Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places.  She learned to “spiel.”  You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms’ length, and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed.  The girl’s skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail.  The effect of the spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong drink.

Annie also learned to dance what is known as the “half time,” or the “part time” waltz.  This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion.  It is really a very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan harvest and bacchic festivals.  You may see traces of it in certain crude peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe.  Now they teach it to immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell the girls that it is the American fashion of waltzing.

Annie Donnelly’s destruction was accomplished in less than a year.  It was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.  There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too crowded for the family to stay in it.  Father and mother were respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie’s first real misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to go home.

The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in every city in the United States.  It is a straight chute down which, every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal.  No one has counted their number.  All we know of the unclassed is that they exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.

It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law.  That is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested.  How many of these unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to know—­we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the unclassed.

[Illustration:  A DANCE HALL]

The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft.  Somewhere in its immediate vicinity there is a saloon.  A dance lasts about five minutes, and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes.  Waiters circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink.  The dance hall without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist, except as it has been established by social workers to offset the influence of the commercial dance hall.

Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted.  Others are large and pretentious.  Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels and their prototypes.  Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be said.  They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in society, in business, and in politics.