CHAPTER III.

SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED

[Illustration: THE CITY HALL, NEW YORK.]

SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED

OR, Despairing Democracy.

_A STUDY OF GREATER NEW YORK._

BY W. T. STEAD,

AUTHOR OF “IF CHRIST CAME TO CHICAGO!”

“Inasmuch as no government can endure in which corrupt

greed not only makes the laws but decides who shall

construe them, many of our best citizens are beginning

to despair of the Republic.”--EX-GOVERNOR ALTGELD,

_Labour Day_, 1897.

The “Review of Reviews” Annual, 1898.

EDITORIAL OFFICES:

MOWBRAY HOUSE, NORFOLK STREET, LONDON, W.C.

PUBLISHING OFFICE:

125, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,

STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

PREFACE.

For the past four years I have devoted the ANNUAL of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS

to a romance based upon the leading social or political event of the year.

This year I intermit the publication of the Series of Contemporary History

in Fiction in order to publish a study of the most interesting and

significant of all the political and municipal problems of our time. To

those who may object to the substitution of a companion volume to my

Chicago book for their usual annual quantum of political romance, I reply,

first, that “changes are lightsome” and a novelty is attractive, and,

secondly, that nothing that the wildest imagination of the romance-writer

could conceive exceeds in startling and sensational horror the grim

outline of the facts which are set forth in this survey of that section of

“Satan’s Invisible World” which was brought to light by the Lexow

Committee.

The trite old saying that “Truth is stranger than Fiction” has seldom been

better exemplified than in the story of the way in which the Second City

in the World has been governed, unless it be in the consequences of the

resulting despair. For if the revelations made before the Lexow Committee

are almost incredible, the deliberate decision of the ablest and most

public-spirited Americans that there is no way of escape save by the

hamstrung Cæsarism of the Charter of Greater New York is still more

marvellous as a confession of the shipwreck of faith. Sin, when it has

conceived, bringeth forth Death, and the corruption that rotted the

administration previous to 1894 has only brought forth its natural fruit

in the adoption of a bastard Bonapartism of the Second Empire as the best

government for the First City in the American Republic.

The election of the first Mayor for Greater New York, which is progressing

while these pages are being written, gives a special actuality and

interest to this study. But its permanent value does not depend upon the

issue of the _plébiscite_ which has decided who will sway the destinies of

the Second City of the World at the eve and on the dawn of the Twentieth

Century.

It will, I hope, render available to the whole English-speaking world the

gist and essence of the evidence taken before the Committee appointed by

the Senate of the State of New York to inquire into the Police Department

of the City. This Committee, presided over by Senator Lexow, held seventy

sittings in the year 1894, and ultimately published the Report of their

inquiry in five stout octavo volumes of 1100 pages each. All their

proceedings were public, and the New York papers published ample reports

from day to day. Outside New York nothing but brief telegrams or

occasional letters informed the world of what was taking place, and the

final Report was never published in the British or Colonial press. Yet the

lesson of the state of things revealed by the Lexow Committee was one

which every great city would do well to take to heart. What New York was,

London, Glasgow, or Melbourne may--nay, will certainly--become, if the

citizens lose interest in the good government of their city.

When I was in New York in September, I tried in vain to purchase a copy of

the Lexow Report. As for exhuming the files of the daily papers, one might

as well try to resurrect Cheops. Fortunately, just as I was stepping on

board the _Teutonic_, the five bulky volumes were handed over to me as a

loan. Dr. Shaw had at the last moment succeeded in borrowing the office

copy of the Report from the Society for the Prevention of Crime. It was

apparently the only available set in the whole city. I deemed it well

therefore to master the voluminous evidence in order to construct a

readable and authentic narrative which would make this great object-lesson

accessible to the world.

W. T. STEAD.

MOWBRAY HOUSE,

NORFOLK STREET, LONDON, W.C.

_November, 1897._

CONTENTS.

PAGE.

FRONTISPIECE: THE CITY HALL, NEW YORK 2

PREFACE 5

PART I.--THE GATEWAY OF THE NEW WORLD.

CHAPTER.

I. LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD 9

II. THE SECOND CITY IN THE WORLD 17

III. ST. TAMMANY AND THE DEVIL 27

IV. THE LEXOW SEARCHLIGHT 43

PART II.--“SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD.”

I. THE POLICE BANDITS OF NEW YORK 57

II. THE POWERS AND THE IMPOTENCE OF THE POLICE 61

III. PROMOTION BY PULL AND PROMOTION BY PURCHASE 67

IV. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A POLICE CAPTAIN 79

V. “THE STRANGER WITHIN THE GATES” 87

VI. THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSES OF THE POLICE 95

VII. KING MCNALLY AND HIS POLICE 107

VIII. THE PANTATA OF THE POLICY SHOP AND POOL ROOM 119

IX. FARMERS-GENERAL OF THE WAGES OF SIN 125

X. “ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN” 135

XI. BELIAL ON THE JUDGMENT SEAT 145

XII. THE WORST TREASON OF ALL 151

PART III.--HAMSTRUNG CÆSARISM AS A REMEDY

I. DESPAIRING DEMOCRACY 159

II. THE TSAR-MAYOR 165

III. THE CHARTER OF GREATER NEW YORK 171

IV. GOVERNMENT BY NEWSPAPER 179

V. WHY NOT TRY THE INQUISITION? 189

VI. THE PLEBISCITE FOR A CÆSAR 197

VII. THE FIRST MAYOR OF GREATER NEW YORK 211

APPENDIX 214

INDEX 217

[Illustration: THE JANITRESS OF THE LAND OF LIBERTY.]

“SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD DISPLAYED”; OR, DESPAIRING DEMOCRACY.

PART I.

THE GATEWAY OF THE NEW WORLD.

CHAPTER I.

LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD.

The entrance to the harbour of New York is not unworthy its position as

the gateway--the ever open gateway--of the New World.

And the colossal monument raised by the genius of Bartholdi at the

threshold of the gateway is no inapt emblem of the sentiments with which

millions have hailed the sight of the American continent.

The harbour, though guarded by great guns against hostile intruder, and

infested by the myrmidons of the Customs, is nevertheless an appropriate

antechamber of the Republic, from whose never-dying torch stream the rays

of Liberty enlightening the world.

Over the great lagoon-like waters flit the white-winged yachts--the

butterflies of the sea--dancing in the rays of the rising sun. On shore

the luxuriant foliage of the trees betrays but here and there the hectic

flush that portends the glories of the Indian summer. The islands, as

emeralds in the setting of the sea, are a doubly welcome sight to eyes

which for days past have seen nothing but the heaving billows of the broad

Atlantic. Here and there, flecking with colour the sunlit scene, flutter

the Stars and Stripes. Far away in the West, faintly audible in the

distance, come the multitudinous sounds of the awakening seaport. The

great Liner, which shuddered and throbbed for three thousand miles as it

forged five hundred miles a day across the sea, is gliding smoothly and

softly as a gondola towards the Venice of the Western World. Except when

approaching the Golden Horn, no more beautiful scene greets the traveller

on approaching a great capital than that presented by the entrance to the

harbour of New York. And right in the centre of the fair vision stands the

Bartholdi monument, with its gigantic figure hailing the pilgrims from the

Older World with the glad welcome of the New. What more appropriate

janitress of the Land of Liberty?

The cynic may sneer that the analogy between the City of the Great

Assassin and the City of the Boss extends further than the sea-gate to the

city. But to the millions whose eyes have rested hungrily upon the nearing

land such reflections are unknown. To them the New World, of which New

York holds the keys, has ever been arrayed in the rainbow garment of Hope.

New York, merely as the portal of the continent, had long been to them as

a kind of New Jerusalem, let down from Heaven in mercy to hard-driven,

hopeless men. From their earliest childhood they had heard of the great

Commonwealth beyond the sea, where the blood-tax of the conscription was

unknown, where all men were free and all men were equal, and where, in

solid, unmistakable reality, the dreams of the poets were found embodied

in a Constitution that was at once the envy and despair of the world:--

There’s freedom at thy gates and rest

For earth’s downtrodden and oppressed;

A shelter for the hunted head,

For the starved labourer toil and bread;

Power at thy bounds

Stops, and calls back his baffled hounds.

What wonder that the storm-tossed emigrant, as he first saw the city of

New York glimmering through the haze, felt the magic charm with which the

tribes of Israel first gazed upon the confines of the Promised Land.

To the great mass of the English, Scottish, and Irish people--as

distinguished from the travelled and more or less cultured minority--the

United States has for a hundred years been the land of their ideal, often

dearer to them than their own. A very large section, possibly a majority,

of our race has ever been more in sympathy with the people that was

believed to have sprung from the loins of the men of the _Mayflower_ than

with the nation which recalled Charles the Second and still tolerates the

ascendency of the Establishment and the dominance of the landed

aristocracy. It is quite recently that this enthusiastic devotion to the

American Commonwealth has been somewhat dashed in Great Britain. It still

exists in full force across the Irish Channel. To the Irishman the United

States is much more of a fatherland than the British Empire. We are,

indeed, but a step-motherland to the Irishman, whereas in the United

States he is not merely at home, but in most of the cities he is at the

head of the household. But forty, thirty, and even twenty years ago it was

practically the accepted creed of the English Radical that America led

the van, and whenever he was downcast and dispirited by the temporary

triumph of the Tories, he found consolation in the reflection that in the

great Republic beyond the Atlantic a new and vigorous race was carrying

out his ideals, free from the hateful clog of the hidebound Conservatism

of the Old Country. No one can read the speeches of Bright and Cobden

without feeling that it was on the Hudson and the Mississippi they found

their spiritual fatherland, and the generation that sat at their feet

learned from them to regard America much as Walt Whitman painted it in his

swinging dithyrambs in praise of “Liberty’s Nation.” We all more or less

were brought up to exult in the belief that--

America is the continent of the Glories, and of the triumph of Freedom,

And of the Democracies, and of the fruits of Society, and of all that

is begun.

