Society (call it what you will) had taken no manner of thought of 
 him until she saw him swept into the street, the pitiful leavings of last 
 night's debauch, with cigar ends, lemon parings, tobacco quids, slops, vile 
 stenches, and the whole loathsome next morning of the bar-room — an own 
 child of the Almighty God! I remember him as he was brought in to be 
 christened, a ruddy, rugged babe; and now there he wallows, reeking, seeth- 
 ing — the dead corpse, not of a man but of a soul, a putrefying lump, horrible
 
 29 
 
 for the life that is in it. Soon the wind of heaven, that good Samaritan, 
 parts the hair upon his forehead, nor is not too nice to kiss those parched, 
 cracked lips; the morning opens upon him her eyes full of pitying sunshine, 
 the sky yearns down to him, and there he lies fermenting." 
 
 There are a good many such in the great whiskey city of Springfield and 
 in the eternal reckoning someone must render an account. 
 
 The beer garden is another corrupting agency. Rescue missionaries say 
 that in nine months after the beer gardens open, every bed in the inlaying 
 hospital will be occupied by an expectant mother. Springfield has a large 
 number of these immoral resorts. The twin sister of the beer garden is the 
 dance evil. You "don't see any harm in dancing?" All right; but you don't 
 want your girls to dance every year on the free-for-all dance platforms of 
 the summer beer gardens. Besides the open beer garden Springfield can boast 
 of her private dancing schools presided over by cultured (?) dancing 
 masters. The ball room is simply next door to the brothel. If the young 
 women who frequent the dance halls could hear the discussions in the side 
 rooms among the men who swing them in the round dance — and who discuss 
 their good and bad qualities just as a sport will discuss the good and bad 
 qualities of a race horse, no decent woman would ever enter another den of 
 this kind. 
 
 "Once, when upon a slumming trip, a reporter on a large city daily, 
 pointing up to a public ball room where thel blazing lights showed the wirl- 
 ing forms of many couples, locked in each other's embrace, said, "More 
 girls have been ruined through these ball rooms than in any other way except 
 through the wine rooms of our city." 
 
 "What are the amusements of the denizens and patrons of houses of 
 shame? Come with me some night, and what will we find? first, and always, 
 the dance, so much so, that those dens of sin are called dance houses, then 
 card playing, cigarette smoking and wine drinking. 
 
 "One of the ablest women of America says of her own experience in the 
 dance, "I am speaking openly and frankly and when I say I did not under- 
 stand what I felt or what were the real and greatest pleasures I derived 
 from the so-called dancing, I expect to be believed; but if my cheecks grew 
 red with uncomprehended pleasure then, they grow pale with shame today, 
 when I think of it all. It was the physical emotions engendered by the mag- 
 netic contact of strong men that I was enamored of, not of the dance, nor 
 even of the men themselves. Thus I became abnormally developed in my 
 lower nature. I grew bolder, and from being able to return shy glances at 
 first, was soon able to meet more daring ones, until the waltz became to me, 
 and whosoever danced with me, one lingering, sweet and purely sensual 
 pleasure, where heart beat against heart, hand was held in hand, and eyes 
 looked burning words which lips dared not speak. 
 
 "Married now, and with home and children around me, I can at least 
 thank God for the experience which will assuredly be the means of prevent- 
 ing my little daughters from indulging in any such dangerous pleasure. But 
 if a young girl, pure and innocent in the beginning, can be brought to feel 
 what I have confessed to have felt, what must be the experience of a married 
 woman? She knows what every glance of the eye, every bend of the head, 
 every close clasp means, and knowing that, reciprocates it, and is led by 
 swifter step and surer path down the dangerous, dishonorable road.
 
 30 
 
 "I have not hesitated to lay bare what are a young girl's most secret 
 thoughts, in the hope that people will stop and at least consider before hand- 
 ing their lilies of purity over to the arms of any one who may choose to 
 blow the frosty breath of dishonor on their petals." 
 
 If every parent in Springfield would read that startling little book, "From 
 the Ball Room to Hell," the professional dancing master would not have 
 much to do in that city for a while. 
 
 Some time ago a Springfield saloonkeeper hung on the wall of his dive 
 this sign: "All nations welcome except Carrie Nation." Here are a few 
 others which would be very appropriate for this rendezvous of drunken and 
 debauched men : "Suicide Whiskey," "Penitentiary Gin," "Delirium Tremens 
 Cocktails," "Home Wrecking Beer." Put these out Mr. Saloonkeeper in 
 front of your licensed Hell and tell your patrons what you are giving them. 
 
 One thing noticeable in Sprinfield, was the fact that not a prominent 
 hotel could be found which did not have a bar in connection with it. It is 
 a question after all whether the temperance cause has made such great 
 progress. We boast that we have driven Rum from the home, from the 
 church, from the college and from respectable society, but after all we find 
 the drink devil cropping up in every conspicuous place in almost every large 
 city in this country. The saloon industry has secured a majority of the best 
 business locations in our cities. 
 
 It secures a business location in every first-class hotel. This brings the 
 open door of the bar room face to face with thousands of young men who 
 would otherwise remain untempted. 
 
 An organization known as The Gideons has been formed among com- 
 mercial travelers. It is made up of Christian men who pledge themselves 
 not to patronize any hotel which keeps a bar in connection with its place 
 of business. This organization is destined to do much good. In the state of 
 Wisconsin, where they were first organized and where they are the strongest, 
 they have forced 75 hotels to close their bars. It is to be hoped that they 
 will keep up the same vigilance until every hotel in the country has been 
 forced to rid itself of the nauseating bar. 
 
 The mother of the Ganges walks out on the bank of the stream and as a 
 religious sacrifice throws her babe into the open mouth of the crocodile. 
 But we, in this land of civilization, this land of schools and colleges, have for 
 a hundred years been walking out upon the banks of this river of death and 
 throwing our loved ones into the open maws of this drink devil until the 
 haggard jaws of the beastly thing slobbers with the blood and brains of the 
 nation's murdered manhood and womanhood. 
 
 THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH 
 
 There are a few principles or truths that should be studiously inculcated 
 in the Mfe and thought of every American lad. A male prostitute is just 
 as low and vile in the sight of God as a female prostitute. In fact, infinitely 
 lower, because he sins to gratify his own unbridled lust, while she, a poor, 
 deserted, down-trodden unit of the human race, sins for her daily bread. 
 
 Sins to live, and lives because she is afraid to die, and is afraid to die, 
 because she has read in her mother's Bible that beyond the grave there is 
 no hope for such as she.
 
 31 
 
 A young man should never be guilty of any conduct toward any girl, that 
 he would not want another man to be guilty of towards his own sister. 
 
 The man who seduces and betrays a young girl, and then deserts her and 
 sends her out to tread the cinder path of sin, alone, down to death and Hell, 
 without a ray of hope in all the midnight of her ruined and blasted life, has 
 committed a crime that is worse than murder. 
 
