As I left that West Side levee of vice I knew I had seen prostitution at
its lowest ebb and that from these holes of horror finally went those
awful alley women of the night to sell their soul and trail their black
disease to any young boy or drunken man who could give them a few cents or
even the price of a drink of whiskey.

Coming down Custom House Place one night about 10:30 o'clock I overtook,
without their knowledge, six boys, ranging from about twelve down to
perhaps seven years, three of whom I knew fairly well. Following them from
shadow to shadow, I gathered sufficient of their low-voiced conversation
to make me certain they had been holding an orgy in a nearby cellar or
basement with a drunken harlot, and that together they had paid her the
small sum of seventeen cents for this damning, soul-destroying commerce.
One boy, a lad of about nine years, had been wheedled by his companions
into paying ten cents of this sum and was arguing for the return of at
least a part of his money, because of the age and helplessness of the
woman and the =extreme short time= allowed him by his companions in his
relations with her.

* * * * *

Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent of the John Worthy School,
which is the local juvenile municipal reformatory, reported that one-third
of the street boys sent to him were suffering from the loathsome diseases
and distempers of the red-light district, nor is this to be wondered at
when we consider the fact that sexual commerce may be purchased almost
anywhere in South State street and in the West Side alleys for the
remarkably low price of ten cents, or even a glass of beer or whiskey,
from the gonorrheal, syphilitic denizens thrown out long ago from the
better class houses of prostitution to live off of the half-drunken men
and boys to be found in swarms along South State, Halsted and South Clark
streets.

Almost invariably, the street boy haunting these underworld sections of
our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half-rotten,
yet painted vampires of the streets whose only care or hope is a crust of
free lunch and enough whiskey or "dope" to drown for a time at least the
last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a little longer in the
wretched body, and the boy having purchased for a small fee his own
destruction trails out again into the night and on into disease and crime
and prison, and finally death.

The av