Hence nothing more extravagant can be said in praise of New York Harbour

than that even to those nurtured on such pabulum it is no unworthy

approach to the sea-gate of a new and better world.

Nor is it only the outside of the harbour that is most impressive. The

Hudson--that stately river compared with which the Rhine is but a muddy

creek, and the Thames a sluggish rivulet--is not less worthy of its _rôle_

as the throne of the great city. It is impossible to exaggerate the

impression which the Hudson at night must produce on the peasant from the

Carpathians or the labourer from Connemara. Even to those who have more

travelled eyes, and are not unfamiliar with seagirt citadels, the

spectacle is superb. Never shall I forget my first impression of the

mighty river.

It seemed as if I had strayed to the entrance of faerie-land, or that,

unawares, I had been transported to the sea-gate of some enchanted city.

Midnight was near. In the sky overhead the stars gleamed, but they were

faint and speck-like, for the moon was shining unveiled by cloud. But it

was neither the lapping of the rippling water nor the silver sheen of the

moonlight on the wave that gave the scene its fascination of wonder. These

things are the universal poetry of Nature--the music of the waves and the

magic of the moon. And there is no speech or language where their voice is

not heard. But here there was something more. For on either side of the

expanse of water rose high banks of irregular outline, from whose rugged

shadows gleamed the lights as of a myriad eyes:--

Behold the enchanted towers of Carbonek,

A castle like a rock upon a rock,

With chasm-like portals open to the sea,

And steps that met the breaker.

Up and down either side, as far as you could see, until the dark outlines

merged in the distant horizon, these innumerable eyes looked out over

the water. Sometimes they winked, and now and then one or another would

close. It was as if each bank were guarded by some vast monster with a

thousand times the eyes of him who watched the treasure of the Golden

Fleece.

[Illustration: THE OCEAN GATE OF THE NEW WORLD. A Misty Morning in New

York.]

And behind the basilisk of the shore there rose, tier upon tier, the

buildings of the city, in which dwelt millions and millions of the

children of men. Palaces and temples, brightly outlined in light or

towering dark against the luminous haze behind, pierced the sky-line.

Amidst the vast confusion two lofty eminences stood out conspicuous,

dominating the whole. One was a crown-like dome, poised in mid-air,

shining resplendent with jewels of electric light; the other a lofty tower

girdled with a blazing zone of fire. Stars of flame shone on its summit,

while ever and anon a beam of white light, quick and piercing as a

two-edged sword, flashed like the brand of an archangel over the shadowy

city. And it was as it was written of old time, when our first parents,

after being cast out of Eden, looked back and saw “a flaming sword turning

every way to keep the way of the tree of life.” The sword was not of fire,

but of pure white light. Above and below it made darkness visibly black,

but revealed with startling distinctness everything on which it fell.

That was but the background, the framework of the picture. For the great

scene was on the water. Never until at Spithead this midsummer, when six

square miles of the Solent crowded with the warships of the world burst at

a signal into a glittering wilderness of lights, had I ever seen anything

to compare to the Hudson at midnight. In Paris on the night of the fête of

the Republic in Exhibition year, when the Seine was crowded with steamers,

all illuminated and decorated from stem to stern, there was something like

this. But the Seine was but a skein of silk stretched across the city; the

water was hidden by the craft. Here the whole expanse of waterway exceeded

even that of the Neva at St. Petersburg; and, although full of life and

colour and sound, was nowhere crowded.

Imagine a great arm of the sea across which, between the two shores, were

swiftly, ceaselessly gliding like silent faerie shuttles in some

enchanter’s loom huge floating palaces, radiant from end to end with

innumerable lights. They moved with such strenuous rapidity that the

waters foamed beneath their keel, and the anchored vessels seemed to fly

past as we left them behind. No great galleon of Spain illuminated in

honour of her patron saint ever shone more resplendent, and none ever

moved with half the fierce, resistless rush of these monsters of the

river. No sails had they or visible means of propulsion, they sped as if

thought-impelled. Seldom had I seen anything more weirdly beautiful, or

more calculated to impress the imagination.

Now and then a smaller palace would float down the stream, reviving, I

know not how, strange reminiscences of the great State barges in which the

Rinaldos of mediæval romance would be rowed to some high festival in

Armida’s garden. Two starry lights overhead, as at the masthead--though

masts there were none--dimly revealed the contour below, where the light

streaming from serried windows produced a curious effect, as if banks of

illuminated oars were speeding the galley on her way. And then again,

silent and slow, with but one light burning at her prow, a sombre

melancholy scow would drift across the moonlit waters--like

the barge

Whereon the lily maid of Astolat

Lay smiling like a star on darkest night.

On sea and on shore it was one perpetual feast of lanterns. Mingled with

the golden and silver rays of the electric lights there shone everywhere

lamps of ruby and of amethyst and of emerald, glowing like jewels of

intense colour, set in a tiara of diamonds and pearls.