 The diseases which come as a sure reward to every man who keeps the 
 company of the harlot, are many, and it may not be amiss to mention a few 
 with some of the complications which accompany these diseases. Among the 
 more common are the the acute anterior and posterior specific urethritis, 
 or gonorrhoea, chronic urethritis, cystitis, membraneous desquamative ure- 
 thritis, urethral abcesses, gonorrhea of the rectum, eye and mouth, orchitis, 
 gonorrheal rheumatism, affections of the heart, spinal troubles, skin diseases, 
 stricture, phimosis vegetations, elephantiasis, and last, but by no means least, 
 syphilis, the most terrible and loathsome of diseases, in some ways resembling 
 leprosy, changing a man or woman into a dangerous animal. It ruins the 
 bodies and lives of innocent offspring even to the third and fourth generation. 
 It affects every tissue, muscles, bones and internal organs with the most aw- 
 ful ulcers. 
 
 Syphilis is so loathsome and vile that the leading physician of Paris 
 said last year. "I would not have a drop or taint of it in my blood for all the 
 wealth of the French Republic." 
 
 The habitue of the brothel should never be tolerated in decent society 
 or allowed to marry a pure and virtuous girl. 
 
 That every house of shame is a spreading station for these vile diseases 
 is clearly proven and any city whose officials sanction or tolerate or touch 
 the polluted money of the harlot, is governed by a most unscrupulous pack 
 of political scoundrels whose hands are red with the blood of murdered 
 innocence. 
 
 That these diseases are prevalent in Springfield, and all other cities that 
 tolerate the brothel, is proven by the large number of physicians who adver- 
 tise as specialists and reap a harvest through the treatment of both male and 
 female prostitutes. 
 
 Springfield as it is today, is corrupt almost beyond the power of language 
 to describe or human imagination to believe. 
 
 Let me say to the clean and virtuous manhood and womanhood of Spring- 
 field, that if I had the power to take you to some eminence and lift the cur- 
 tain and let you behold with astonished gaze the midnight vileness and 
 iniquity of your city, you would stand up and swear before God and high 
 Heaven, to never eat, or drink, or rest, or sleep until the red light district 
 was in smoking ruins. 
 
 Springfield is paying for its sin and shame through the debauching of 
 hundreds of its girls and boys. Let me say to you, Mr. Springfield citizen, 
 that if your boy is debauched, and your girl prostituted, you have no ground 
 for complaint, for through your cowardice and indifference you are making 
 such things possible. When you tolerate these iniquities which have become 
 so deeply intrenched in the civic life of your city, you know that hundreds 
 must go down through sin and shame to death and Hell, and if it is some- 
 one near and dear to you, don't complain, for it has been done by the ver- 
 dict «f your own will.
 
 32 
 
 The following from Pearson's magazine of May, 1910, is so brave and 
 strong and contains so much vital truth that we hope it may be read by 
 every parent in Springfield, that they may know the fruits and dangers to 
 their loved ones that lurk in a Red Light District: 
 
 "If man progresses only by accepting the truth and molding himself ac- 
 cording to that truth, then the American nation is rapidly retrogressing. 
 
 We have had the truth ever before us; it has tried to force itself upon 
 us in painful and distressing evidence, but we keep shutting out all this 
 aid to our bodily well-being by placing a screen of dark-green prejudice in 
 front of vital facts. Prejudice is the hysteric daughter of ignorance; ignor- 
 ance is the bosom friend and ear whisperer of the most destructive- enemy 
 man has today. 
 
 . This enemy is Venereal disease. Among the American people — that is, 
 among all the various nationalities in the United States — venereal disease has 
 been allowed to penetrate unchecked, uncontrolled. It is honey-combing the 
 nation. It has stuck its slimy head into innocent families, left its germs 
 on the infant's lips, coiled its poisonous body around the public high school 
 youth. 
 
 Don't shudder. The latter statement is founded upon professional ex- 
 perience. 
 
 Tuberculosis? Typhoid fever? Why mere incidences in the progress of 
 the world. 
 
 I shall not in this article deal in any manner with statistics ; these have 
 been fully given elsewhere. But just one little example of the progress to- 
 wards a rapidly disintegrating nation, broken homes, childless women and 
 helpless and disgusting creeping things born to be men, will enable you all 
 to see the danger ahead. 
 
 Take a group of one hundred young men — those from eighteen to twenty- 
 five years of age — and seventy-five of these will be found to be suffering 
 either from the effects of venereal diseases or still in an acute stage of any 
 of them. Two-thirds of them will marry. 
 
 Think of it! Five out of every ten holy marriages debased by this plague. 
 And we wonder at the increase of divorce! 
 
 But this is only the social side of the horrible state of affairs — there is 
 the economic. It is here that the future looks dark for any nation which 
 refuses through its thinking men and women to recognize and control the 
 plague that is upon us, and rushing the supporters of families to hospitals, 
 asylums and graves. 
 
 It is not so much the acute stages of the diseases that do the irreparable 
 injury; it is the severe complications and after effects which lead to per- 
 manent bed-ridden infirmity, complete inability to do any work or follow any 
 employment, premature old age and the many nervous disturbances from 
 paralysis to brain disease, from rheumatism to alcoholism. 
 
 All diseases which interrupt the happiness of married life, many of the 
 affections which cause degeneracy and dipsomania, drug habits, perversions, 
 suicides and homicides, have their genesis in venereal diseases, either ac- 
 quired or inherited. 
 
 When the bread winner of the family becomes in early life a burden upon 
 the community through a disease that can be controlled; when families 
 are broken up and scatter their diseased remnants throughout the land
 
 33 
 
 because people would not listen to the truth; when we are being taxed 
 at an ever increasing rate to support hospitals and to build more institutions 
 for the insane; when the crippled girls and boys, the blind babies, suffering 
 and, later on, mutilated mothers, are still exhibited in our land, what in 
 God's name is the use of calling this nation a civilized nation? 
 
 No race of savages would allow the horrible state of affairs to exist that 
 this nation of heterogeneous peoples allows daily. 
 
 It is just because mothers, teachers and ministers would not listen to 
 vital facts in our social condition that the increase in venereal diseases has 
 progressed until they no longer remain behind the walls of evil places or 
 are segregated in hospitals. They poke their poisonous germs into homes, 
 are ever ready for their innocent victims in public toilets rooms, on these 
 nasty contrivances the roll towels, common drinking cups, public bathing 
 suits. They infect the maids who handle the soiled linen in hotels and 
 boarding houses, lurk around dirty barber shops, lie in wait for victims in 
 public combs, brushes — in fact, on all things handled by the diseased. And 
 there are millions of them in this land. 
 
 Before going farther into this matter, let us see just how the innocent 
 are made victims of these horrible diseases. 
 
 I know a lad who lost both eyes through a disease which he had innocently 
 acquired. His mother is heartbroken, the father almost useless through 
 grief. And whose fault was it? The parents,' especially the mother's. She 
 is one of those millions who would not listen or talk of matters that are the 
 most important today in the rearing of children. 
 
 EVERY DAY GERM CARRIERS 
 
 A servant girl was taken from an employment office. She, of course, 
 used the family towels. I say "of course," because in spite of all care to 
 see that such persons have their own linen, they will use any they find lying 
 around in chambers and bath rooms. 
 
