After all, why should the woman voter concur in the assumption that every large city must either set aside well-known districts for the accommodation of prostitution, as Chicago does, or continually permit it to flourish in tenement and apartment houses, as is done in New York?  Smaller communities and towns throughout the land are free from at least this semi-legal organization of it, and why should it be accepted as a permanent aspect of city life?  The valuable report of the Chicago Vice Commission estimates that twenty thousand of the men daily responsible for this evil in Chicago live outside of the city.  They are the men who come from other towns to Chicago in order to see the sights.  They are supposedly moral at home, where they are well known and subjected to the constant control of public opinion.  The report goes on to state that during conventions or “show” occasions the business of commercialized vice is enormously increased.  The village gossip with her vituperative tongue after all performs a valuable function both of castigation and retribution; but her fellow-townsman, although quite unconscious of her restraint, coming into a city hotel often experiences a great sense of relief which easily rises to a mood of exhilaration.  In addition to this he holds an exaggerated notion of the wickedness of the city.  A visiting countryman is often shown museums and questionable sights reserved largely for his patronage, just as tourists are conducted to lurid Parisian revels and indecencies sustained primarily for their horrified contemplation.  Such a situation would indicate that, because control is much more difficult in a large city than in a small town, the city deliberately provides for its own inability in this direction.

During a recent military encampment in Chicago large numbers of young girls were attracted to it by that glamour which always surrounds the soldier.  On the complaint of several mothers, investigators discovered that the girls were there without the knowledge of their parents, some of them having literally climbed out of windows after their parents had supposed them asleep.  A thorough investigation disclosed not only an enormous increase of business in the restricted districts, but the downfall of many young girls who had hitherto been thoroughly respectable and able to resist the ordinary temptations of city life, but who had completely lost their heads over the glitter of a military camp.  One young girl was seen by an investigator in the late evening hurrying away from the camp.  She was so absorbed in her trouble and so blinded by her tears that she fairly ran against him and he heard her praying, as she frantically clutched the beads around her neck, “Oh, Mother of God, what have I done!  What have I done!” The Chicago encampment was finally brought under control through the combined efforts of the park commissioners, the city police, and the military authorities, but not without a certain resentment from the last toward