And to add to the weirdness and mystery of the scene, ever and again there

would rise from the waters a strange melodious murmur, increasing in

intensity to a wail, which would continue a minute and then die away as it

arose. It was like the plaintive lowing of sea-monsters for their lost or

wandering calves. Otherwise all was still, save the lapping of the waves

on the shore.

“And behold I saw,” said the seer of the Apocalypse, “as if it were a sea

of glass mingled with fire. And lo----”

It was New York seen from a New Jersey ferry-boat on the Hudson, plying

between 23rd Street and the Pennsylvania railway. Could there be a more

sudden descent from the poetry of faerie-land to the vulgar prose of a

work-a-day world? The light-crowned dome was the office of the _World_

newspaper, the flashing beam from the tower the advertisement of a dry

goods store from Chicago. Yet, nevertheless, the effect of the reality, as

it may be seen every fine night, far exceeds my poor description. To those

who have eyes to see it is one of the most wonderful and beautiful and

suggestive of scenes.

Such then is the outward and visible aspect of the Empire City, a city

which from its situation is beautiful exceedingly, and which until quite

recently was regarded as the joy of the whole earth, and which still does

honour to the statue of such a martyr of Liberty as Nathan Hale. How it

has come to pass that the mighty has fallen, and the city which was once a

name at the sound of which men renewed their hope and faith in the

progress of the world, has become a byword, a hissing and reproach, it

will be the object of this volume to explain. It is a subject in which we

of the Old World have weighty reason to be interested. For we have

suffered a severe blow and a grievous discouragement in the betrayal of

the cause of Liberty in the very vestibule and entrance chamber of the

Republic. For all round the world the shame of New York darkens the sombre

shade which encompasses the oppressed and gladdens with evil joy the heart

of the oppressor.

[Illustration: STATUE OF NATHAN HALE. City Hall Park, New York.]

[Illustration: THE GRIDIRON STREETS OF THE NOISY CITY. New York Post

Office, Broadway.]

CHAPTER II.

THE SECOND CITY IN THE WORLD.

A pandemonium of type-writing machines--of gigantic type-writing machines

driven by demons who never tire--in some vast hall of Eblis. The clank of

the type, the swish of the machine, the quick nervous ring of the bell,

all indefinitely multiplied and magnified, fill the vast space with a

reverberating clangour. This clangour continuously increases until its

very vibrations seem to become clotted and fill the air with a sound that

can be felt in every pore. It is like the pressure of an atmosphere so

dense you can almost cut it with a knife, an atmosphere that is never

still, but perpetually frets, and moans, and snarls with feverish unrest.

How many machines there must be to crowd the air with this million times

multiplied misery of click and clang--ring-ring--ring-ring--and clang and

click, that never stops, but rises and falls, rhythmless and rude, like

the waves of a choppy sea on a rocky beach! Now and again through the

infernal hubbub there pierces a dreadful wail,

As it were, one voice in agony

Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills

All night in a waste land, where no one comes

Or hath come since the making of the world.

How hot the air is! a temperature of the antechamber of Tophet. As the

perspiration bursts in great beads of moisture from your brow, you hear

the faint hum of circling wings, faint at first, but ever growing shriller

and more acute--hiss, zip--as the invisible fiend circles round his

prostrate victim. Hiss, zip, nearer, louder than before, audible clearly

even above the metallic storm of the type-writing machines. And as the

mosquito settles on your ear, you awake with a start and suddenly realise

where you are.

You are not in even the outermost circles of Dante’s “Inferno.” You are

trying to sleep in the heart of Central New York, in the midst of all the

thunder and the rush and the roar of her million-crowded streets, along

which surges as a restless tide the turbid and foaming flood of city life.

The bells of the tramcars continually sounding, the weariless trampling of

the ironshod hoofs over granite roadway, the whirling rumble of the

wheels, the roar of the trains which on the elevated railways radiate

uproar from a kind of infernal firmament on high, all suffused and

submerged in the murmurous hum that rises unceasing from the hurrying

footsteps in the crowded street, that inarticulate voice of New York--

Sad as the wail that from the populous earth

All day and night to high Olympus soars.

And that dreadful shriek is the farewell of an Ocean liner sounding a

sonorous note with stentorian lungs as it quits the wharf.

There is nothing like it in London. Chicago, with all its bustle, has

nothing to compare to this harsh metallic clangour of struggle and

strife--although there the mournful death-tolling bell on the locomotives

which thread the streets supplies a note of pathos and of awe that is

missing in the racket and roar of New York.

One grows used to it in time, just as after a few days you become used to

the thrust and swirl of the screw which drives the liner across the sea.

The great ship vibrates in every nerve of steel, and the state-room throbs

with the thud of the engines. So the great city pulses with strenuous

power, and in the multitudinous uproar of its streets we hear the sound of

the friction of the two-million manpower engine which has made even Lesser

New York one of the greatest driving forces of the American Republic.