 This girl was diseased; the germs of her disease were left on a towel. The 
 innocent boy wiped his face with the towel. The poisonous germs got into 
 his eyes. If the real trouble had been known with the first signs of inflam- 
 mation, the eyes might have been saved. 
 
 "But," you say, "how was the mother to know about this condition of 
 the servant?" 
 
 How does the mother know about the danger of her boy going on thin 
 ice? Why does she warn him and learn herself if the ice is safe? Because 
 these and similar matters have been a part of her mother's education, 
 knowledge that has naturally come to her through the experience of others. 
 Because in these matters she would listen and take heed. 
 
 But how could she know about this fearful disease that the girl brought 
 into the house? 
 
 If she had learned, listened and taken advice early in her life — yes, 
 when she was a young woman had she been properly warned, she would 
 have been on her guard, would have seen things, noticed little items that 
 would have warned her. She would have sent the girl away immediately, 
 bag and baggage. 
 
 Had she known, when the boy's eyes became inflamed, she would have
 
 at once, without a moment's delay, sent for the doctor, hoping her fears were 
 useless but realizing that such things were possible. 
 
 Mothers! You all have been aiding the spread of these diseases and their 
 many injurious off-shoots, by the shallow idea that your boy ivas safe, that 
 your daughter would never know of these horrors. 
 
 What is the use of all this academic and theologic discussion about the 
 increase of divorce when the barrier which confines the trouble to our land 
 is kept up by the mothers and the women teachers? 
 
 Make laws? Of what value are laws unless the reasons for such laws are 
 well understood? If the reasons and necessity for such laws are thoroughly 
 understood, conditions will right themselves. It would not be absolutely 
 necessary to have a physician's certificate if all women in this land knew 
 why such were necessary. A woman well informed even as to details would 
 be herself the best guardian of the perils of her family. For a mother, see- 
 ing danger threatening her child, has a mind fresh and clear seeing, as swift 
 and as logical as that of a savage. Knowledge makes for care, watchful- 
 ness and investigation. 
 
 You take a house in the suburbs. Before you do so you look carefully into 
 the purity of the water supply; you investigate any rumors of typhoid in 
 the district; you keep clear of communities where saloons and other places 
 exist; you take care that the educational facilities are the best for mind and 
 morals. And why? Because all these matters are known to you as very 
 important for the well being of your little family. You have learned, you 
 have listened. But to the more important matters — of really vital matters 
 — you have stopped your ears and closed your eyes. 
 
 AN EXAMPLE OF CRIMINAL IGNORANCE 
 Here is a good example of this criminal ignorance. A young girl was 
 brought to me by a worried mother. The child was fourteen years of age. 
 From a good, obedient and cheerful child she had merged into a fretful, 
 wilful and irritating girl. She was uneasy, would, or could, not apply her 
 mind to her simple studies. Then her mother discovered something. She 
 was horrified. What did it mean? 
 
 "Diseased, madam; badly diseased. It is impossible to say what the out- 
 come will be. She ought never to marry, even when she has been under the 
 best treatment. She will probably be childless. That's the reason — at least, 
 one of them." 
 
 No need to describe the state of the striken mother. 
 
 Did I speak too harshly? Perhaps; but my indignation got the better of 
 me. And why? 
 
 Because this very mother had been warned by me a year before to keep 
 her daughter from running around, visiting the nickelodeons, matinees, going 
 on public picnics. She would not listen; her child was "only a baby," she 
 indignantly told me. 
 
 "True, madam, I do not imply for an instant that there is anything but 
 innocent play as yet. But in reality you are the baby in this case. Keep 
 your daughter with you — that is what I mean. Instruct her after I have 
 instructed you." 
 
 Oh, no. She would not listen ; such matters did not concern her. The girl 
 remained a child, was pure and innocent, yet she had contracted one of the 
 two horrible diseases, gonorrhoea.
 
 35 
 
 How? 
 
 She went on a picnic to one of the cheap bathing shores. Here she hired 
 a bathing suit that had just been used. The contagious matter left on this 
 suit by the former user found a ready soil. So the disease progressed until 
 it had a ruinous hold on the childish body. 
 
 WORSE THAN TYPHOID 
 
 There is a medical case known as "Typhoid Mary." This unfortunate 
 woman sheds typhoid germs wherever she goes. By the mere act of washing 
 dishes in families she has spread a fearful havoc. Over a score of her vic- 
 tims are known. This typhoid carrier is now isolated. 
 
 There are millions of individuals going around among you who carry 
 germs of a much worse disease. 
 
 And yet, you American mothers go along shutting your timid eyes to 
 the conditions that are constantly threatening your children. 
 
 Just as soon as you will join the progressive doctors, after learning the 
 real facts, much of this danger can be shut out of your homes. A ready 
 acceptance of these conditions, earnest talk, forthrightness in acting, will 
 do more than all the laws men or women can devise. 
 
 WHAT THE PUBLIC MUST KNOW 
 
 It is not the immoral side of these conditions nor the condemnation of the 
 evil that I have anything to say here, but only the simple facts which all 
 parents must face. Through ignorance — not to use a harsher term — of these 
 facts every home in the land is menaced. 
 
 Of course the diseases have their starting point in those of evil habits 
 and immoral living. They originally arise from the results of filthy acts and 
 lives. Smallpox, typhoid fever, arise through ignorance of health laws, 
 through filth, through disseminating the germs where the innocent can be- 
 come victims. But we recognize and regulate these germ diseases. We have 
 laws controlling their spread. We isolate the smallpox victim; we vaccinate 
 the people. We see to it that our water supply is kept pure and make it a 
 criminal offense to pollute in any manner food or water. 
 
 Yet these are sporadic diseases. 
 
 The almost universal plague which will, if longer allowed to spread, 
 create a holocaust throughout the nation, is ignored, denied recognition in 
 church and family laws by the people. 
 
 It is now in full activity, its poison is carrying out its destructive acts; 
 its hydra-headed body serpentizes its way to the family bed; its beastly con- 
 trol is becoming absolute. 
 
 THE TWO DISEASES 
 
 The two diseases which we call venereal diseases are syphilis and gon- 
 orrhoea. First let us take up the most horrible and destructive one — syphilis. 
 Most destructive as concerns its ultimate effect on the human body, brain, 
 nervous system, tissues, bones. The second, gonorrhoea, is more destructive 
 to the home and family. 
 
 One, I might say, destroys the body and those that come after this de- 
 cayed body; the other disintegrates the unit of all civilized nations, the 
 family. 
 
 Syphilis is of course at first contracted through direct relations. After 
 its first appearance it penetrates the whole body until it pushes its poisonous
 
 36 
 
 and rotting germs to the surface. It now appears in sores on the skin, ulcers 
 in the throat, nasty looking scabs on the scalp. When this latter state arrives, 
 loss of hair quickly follows. 
 
 (It is understood that I am trying to explain in non-medical terms and 
 plain words vital facts. Scientific theories or details are not what the 
 public needs at present. — W. L. H.) 
 
 It is in these conditions, confronting even the innocent babies, that all 
 the danger lies. Let a man have one of those ulcers in his throat; he kisses 
 his little baby brother or, more horrible! his own mother, and now the awful 
 disease has been acquired by the two innocent loved ones. 
 
