ne you must recognize
the silly season as your period of special peril, as the time when it is
insidiously easy to relax your vigilance, to let down the protecting
bars of strict social conventionality and to give yourself a little
latitude in the matter of "harmless flirtation."

The only safe way is to be just a little more particular about the
acquaintances you form during the silly season than at any other time.

E. A. B.

CHAPTER XX.

CHICAGO'S WHITE SLAVE MARKET--THE "LEVEE."

It is no pleasure to me to impeach my city, but it is false patriotism
to allow the crimes of one's own country to go without rebuke. We are
responsible for the evil that we have power to abolish. It is the duty
of a patriotic preacher to lash the sins of his people till they are
lashed out of existence.

One afternoon last summer Captain Wood of the Twenty-second street
police station, who has always taken splendid care of our missionaries,
told me that Jesus did not try to destroy the "levee" in Jerusalem, but
forgave the repentant woman who washed his feet with her tears. That
evening a Jew who was born and brought up in Jerusalem came to help us
in our street meeting. I asked him publicly if there is any "levee,"
that is, a vice district, in Jerusalem. He said that the Arabs would not
tolerate one such house of shame but would burn it down before morning.

Mr. Archibald Forder, for seventeen years a pioneer missionary in the
interior of Arabia, says that among the Arabs this vice is unknown--"and
a great big UNKNOWN it is."

Rev. Dr. Spencer Lewis, for many years a missionary in China, said when
he preached with us in midnight Chicago, that even heathen China, which
is very impure, does not obtrude vice as does Chicago.

In New York City Mayor Low broke up the "tenderloin" some years ago, and
though vice is shamefully abundant and flagrant in that metropolis, the
city government no longer gives the white slave traders a practical
license to commit their crimes, by setting apart a portion of the city
where they may operate with impunity.

In Philadelphia, when three of us conferred with Mr. Gibboney, secretary
of the Law and Order Society, concerning a proposed exploration of a
questionable district, one of the questions immediately raised was how
we might gain our liberty if arrested in a raid on an immoral resort
which we might be investigating. This was a vital and serious question,
in Philadelphia. There vice is a