It is a dynamo of the first order. And like the dynamo it is instinct with

magnetic power. All great cities are great magnets, and New York is the

greatest--but one--in the world.

The figures of the portentous growth of cities in our epoch recall the

familiar story in the “Arabian Nights Entertainments” of the vessel which,

sailing too near the Loadstone Mountain, was whelmed into sudden

destruction. For the attraction of the loadstone was such that all the

iron nails in the vessel were drawn out of their fastenings, and the

timbers that were once a ship became mere flotsam and jetsam on the water.

It is a wild and romantic fable in the mouth of the Princess Scheherazade;

but it is grim reality in the world to-day. For the great city is to the

rural population exactly what the Arabian loadstone mountain was to the

heedless sailor who came within the range of its fascination. All the iron

in the rural ship of State is attracted to the mighty Babylon. The men

with iron in their blood, the girls whose pulses leap and tingle with the

eager flush of adventure and ambition, desert the village and the farm to

crowd the roaring mart and glaring street. The country is denuded of its

most vigorous children. The city engulfs into its insatiate maw all those

the brightest, the bravest, and the best.

The process goes on at an ever accelerating ratio. As Mr. Godkin has well

observed:--

Parks and gardens, cheap concerts, free museums and art galleries,

cheap means of conveyance, model lodging-houses, rich charities, such

as every city is now offering in abundance to all comers, are so many

inducements to country poor to try their luck in the streets. They are

the exact equivalents, as an invitation to the lazy and the

pleasure-loving, of the Roman circus and free flour which we all use

in explanation of the decline and fall of the Empire. They are

luxuries which seem to be within every man’s reach gratis, and they

act with tremendous force on the rural imagination.--_North American

Review_, June, 1890.

The percentage of urban to the total population of the United States,

defining as urban all dwellers in cities of more than 8,000 population,

was 3·35 in 1790. Forty years later it had doubled. But in 1860 it was

16·13, and in 1890, 29·12. But the growth of the cities which alone

deserve the name of great has been still more phenomenal. In 1840--not

sixty years ago--the ten greatest cities of America contained a total

population of 711,652. To-day Brooklyn alone, which has been merged as a

kind of suburb in Greater New York, has a population of a million, while

the ten great cities, to be hereafter known as the Great Ten--New York,

Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, San

Francisco, Cincinnati, and Cleveland--had in 1890 a population of

6,660,402, and will have in 1900 a population of eight millions. In fifty

years the population of the United States did not quadruple itself, for it

only expanded in round numbers from 17 millions to 62½ millions. But the

great cities increased themselves nearly ten-fold in the same period, and

to-day they contain 11 per cent. of the whole population of the Union. The

latest estimate of the present population of the country gives the cities

25 millions out of the 72 million citizens of the United States.

If one-third of the inhabitants of the American Commonwealth dwell in

cities, these urban centres possess even more than one-third of the wealth

of the nation, and far more than one-third of its actual power. A writer

in one of the recent American magazines points out that the wealth of the

Great Ten in 1890 exceeded the wealth of the whole country, cities

included, in 1850. The revenue of the same Great Ten amounted in 1890 to

£25,000,000 per annum, a greater sum than was raised for State purposes in

all the federated States and Territories. The annual Budget of New York

and Brooklyn in 1890 dealt with ten millions sterling, a sum almost

exactly equalling the Budget of the United States forty years ago.

It is now half a century since De Tocqueville wrote:--“I look upon the

size of certain American cities, and especially upon the nature of their

population, as a real danger which threatens the security of the

Republic.” Since then this “real danger” has gone on increasing at an ever

accelerating ratio. When De Tocqueville wrote, there were only three or

four cities with a population over 100,000. To-day there are thirty. And

most remarkable fact of all, the population of Greater New York is now

equal in number to the total population of the United States at the time

of the Declaration of Independence. Her 3,200,000 inhabitants exceed

nearly four-fold the total number of the inhabitants in all the cities in

the States at the time De Tocqueville visited America. In the State of

New York, sixty per cent, of the inhabitants live in cities; in

Massachusetts, seventy per cent.

This tendency townwards, which is one of the most striking characteristics

of the English-speaking race all round the world, is nowhere more

conspicuous than in the United States; and New York, of all American

cities, is that where this centripetal law is just now seen to be

operating most powerfully. In the amalgamation by which the Greater New

York has come into being we have the latest manifestation of the craving

on the part of all modern men to come together in ever-increasing

agglomerations of humanity. The fissiparous tendency so perceptible in

politics is not visible in cities. There are numerous instances of two

cities fusing into one; but no city having once achieved its unity splits

it up. Amalgamation, not separation, is the order of the day. Where a

river does not divide--as for instance, in the case of Gateshead, that

“long, narrow, dirty lane leading into Newcastle-on-Tyne,” or in the case

of Salford--the larger town invariably swallows up its minor neighbours,

as a large raindrop on the window-pane attracts the smaller drops in its

immediate vicinity. In the case of Greater New York, not even the dividing

river has been able to prevent the law of gravitation doing its will.