 Now you can readily see that if an infected person drink ft out of a pub- 
 lic cup, he or she may leave, and almost invariably does leave, some of the 
 germs on the edges of the cup. The next individual to drink out of that cup 
 may be an innocent girl. 
 
 A little crack on the lip — and who has them not? — or some slight abra- 
 sion, a tender tongue is sufficient to absorb the germs, and then we have the 
 unfortunate one probably ruined for life. I say probablv, because if the 
 danger of these little sores is not fully recognized the child is not treated 
 until it is too late. "Mother thought it was a little cold-sore," a young girl 
 told me as she lay in the hospital a distressing and soul-harrowing case. 
 
 THEIR DANGER TO INNOCENCE 
 
 Iti is in the contemplation of marriage that syphilis acquires special im- 
 portance in contra-distinction to gonorrhoea. Syphilis, in addition to being 
 transmissible bv external infection, is also communicated through the medium 
 of the germ cells. Now comes the danger to the child. If either mother or 
 father become infected with syphilis — innocently or otherwise — the child is 
 liable to be born with some objective evidence of this destructive disease. It 
 may be physically perfect, morally imperfect. It may be idiotic, deformed, 
 paralyzed. It mav grow to adult age without any symptoms of its inher- 
 itance, but, when the stress and storm of life comes, give way to uncontroll- 
 able impulses — drunkenness, drug habit, useless lying, perversions of the 
 moral instincts, mental and moral instability. 
 
 Or, still more horrible, the child of such diseased parents may go through 
 life an upright and successful man only to see his child born with all the 
 signs of the grandfather's curse stamDed upon it! 
 
 It is of course clear that no syphilitic should marry so long as infectious 
 symptoms of the disease are present, since he might transfer the same by 
 direct contact as well as by the common use of domestic utensils, but above 
 all by the processes of generation and conception respectively. 
 
 Just as soon as the women of this country understand these matters 
 there will be fewer marriages of the syphilitics. There never should be one 
 such criminal act; and I believe that every young woman in the land, when 
 well informed of the dangers, will see to it that this is brought about. 
 
 Cure? Possibly, but its certainty is always doubtful. The temporary 
 absence of diseased conditions is, however, not always a proof of cure, since 
 syphilis often presents latent periods which may last for years and during 
 which there are no outward signs of the poison still slumbering in the body 
 with its virulence unimpaired. 
 
 • X.
 
 37 
 
 AN ILLUSTRATION 
 Let us take an example. A young man contracts syphilis. He goes under 
 treatment. After five years he is assured that he is free from all the 
 poison which once entered his body. He marries. Matters go on smoothly; 
 domestic happiness reigns; he has forgotten, or rather ceased to remember, 
 that virulent poison at one time soaked in his tissues. At about forty-five 
 years of age he finds difficulty in walking. The trouble increases; he seeks 
 the doctor. 
 
 "Have you ever had syphilis?" the physician asks. Well, let us not dwell 
 upon the soul of agony and horrible revelations. The unfortunate man, 
 right in the midst of his manhood, lands in the hospital to remain while the 
 locomotor ataxia goes its horrible and painful course to the sad end. 
 
 Or it may be a similar case, only the man demonstrates mental symptoms. 
 He becomes reckless, dissipates his fortune, is immoral, consorts with vile 
 companions, drinks constantly, neglects his family — is a completely changed 
 individual. 
 
 Again the fatal question: "Have you ever had syphilis?" 
 "Oh, that was twenty years ago, Doctor. I was cured." 
 He is sent to an asylum, where he soon becomes a helpless thing from 
 syphilitic germs destroying his brain — general paralysis of the insane — 
 paresis. 
 
 I do not mean to infer that every case of locomotor ataxia or paresis is 
 due to syphilis, but it is safe to say that nine-five out of a hundred are due 
 to this venereal disease — some eminent specialists say every case. 
 
 Another thing to be taken into serious consideration: Even if the in- 
 dividual has gone through a thorough and systematic course of treatment 
 by a scientific physician and pronounced cured, yet the disease has probably 
 left a weak state of the organism which must be taken into account when the 
 subject of marriage is under consideration. The body is never as it was; 
 the nervous system becomes debilitated, and under marriage relations it often 
 breaks down. The young wife has a husband but in name. She is practically 
 widowed with a shameful wreck around her. Divorce? She has a right to 
 it, unless she married with her eyes wide open and with a good hearing. 
 
 Such a case of divorce goes down, like thousands of others in the statis- 
 tics, as one of "abandonment, non-support, incompatibality." Tommyrot! 
 
 (The government statistics regarding the many causes for divorce are 
 very misleading. The real causes for thousands of divorces are similar to 
 the above, and instead of the real causes given to the gatherers of statistics, 
 we get the indirect causes. "Cruelty" is certainly correct in all these cases, 
 but from a sociologic and scientific point, and as enabling us to get at the 
 real reasons, these maladroit euphemisms are very misleading.) 
 
 Here is an example of one of the indirect ways through which syphilis 
 can work ruin, disintegrate families, cause divorce. A young married couple 
 had one child, a baby seven months old. Its nurse was a cream-colored girl. 
 Mother, child and nurse went to a summer resort, the husband coming up 
 on Saturdays. The child becoming ill, sores breaking out on its tiny lips, 
 the hotel physician advised their return home. In a few weeks the husband 
 became ill, bad chills, and painful ulcers appeared upon his throat. He went 
 to his doctor, who had known him for years. This physician was astonished. 
 There was no mistaking the ulcers; they were syphilitic. But he kept silent,
 
 38 
 
 while treating and cautioning the man. He must leave home — go to some ■ 
 baths. You see the doctor knew the danger of allowing the man around his 
 wife and baby. 
 
 Unfortunately the wife had her physician for self and baby. They had 
 to go to him. He was not so wise nor so prudent as her husband's physi- 
 cian. His astonishment and questions brought anxious questions from the 
 wife. The horrible facts all came out. 
 
 "You have the 'bad disease,' Mrs. ." 
 
 How did it all come about? Difficult to be exact in explaining the de- 
 tails of the cause. The baby contracted syphilis. It went to its worst stage 
 untreated, unrecognized, until too late. 
 
 You see the poor mother didn't know; she had been kept in total ignorance 
 of these vital facts concerning venereal diseases. 
 
 Had she known — well, it would have been possible to prevent this family's 
 dissolution. At least, neither father nor mother would have contracted the 
 disease from the child. It would have been isolated, treated, never kissed 
 while the disease was in evidence, while the sores lasted. 
 
 This little babe was cared for by one who had upon her person the germs 
 of syphilis. It may be possible that the infant contracted the disease through 
 drinking from some utensil upon which were the germs of syphilis. But to 
 one who knows the true conditions it looks the other way. 
 
 This case demonstrates a fact which I cannot too often state, a fact that 
 every man, woman and child should know — that the disease syphilis fre- 
 quently remains unrecognized a long time and therefore untreated; and the 
 fact that the necessary precautionary measures are in consequence omitted 
 renders the patient a focus of infection of the worst kind, so that the occur- 
 rance of the awful disease among several members of a family and in board- 
 ing houses, is by no means unknown. 
 
 GONORRHOEA AND ITS MANY MANIFESTATIONS. 
 
 For many decades gonorrhoea was considered merely a local disease. 
 Like syphilis its initial cause is in immoral acts. It is primarily acquired by 
 contact. It is a fearfully contagious, disease. It only appears in its direct 
 stage as an inflammation which pours out a virulent poison. It is this 
 poisonous matter which when deposited or left on towels, linen, toilets, in 
 fact, on anything it comes in contact with, works its fearful havoc. It does 
 not kill or rot the body like syphilis, but it maims, tortures indefinitely, both 
 the innocent and guilty alike. It is far more the cause of family disintegra- 
 tion than syphilis, for it is hideous in its ramifications, in its unknown laws 
 of reappearance, in the vitality of its germs. 
 
 These germs may lie dormant and inactive for years. In this fact lies 
 its danger. It never shows itself by sores on body or tissues; it is purely 
 local. It does not threaten the health and lives of the public through drink- 
 ing cups, hair brushes, etc. But anything that has come in contact with the 
 diseased parts is more to be feared that the fangs of a viper. 
 
 The public has been told so many facts, so many important truths re- 
 garding the blindness caused by this disease, that I merely mention it. Per- 
 haps one-third of blindness is caused by this disease. But here is what the 
 public should know: It is never certain when a cure has been effected in 
 gonorrhoea. As far as the individual who has become infected is concerned,
 
 39 
 
 "cures" are practically made. That is, the patient can discover no sign of 
 the vile germs remaining. The best physicians, however, can never be ab- 
 solutely certain that the germs do not remain latent and quiescent in the 
 body. Only those human, social vampires, the quacks, make a statement of 
 "a certain cure." 
 
 This uncertainty of a cure can best be demonstrated by citing examples. 
 
 A young man of twenty-five years marries a pure, innocent girl— I hope 
 there will be no ignorant girls or mothers by the time I finish my plain talk. 
 Five years prior to this young man's marriage he contracted gonorrhea. He 
 has been careful since; been under the best physicians and carried out all 
 instructions. His severe lesson made him a good man. His physician thought 
 it safe for him to marry, although like all conscientious doctors he warned 
 him that he ran some risk — or, rather the pure girl will run the risk. 
 
 For a few months all runs well. Finally the little wife had a miscar- 
 riage. Nothing unusual in the present method of training our girls. She 
 takes a long time in recovering from an illness. After a while another ac- 
 cident of the same kind happens. Now she becomes an invalid for some time. 
 It dawns upon her worried thoughts that she is to be childless. She remains 
 a semi-invalid ; her husband at times blames her, he mutters innuendos which 
 painfully pierce her aching heart. 
 
 Soon peace and patience leave the home. The suffering young wife grows 
 worse and finally there is only one resort. The doctors have told here that 
 she must have an operation to save her from longer suffering. 
 
 In the hospital the knife reveals the suspected cause. 
 
 Gonorrhoeal infection! The internal organs of reproduction have been 
 the seat of an inflamation that has destroyed their usefulness. They had to 
 come out. Poor, poor girl! You see, she didn't know. These things were 
 never told her — neither did the husband really know. 
 
 Another tragedy — broken home, disgrace, an unsexed thing. 
 
 And after? Well, often the asylum, frequently recklessness and dissipa- 
 tion — or the river. You read of the ends almost daily. 
 
 Now comes another case, exactly like the above in all but its final out- 
 come. Instead of physical symptoms and illness the young wife becomes 
 hysterical, morbid, cross. All the physic volcanoes which lie hidden in every 
 soul are in a state of constant eruption. This wife has a child, but she hates 
 it, it annoys her; so does her husband. Finally she has a horror of his pres- 
 ence. Now fix this in your mind — she is as absolutely ignorant of the real 
 cause of her condition as is her husband. Nobody knows at this time. 
 
 Her increasing irritability makes her presence disagreeable to all ai-ound 
 her. Morbid introspection soon gives way to melancholia. Then one of two 
 things happens; she either takes to stimulants or drugs, or she becomes a 
 fixed neurasthenic and ultimately lands in the hospital for the mentally ill. 
 
 What is the cause of all these psychic disturbances? 
 
 The germs of gonorrhoea with which she became infected through her 
 "cured" husband, instead of finding lodgment in any particular organ or 
 organs, have penetrated the nervous system, have affected the brain. 
 
 In another case, all may go well with the wife. She remains perfectly 
 well, has not apparently become infected; but those serpent-wise germs will 
 not let go their coiling grasp on the husband.
 
 40 
 
 Ten or more years have passed in quiet domestic life, when the husband 
 is stricken with acute inflammatory rheumatism. Now the family provider 
 becomes useless. Crippled, he is pushed around by an attendant — helpless, 
 groaning with pain, a heavy burden upon the wife and friends. 
 
 And so I might continue. 
 
 Now remember that all these cases that I have shown to you belong to 
 the wealthy class. They had the best of advice, treatment, and all that money 
 and science could procure. But the sins or errors of youth — due in most 
 part to ignorance of the peril — still remain to strike at the most favorable 
 opportunity to bring misery and disgrace. 
 
 Now, if these are the conditions which exist through the curse of gonor- 
 rhoeal infection in the wealthy, it is readily seen what the effects are upon 
 the economics of any nation where the working classes are affected. 
 
 When the husband is made useless as a wage-earner, what is the result? 
 The wife must earn for all. Plucky is she who in all the bloom of youth and 
 beauty, disgusted, and perhaps hating the man who has brought her down 
 to care for home and his diseased body, does not accept "the easiest way." 
 
 But they don't — that is, not many of them. Such women deserve more 
 credit and man's aid than they have ever received. They are martyrs; they 
 don't complain or run to the divorce courts; they just keep on caring for 
 the little ones. With the ever disgusting thing around them, they rise and 
 struggle for him and these helpless ones around her. 
 
 But there is an end to all this struggle. It is in the hospital for a true 
 illness, and the free ward for venereal diseases for the husband, while the 
 children must depend upon charity for assistance. 
 
 And this need for charity will increase as long as we remain a nation of 
 hypocrites and truth deniers. 
 
 To get at once out of this uncivilized state we must start at the bottom. 
 Instruction is needed by all classes, but especially by the youths and maids of 
 of the land. 
 
 During the next five years there will be thousands of one-time strong, 
 healthy women in our hospitals, living on charity, walking the streets. These 
 will have given birth to more thousands of diseased children — cripples, moral 
 imbeciles, juvenile criminals — as they grow up neglected and the vitiated 
 blood controls their impulses. 
 
 These thousands of women and future mothers are now in Europe. 
 
 But how do all these diseased women get into the country? 
 
 They don't come here diseased; they are pure, innocent wives, cr wives 
 to be, when they arrive here. 
 
 From southwestern Europe there are arriving almost daily a very large 
 number of young men immigrants. They have either left their wives to re- 
 main until they can be sent for, or they have left some young girls, promising 
 to send for them and make them their wives as soon as the money is saved 
 for the passages. 
 