The City of New York is indeed seated upon rivers, and if State boundaries

had not stood in the way, there is little doubt that Jersey City would

have shared the fate of Brooklyn and Long Island. But even without Jersey

City, the new urban conglomerate will be the second city of the world in

populousness and greater even than London in area.

The City of New York has an area of 39 square miles, while the area of

Greater New York is over 300 square miles. Brooklyn contains 29 square

miles, Staten Island comprises nearly 60 square miles, Westchester County

annex has an area of about 20 square miles, and the Long Island townships

included in the scheme have an aggregate extent of perhaps 170 miles.

At the first election for the Greater New York, held this year, no fewer

than 567,000 citizens were registered as electors in this colossal

constituency. The Greater New York charter divides the city into five

boroughs. (1) Manhattan, consisting of the island of Manhattan, and the

outlying islands naturally related to it. (2) The Bronx, including all

that part of the present City of New York lying north of the Harlem, a

territory which comprises two-thirds of the area of the present City of

New York. (3) Brooklyn. (4) Queen’s, consisting of that portion of Queen’s

County which is incorporated into the Greater New York. (5) Richmond; that

is, Staten Island. The population of the City of New York which before the

amalgamation was close on 2,000,000, is now swollen to 3,200,000, of whom

nearly 2,000,000 live in tenement houses.

The size of New York is by no means its most notable distinction. Chicago

some day may, by right of its more central position, win the prize of

being recognised as the real if not the political capital of the United

States. But the position to which Chicago aspires has, for nearly a

century, been held by New York. For New York is one of the few cities in

the States which are not of yesterday. Of course, compared with London,

which dates back to the Cæsars, New York is but a mushroom upstart. But as

in the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so in the New World a

city which can count its history by centuries may be regarded as

possessing quite a respectable antiquity.

[Illustration: Map of GREATER NEW YORK.]

To us in the Old World it is the window through which we look into

America. Peter the Great built his capital on the Neva in order to have a

window from which he could look into Europe. New York serves much the same

purpose. It is through the window-pane of New York that the Old World sees

what little it does see that is going on in the American Republic. All the

newspaper correspondents of the European press without a single exception,

so far as I know, cable from New York. Not a single British newspaper has

a correspondent at Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Washington. As for

the suggestion of publishing telegrams from New Orleans or San Francisco,

it would be more reasonable to expect to see despatches from Mars. This

leads, no doubt, to much misconception. The New York window is by no means

of transparent crystal. Those who consent to see the United States solely

through their New York window-pane will often be egregiously misled.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that New York is the only window through

which the Old World peeps into the New.

Nor is that the only special reason why New York is better known to us of

the older branch of the race than any other part of the American

Continent. New York is not more the only window than it is the only door

of the New World. The Atlantic is furrowed by a thousand keels, but all

the liners steer for New York. Steamers no doubt ply to Boston and to

Philadelphia, but the great trade route--the only passenger route--lies

past Sandy Hook. New York is the front gate of the Western hemisphere.

Even Canada finds it more convenient to use the New York entrance than the

ice-blocked mouth of the St. Lawrence. Hence, whatever else the Old World

man may see or fail to see in the New World, the one place he is certain

to see, the one place which he cannot avoid seeing, is the Queen of the

Hudson.

And as New York is the first American city which every traveller sees, and

the last which he leaves, so New York has attracted a greater number of

European residents than any other city, with the doubtful exception of

Chicago. In 1888, thirty-six per cent. of the citizens were either Irish

or of Irish descent. The German element was in 1891 estimated at

twenty-five per cent. In the City of New York the indigenous American only

numbers twenty per cent.

But it is not its imported population which makes it so peculiarly

European. Chicago is at least as cosmopolitan, but the city on Lake

Michigan counts herself much more American than her sister on the Hudson.

During the last Presidential Campaign New York was constantly singled out

for attack by the Bryanite orators of the West and South as if it were a

foreign and hostile colony encamped on American soil. Wall Street, the

centre of the financial system of the United States, was as sound on the

currency question as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the

advocates of Free Silver confounded New York and London alike beneath

their savage anathema. Community of interest begets community of ideas,

and the Western men angrily declare that New York is no more a typical

American city than London or Liverpool. This is an exaggeration, no doubt.

But neighbourhood counts for something, and New York is a thousand miles

nearer to London than to Chicago.

New York is only six days’ steaming from Europe. It is the centre from

whence the mighty shuttles ply back and forth across the Atlantic,

weaving the ocean-sundered sections of our race into one. Of the threads,

some end at Southampton and others at Liverpool. But they all start from

New York.

[Illustration: ONE OF THE WINDOW-PANES OF THE WINDOW OF THE NEW WORLD.

Printing-House Square, New York.]