 These men remain in our cities two or three years before sending for 
 these women at home. These women reach their husbands or sweethearts 
 in full and vigorous health. But this good health does not last long after the 
 continuance of the marriage relations. The women become infected by their 
 husbands, who have contracted a disease in this free land — free for the 
 universal liberty and license of venereal disease, but not free for the spread-
 
 41 
 
 ing of knowledge of this plague by allowing its clangers to be taught to our 
 youths and girls — yes, even to our mothers — or any legal control of ita 
 progress, any supervision of those who are the foci of the nurse. 
 
 In the instruction of our young citizens upon matters of vital importance 
 to their health and happiness, our public schools are miserable failures. They 
 are more than this; they are a menace to the welfare of our nation. 
 
 We must have at once separate schools for the sexes after they pass the 
 primary schools. Let there be manly and womanly instruction in all these 
 important subjects. Shove false prudery into the garbage cans; throw out 
 all teachers who will not recognize the important sex differentiation at the 
 volcanic age of adolescence, and who are not cognizant of the curse of un- 
 controlled and uninformed impulses. 
 
 And what are we, those who should help, doing to stop this curse of our 
 nation? I mean we — the people, the government. 
 
 Nothing, absolutely nothing, except to furnish dollars for treatment but 
 not a word or dollar to instruct the coming generation. 
 
 SOME PLAIN EARNEST WORDS TO THE BOYS AND 
 YOUNG MEN OF SPRINGFIELD 
 
 I want to conclude this book with a few plain words addressed directly to 
 boys and young men. The boys of today are the voters, citizens and home 
 builders of tomorrow. The success of this nation depends on the character of 
 its manhood. The strength and greatness of a nation does not depend so 
 much on the extent of its domain, the fertility of its soil, the richness of its 
 banks, the extent of its commerce, as it does on the character of its manhood. 
 Greece defied the world because of the Spartan spirit of its unsullied man- 
 hood. Virtue is life, vice is death, to nation or individual. "The wages of 
 sin is death," is a truism from sacred writ that applies to nations just the 
 same as to individuals. This great nation that we love and honor, and for 
 which we would gladly give our lives on the field of battle, faces no danger 
 whatever from external foe. Its foes are internal. They are the deadliest 
 foes that ever assailed a nation, for they strike at its very heart by secretly, 
 treacherously, persistently and insidiously assailing its manhood. This is our 
 country's danger, its manhood gone, the foundation of its greatness has been 
 destroyed. These enemies are: 
 
 1. The Saloon. 
 
 2. The Brothel. 
 
 3. The Gambling Den. 
 
 4. Secret Vice. 
 
 5. Political Romanism. 
 
 6. The Tobacco Habit. 
 
 There are other evils, but they are kindred to the ones mentioned. Most 
 of these evils are peculiar in their efforts to capture, debauch and enslave 
 the young manhood of the nation. To accomplish this end vast and elaborate 
 plans are carried out. Millions are spent to make the saloon and brothel 
 attractive and the gambling hells enticing. Other agencies are employed, 
 beer gardens, dance halls, arcades where vulgar pictures are featured, shod- 
 dy, vulgar shows, billiard halls, cigar stores and Sunday excursions. The 
 trend of it all is toward Hell and away from all that strengthens character
 
 42 
 
 and builds manhood. Out of these institutions comes the rottenness that 
 corrupts politics, gangrenes the state and threatens the utter destruction of 
 our free institutions. 
 
 On the other side, pitted against these minions of darkness and defying 
 the very imps of Hell, is the Church of God with all its mightly auxiliary 
 institutions, that have sworn in the name of Jesus Christ as king the saloon 
 must die. Young men, in this, the most heroic fight of the centuries to save 
 a nation's life and a nation's manhood, where are you going to take your 
 stand? Will it be as a craven slave of sin in the devil's army or will you be an 
 errant knight, wearing the armor of truth and righteousness, beneath a stain- 
 less flag, winning victories for an ever living King? 
 
 We must have and will have on our side the boys of the nation. You are 
 a mighty power, young men, and as you come to realize that power you must 
 feel its responsibility. You must fight for the redemption of your city and, 
 eventually, for the redemption of the state and nation. 
 
 The author hopes that this book will be of great value to young men. 
 Young men have been looked upon as a care, as wards in the realm of busi- 
 ness activity and progressive civilization. The world is slow to learn, and 
 when taught is quick to forget, that young men are strong in muscles, mind 
 and character, and that they, more than any others, are capable of carrying 
 on the world's work. Men are the highest expression of the Infinite mind, 
 and the best kind of man is a young man. 
 
 "Arouse him then; this is thy part; 
 
 Show him the claim; point out the need. 
 And nerve his arm and cheer his heart. 
 
 Then stand aside, and say: "God-speed." 
 
 Young men can do wonders. The great Chinese wall is the unrivaled 
 wonder of the world's history. It is 1,259 miles long, 20 feet high, 25 feet 
 thick, and contains 20,000 towers 40 feet square at the base and 37 feet high. 
 It took hundreds of years to build it and it is the most stupendous structure 
 erected by man. If laid down in the United States it would reach from 
 Niagara Falls to Dallas, Texas, from New Orleans to New York. It would 
 wall our Atlantic seaboard from Nova Scotia to Florida; yet with the aid of 
 modern machinery, the Young Men of America represent enough force to dig 
 the clay from the earth, manufacture the bricks and construct the wall com- 
 plete in five days. We want this marvelous energy of young manhood conse- 
 crated and concentrated along moral lines until we accomplish the moral re- 
 demption of America. 
 
 According to the census of 1900 the toal population of the U. S. was 
 72,622,250, and of this number 42,067,880 were males. Almost exactly one- 
 third of this number, or 14,689,293, were young men between the ages of 
 fourteen and twenty-eight. According to estimates furnished by the Gover- 
 nors of the various states on January 1st, 1906, to the New York World the 
 present population of our nation is 81,197,652. Continuing the same ratio 
 regarding sex and age that prevailed in 1900, would give a male population 
 of at least 46,000,000. There are at the present time in the United States 
 15,000,000 young men beween fourteen and twenty-eight. All the future hope 
 of the American republic is wrapped up in these 15,000,000 young men and
 
 43 
 
 boys. Can we realize the tremendous responsibility that rests upon the 
 church in its efforts to win the boys? 
 
 The now famous painting "Breaking Home Ties" by the lamented Thomas 
 Havenden, which won the first prize at the Chicago World's Fair, represents 
 an American boy leaving home to battle for himself. More than a thousand 
 boys like this one go out from their homes every day to make homes for 
 themselves, to create new conditions, to acquire property, to marry well and 
 establish other families, to become good citizens and valued members of new 
 communities, to develop that estate of American manhood which is the 
 strength of the strongest of nations. 
 