There is another distinctive element about New York. It is the great

literary producing-centre of the American people. Boston has long since

been dethroned. No other city has even ventured to contest the primacy of

New York. There is not a single magazine printed in America that has any

circulation outside the United States which is not edited, printed, and

published in New York. The advantages of a more central position enjoyed

by Chicago are as nought compared with those which New York enjoys in

other ways. When I proposed to publish the American _Review of Reviews_ in

Chicago, I was promptly silenced by the statement that with the exception

of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ there was not a single periodical published

outside New York which could claim to have achieved a success. New York,

from the publishing point of view, is the hub of the American universe.

Her magazines, admirably edited and marvellously illustrated, circulate in

every nook and corner of the English-speaking world. The magazines of the

other cities are virtually unknown outside the Republic, and often, it may

be said, outside the city that gives them birth. New York, then, as the

window and front door of the United States, with an unchallenged

financial, commercial, shipping and literary ascendency, has the pull over

all her rivals. To nine-tenths of mankind New York is America. All the

rest of the country is but the pedestal upon which New York stands.

This pre-eminent position carries with it a grave responsibility. If the

world at large judges the American Commonwealth by New York, then New York

owes a double duty both to the American Commonwealth and to the world at

large. Hence the extreme interest which the latest evolution in the civic

development of New York naturally arouses. This Greater New York--what

does it mean? How did it come into being? What were the issues at stake at

the late Election? All these questions every one is asking. I propose to

attempt to supply some answer.

It is a task of some difficulty and no little importance; for not merely

is New York--rightly or wrongly--regarded as the most typical and best

known American city, but the United States tends more and more to become

not a federation of States and territories, but an association of huge

cities. The Great Ten not merely include within their boundaries nearly

eight million persons, or more than ten per cent. of the whole population;

they do the thinking and the guiding and the managing of a very large

proportion of the remaining nine-tenths. Draw a circle with a

three-hundred-mile radius round the Great Ten, and you inclose an area

which is practically dominated by the Ten and educated by their

newspapers. The Newspaper Area is a phrase not yet naturalised in

geographies, but it is the most real and living area of all those into

which the social organism is divided. For the newspaper collects its news

every day, and sells its news every morning and evening, thereby creating

a living, ever-renewed bond between the dwellers within the radius of its

circulation infinitely superior to the nexus supplied by the tax-collector

and the policeman. It is not difficult to define the length of the range

within which a newspaper can create a constituency. It is rigidly limited

by the distance from the printing-office in which a newspaper can be

delivered before breakfast. After breakfast the influence of the newspaper

dwindles every minute. Any one living so far off as not to be able to

obtain his newspaper before dinner is practically outside the

pale--unless, of course, he lives remote from any local centre of news

distribution. In that case the range of influence is almost indefinite, as

is shown to this day in the hold which the weekly _New York Tribune_

exercises over farmers scattered everywhere between the Atlantic and the

Rocky Mountains. But speaking generally, the range of the Newspaper Area

is limited by breakfast-time.

[Illustration: THE FRONT DOOR OF THE NEW WORLD.]

Greater New York has come into being in order to increase, not to

diminish, the influence of New York in the Republic and in the world at

large. This influence may be for evil. “Under the new charter,” says Mr.

W. C. De Witt, Chairman of the Committee which drafted that document, “the

City of New York at one bound becomes the mistress of the Western

hemisphere and the second city of the world. It should be to its people

what Athens was to the Greek, Rome to the Romans, Florence to the

Florentine--an object of constant solicitude and of civic pride.”

The question whether they intend to obey the voice of their friendly

mentor is one on which the future fortune of the American Commonwealth

will largely depend. For, as Mr. J. C. Adams pointed out in a thoughtful

article on “The Municipal Threat in National Politics,” which he

contributed to the _New England Magazine_ in July, 1891:--

The misgovernment of the cities is the prophecy of misgovernment of

the nation; just as the paralysis of the great nerve-centres means the

palsy of the whole body. There is graver danger to the republic in the

failure of good government in our cities than arises from the moral

corruption which accompanies that failure. The misgovernment of our

cities means the break-down of one of the two fundamental principles

upon which our political fabric rests. It is the failure of local

self-government in a most vital part. It is as great a peril to the

republic as the revolt against the Union. For the republic is

organised upon two great political ideas, both essential to its

existence. The first is the principle of federation, which is embodied

in the Union; the second is the principle of local self-government,

which places the business of the states and the towns in the hands of

the people who live in them. Both of these are vital principles. The

republic has survived the attempt to subvert one of them. It has just

entered on its real struggle with a serious attack upon the other.

The fate, therefore, of the American Republic may be bound up with the

fortunes of Greater New York.

CHAPTER III.

ST. TAMMANY AND THE DEVIL.

Hitherto, the city government of New York has not been a credit to the

Republic; otherwise I should not be publishing a survey of the way in

which New York has been governed as “Satan’s Invisible World Displayed.”