 Millions of young men are without home, or they drift from place to 
 place, from job to job, until, divorced from the natural affection and settled 
 motives in life, they form a national peril rather than a tower of strength 
 and protection. Never in the history of our nation were vice and immorality 
 so powerfully and systematically organized as they are today. There are 
 few epithets more stigmatizing than to say that a young fellow "has gone 
 like most young men." It means that he has gone to the bad. To gain the 
 reputation of being "one of the boys" is little short of ill repute. It is a 
 sad fact that the experience of most of our boys and young men from their 
 earliest career as such, is little else than a panorama of vice and wickedness. 
 Young men are not taking the interest they should in moral and re- 
 ligious problems. We give a few quotations from that excellent little work, 
 "Dying at the Top," by Dr. J. W. Clokey : 
 
 "The National Committee of the Y. M. C. A. has sent out a printed state- 
 ment in which I find that but five per cent of the young men throughout the 
 land are members of churches ; that only fifteen out of every one hundred at- 
 tend religious services with any regularity, and that seventy-five out of one 
 hundred never attend church at all." 
 
 "A city of 17,000 population, 3,000 young men; 1,021, over one-fourth, 
 entered forty -nine saloons in one hour on a Saturday night." 
 
 "In Leadville, Col., on a certain Sabbath evening, 250 young men attended 
 the eight Protestant and Catholic churches; the same evening 2,000 of the 
 5,000 young men entered six of the seventy-six saloons*** Mr. Meigs, of 
 Indianapolis, Ind., delivered a lecture some time since in Terre Haute. Before 
 his visit he had seven young men take notes for him in that city. The re- 
 sult was that, on a certain Saturday evening, these young men found 1,045 
 young men enter seven of the 150 saloons; and on the following Sabbath 
 morning only seventy-five young men in all of the churches." 
 
 The following is from the report of the secretary of the Y. M. C. A. of 
 San Francisco for 1899: 
 
 "On Sunday evening, August 19, 1898, there were, by actual count, in 
 all the Evangelical churches, 1,892 young men between sixteen and thirty- 
 five years of age. On the following Sunday evening, August 26, the principal 
 theaters, concert and billiard halls, and other places of amusement, includ- 
 ing saloons, etc., were counted (one baseball match at which were 5,000 
 young men,) and there were found in these places of amusement and saloons, 
 including the baseball match on the afternoon of that day, 17,933 young men. 
 And there were at least 3,000 places of unhallowed influences, which could
 
 44 
 
 not be reached and counted by our committee that evening, where young men 
 were congregated. Putting it at the very lowest estimate, we would say, that, 
 on that evening, there were on an average five young men visited each of 
 these places, which gives us a total of 15,000. By these figures we find that 
 there were at the least calculation 32,933 young men in the theaters, drink- 
 ing saloons, and other places of amusement on that Sunday evening. This 
 report is signed by ten young men representing different denominations. The 
 largest number of young men found in any one church, was 411; the least 
 six. The largest number found in any one theater was 1,200, and there were 
 three places where there were over 1,000." 
 
 Again Dr. Clokey says: "Our own sons are the Tartars of today and the 
 walls that incarcerate them, would, if placed end to end, in a continuous line, 
 rival in length China's 1,500 mile wonder. In round numbers seventy per 
 cent of the convicts in our penitentiaries are young men." 
 
 The saloon must have boys or it must close up. It can no more run with- 
 out boys than the saw mill without logs. Two million boys is what these 
 engines of hell destroy during every generation. One family out of every ten 
 must contribute a boy. Do you vote to keep the saloon running, grinding up 
 boys, and contribute none of your own to keep up the supply? You don't 
 want your boy ruined? Then do not give your influence or your vote to keep 
 this youth destroying machinery running. 
 
 However in regard to young men we are not justified in drawing too 
 dark a picture. "There is a silver lining to every cloud." In every com- 
 munity may be found young men who are noble in heart and pure in charac- 
 ter. Let us urge upon young men the necessity of becoming Christians early 
 in life. Nearly all who become useful Christians do so early in life. A man 
 is seldom converted after twenty-eight; not one in ten between thirty and 
 forty; not one in sixty between forty and fifty, and not one in three hundred 
 between fifty and sixty. More than 75 per cent of those who are Christians 
 were converted before the age of twenty-one. The spirit which inclines the 
 minds and hearts of men toward God and a religious life rapidly declines in 
 influence after the age of manhood is reached. The old may be saved, but 
 salvation is especially in behalf of the young. The Bible contains scarcely 
 a direct promise to an aged and unconverted man, but it is full of promise to 
 young men. To a remarkable degree it is a book about young men and for 
 young men. Its kings, its prophets, its apostles, and its heroes were chiefly 
 young men. Jesus Christ was a young man. He experienced the trials and 
 vicissitudes of life, and was tempted of the devil as young men only exper- 
 ience these things. He learned a trade, waxed strong in muscle and mind, 
 won his own reputation among men; came in contact with the world, saw 
 its iniquity and deception, its hypocrisy and treason in high places as young 
 men see these things today. Through it all he lived a pure and blameless 
 life. He had no experience with age, but finished his work while the glow 
 of youthful vigor was upon his cheeks. His life is pre-eminently a pattern 
 for young men. Nowhere is Christian character so attractive and powerful 
 as when exemplified in the lives of young men. To none does it prove so 
 great a blessing, and to none does it give so potent an influence for useful- 
 ness. Life's battles must be fought, temptations overcome, evils conquered, 
 obstacles put aside and enemies overthrown, while men are young.
 
 45 
 
 It is a fatal delusion for young men to conclude that the world owes them 
 a living and that somehow in some way it will come to them without its 
 equivalent in work which brings into action their brightest faculties and best 
 energies. Young men must learn that the great victories come early in life 
 or they do not come at all. Young men must be useful. 
 
 George Washington was busily engaged in surveying the wilds of Vir- 
 ginia at eighteen. 
 
 LaFayette, the great French patriot, was but twenty-one when he fought 
 the battle of Monmouth. 
 
 Alexander the Great ascended the throne of Macedon as king at twenty. 
 Hannibal completed the subjugation of Spain while in his twenties. 
 Charles V was crowned emporer of Germany at twenty. 
 
 Louis XIV made his court the center of art, literature and science before 
 he was twenty-one. 
 
 David Farragut, the noted American admiral was a lieutenant at twenty- 
 one. 
 
 Demosthenes was the greatest orator of Greece, and Cicero of Rome, 
 while yet in their twenties. 
 
 William Wilberforce, England's champion of freedom, began his anti-slav- 
 ery efforts before he was sixteen. 
 
 William E. Gladstone, the "Grand Old Man" of England was a member of 
 the House of Commons at twenty-three. 
 
 Thomas Jefferson was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses at 
 twenty-six. 
 
 Alexander Hamilton was Washington's aid-de-camp at the age of twenty. 
 
 William Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-four, and practically the ruler 
 of England at twenty-five. 
 
 Lord Bacon was appointed Consul to the Queen at twenty-eight. 
 
 Plato devoted his life to the study of phliosophy at twenty. 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton was twenty-three when he saw the fall of the apple 
 which resulted in the discovery of gravitation. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin, the philosopher and statesman, began to write for 
 publication when a boy of fourteen. 
 
 Pascal, the French philosopher, solved various geometrical problems up- 
 on the floor of his mother's kitchen with a piece of charcoal before he was 
 eight years of age. 
 
 Sir Humphrey Davy, discoverer of the chemical elements, made his first 
 experiment in chemistry at nineteen. 
 
 Michael Faraday became the greatest experimental philosopher the world 
 has produced at twenty-two. 
 
 Galileo was only eighteen when he stood in the cathedral of Pisa and no- 
 ticed how regularly the great hanging lamp swung to and fro, and by com- 
 paring it with the beat of his pulse he decided the accuracy of the time in its 
 movements, from which he became the inventor of the clock pendulum. 
 
 Lord Henry Brogham, the British statesman, orator and scientist, was a 
 brilliant scholar while yet in his teens. 
 
 -«■».'» m m • •" » ».««
 
 M 
 
 Humboldt, to whom physical seience is more indebted than any man of 
 modern times, published his first volume at twenty-one. 
 
 John J. Audubon, the world's greatest ornithologist, began the study of 
 birds when a youth; he was born in Louisiana and was studying painting in 
 Paris at fourteen. 
 
 Sir William Rowan Hamilton had thoroughly mastered all the branches 
 of the ordinary university course and was making original investigations 
 in mathematics, philosophy and metaphysics at fifteen. 
 
 Dr Thomas Young had learned French and Latin without a teacher and 
 had made considerable progress in Arabic, Persic and Hebrew at fourteen. 
 
 McCormick had conceived in his own mind, and constructed with his own 
 hands, a harvesting reaper before he was twenty-two. 
 
 Elias Howe gave to the world one of its greatest civilizing agents, the 
 sewing machine, when he was a young man of twenty-six. 
 
 Eli Whitney, while yet in his twenties, invented the cotton-gin which dou- 
 bled the wealth of the southern states. 
 
 Thomas A. Edison, while a young man, kept the path to the Patent Office 
 hot with his foot steps. 
 
 Robert Fulton was in Europe studying art and earning his own way at 
 twenty-one. 
 
 Samuel Colt invented the revolver which bears his name at twenty-one. 
 James Watt, at twenty-one, was appointed mathematical instrument maker 
 at the University of Glasgow. 
 
 Edward Gibbon, the most brilliant recorder of events the world has pro- 
 duced, began his studies, which resulted in his unrivaled historical works, 
 at the age of seventeen. 
 
 These illustrations of the courage and heroism of young men could be car- 
 ried on indefinitely. The few cases have been cited to show what has been 
 done by Joung men in the past. These same victories can be won by men 
 todav It only requires grit, courage and determination. An education is 
 worth the cos? no^ifference what the cost may be Burn the midmgh .oil 
 if necessary. Pick up a little fragment of learning here and there whenever 
 the opportunity offers. If you are totally illiterate you can commence with 
 the smallest words and master just one word per day, gradua lly taking up the 
 more difficult ones and in three years you can be a master of the English 
 £neuaff™ Keep eternally at it. Do not waste your evenings, in saloons or 
 bUlSrd halls'. Do not read trashy literature, time is too precious, but read 
 each year a collection of the best books of the age, biography, history poetry, 
 sdence etc Buy the books and own them if possible; if not, take advantage 
 lithe ^ Public Library. Do not droop; stand erect with head up and be a 
 learner by observation. 
 
 And let me say a word to parents. You should encourage and assist your 
 children in their efforts to acquire an education even if you make serious sac- 
 rifices to do it Keep in the confidence of your children Make companions 
 of them and they will look to you for advice and counsel. And when home 
 ties are broken and the boy goes out into the world, keep in touch with him 
 sSll There Ts both truth and tragedy in the following beautiful lines by 
 Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
 
 47 
 
 INTO THE WORLD 
 
 Out over childhood's borders 
 Manhood's brave banners unfurled, 
 Weighed down with precepts and orders, 
 A boy has gone into the world. 
 
 Nobody thinks it pathetic, 
 For he is a strong-armed youth; 
 But where is the vision prophetic 
 To forecast his future with truth? 
 
 No more a child to be petted 
 And sheltered away from the strife? 
 Henceforth a man to be fretted 
 And worn with the worries of life. 
 
 Henceforth a man, with others 
 To scramble and push in the race, 
 To jostle and crowd with others, 
 To struggle for gain and place. 
 
 Now, though his heart is breaking, 
 Henceforth his lids must be dry. 
 N*w, though his soul is aching, 
 He must not utter a cry. 
 
 Now, if his brain is troubled, 
 Now, if his courage is gone, 
 Still must his strength be doubled, 
 Still must the battle go on. 
 
 Now, if success shall crown him, 
 Oh, how the world will cheer; 
 Now, if misfortune shall down him, 
 Oh, how the scoffer will jeer! 
 
 Virtue and truth attend him 
 Into the vortex whirled; 
 God and his angels defend him, 
 A boy has gone into the world.
 
 The Rail Splitter 
 
 Edited and published by Wm. Lloyd Clark. One year 50 cents. 
 In clubs of four or more, 40 cents. Bundle rates to those who 
 will help spread the truth, one cent each, in any quantity, or ten 
 dollars per thousand, if ordered at one time. This is the cheap- 
 est and most effective literature you can scatter among the peo- 
 ple as an antidote to papal poison. Platform: Free speech. Free 
 press. Free schools. Free text books. Convent inspection. Separa- 
 tion of church and state. Taxation of church property. No public 
 funds for sectarian purposes. Equality of all before the law. As 
 an interpreter of events and a stimulant to brain action The Rail 
 Splitter is indispensible to every loyal, red-blooded American. 
 We need your help. We are fighting an enemy as deadly to our' 
 liberties as the Cobra of India is deadly to human life. The 
 enemy is thoroughly organized, led by shrewd and resourceful 
 schemers and is backed by untold wealth. Romanism and civil 
 liberty will not mix any more than oil and water- This nation 
 cannot endure half Papal and half Protestant. The Rail Split- 
 ter is working to the limit of its ability to save and preserve our 
 free institutions. To win it must have the loyal and active sup- 
 port of every patriot on the firing line. We are appealing to you 
 to help us build up The Rail Splitter that it may become a wall 
 so strongly surrounding our liberties that the enemy can never 
 scale it or break through it. Every paper you hand to a friend 
 and club of subscribers you send in helps to that end. Give this 
 paper the best co-operation within your power that we may work 
 together for the salvation and preservation of our free institu- 
 tions. If we give our children a free nation in which to live 
 there is no time to lose. The enemy, the Roman Hierarchy, is 
 busy. Order a bundle of papers and get on the firing line today. 
 Head the list with your name and round up every loyal Ameri- 
 can in your community. This paper has in its service the great- 
 est anti-Papal cartoonist in America. Its illustrations and its 
 powerful articles will overthrow the minions of the Man-God if 
 you do your duty and put it into the homes of the people. Its 
 publisher has given the cause years of hard and faithful service 
 without reward or compensation. Its office is equipped with the 
 best anti-Papal library in America. It carries no questionable 
 or filthy ads in its columns. It is brave and fearless and clean 
 and should have the loyal and unselfish support of every liberty 
 loving American. All together for a mighty forward movement. 
 
 Catalogues free. 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 THE RAIL SPUTTER, Milan, Illinois