The title, of course, is an adaptation, not an invention. The original

holder of the copyright was one Hopkins, of the seventeenth century, who,

having had much experience in the discovery of witches, deemed himself an

expert qualified to describe the inner history and secret mystery of the

infernal regions under that picturesque title. I have adopted it as being

on the whole the most appropriate description of the state of abysmal

abomination into which the government of New York had sunk before the

great revolt of 1894 broke the power of Tammany--for a season--and placed

in office a Reform Government charged to cleanse the Augean stable. The

old witchfinder had no story to tell so horrible or so incredible as that

which I have drawn up from the sworn evidence of witnesses exposed to

public cross-examination before a State Commission in the City of New

York. In the reports of the infernal Sabbats, for attending which

thousands of old women were burnt or hanged in the seventeenth century,

there always figures in the background, as the central figure in the

horrid drama, a form but half-revealed, concerning whose identity even the

witchfinders speak with awe. The weird women, with their incantations and

their broomsticks, their magic spells and their diabolical trysts, are but

the slaves of the Demon, who, whether as their lover or their torturer, is

ever their master, whose name they whisper with fear, and whose commands

they obey with instant alacrity. For the Master of Ceremonies in the

Infernal revels, the Lord of the Witches’ Sabbat, is none other than Satan

himself, the incarnate principle of Evil, the Boss of Hell!

In the modern world, sceptical and superstitious, these tales of witches

and warlocks seem childish nonsense, unworthy of the attention of grown-up

men. But although the _dramatis personæ_ have changed, and the

_mise-en-scène_, the same phenomena reappear eternally. Here in the

history of New York we have the whole infernal phantasmagoria once again,

with heelers for witches, policemen as wizards, and secret sessions in

Tammany Hall as the Witches’ Sabbat of the new era. And behind them all,

always present but dimly seen--the omnipresent central force, whose name

is muttered with awe, and whose mandate is obeyed with speed--is the same

sombre figure whom his devotees regard with passionate worship, and whom

his enemies dread even as they curse his name. And this modern

Sathanas--this man who to every good Republican is the most authentic

incarnation of the principle of Evil, the veritable archfiend of the

political world--is the Boss of Tammany Hall.

Among the many legends which have clustered round the beginning of the

great association which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of

New York, there is one which appeals specially to the sense of humour.

Tammany, according to tradition, was the name of a Delaware Indian who in

ancient days belonged to a Redskin confederacy that inhabited the regions

now known as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His name has been variously

spelled as Temane, Tamanend, Taminent, Tameny, and Tammany.

Curiously enough, by a kind of metamorphosis by no means without precedent

among more historical saints, his name has been attached to a locality

which he probably never visited, and with the inhabitants of which he and

his people lived in hereditary feud. This was not, however, due to any of

his conflicts with the Mohicans, who in those days pitched their wigwams

on the island of Manhattan. He owes it to a battle which he fought with no

less a personage than the great enemy of mankind. In the days when St.

Tammany, passed his legendary existence, there were no white men on the

American Continent; but although the Pale-Face was absent, the Black man

was in full force, and one fine day St. Tammany was exposed to the fell

onslaught of the foul fiend. At first, as is his wont, the bad spirit,

with honeyed words, sought to be admitted to a share in the government of

Tammany’s realm.

“Get thee behind me, Satan!” rendered in the choicest Delaware dialect,

was the Saint’s response to the offers of the tempter. But as a more

illustrious case attests, the Devil is not a person who will accept a

first refusal. Changing his tactics, he brought upon St. Tammany and his

Delawares many grievous afflictions of body and of estate, and while the

good Chief’s limbs were sore and his heart was heavy, the cunning deceiver

attempted to slink into the country unawares.

St. Tammany, however, although sick and sore, slept with one eye open, and

the Devil was promptly ordered to “get out of that,” with an emphasis

which left him no option but to obey. Again and again the Devil, renewing

his attacks, tried his best to circumvent St. Tammany, but finding that

all was in vain, he at last flung patience and strategy to the winds, and

boldly attacked the great Sagamore in order to overwhelm him by his

infernal might.

[Illustration: UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK, WITH THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT.]

Then, says the legend, ensued the most tremendous battle that has ever

been waged between man and his great enemy. For many months the great

fight went on, and as Tammany and the Devil wrestled to and fro in mortal

combat, whole forests were broken down, and the ground was so effectually

trampled under foot that it has remained prairie land to this day. At

last, after the forests had been destroyed, and the country trodden flat,

St. Tammany, catching his adversary unawares, tripped him up, and hurled

him to the ground. It was in the nick of time, for Tammany was so

exhausted with the prolonged struggle that when he drew his scalping-knife

to make a final end of the Evil One, the fiend, to the eternal regret of

all the children of men, succeeded in slipping from Tammany’s clutches. He

escaped across the river to New York, where--so runs the legend, as it is

recorded by a writer in _Harper_--“he was hospitably received by the

natives, and has ever since continued to make his home.”

Such, in the quaint but suggestive narrative of the ancient myth, is the

way in which the Devil first came to New York, where, as if in revenge for

his defeat, he seems to have christened the political organisation which

has been his headquarters after the name of Tammany.

The Tammany organisation did not in the beginning take its rise in New

York. It first sprang into being in the ranks of the revolutionary army of

Pennsylvania. Tammany, or Tamanend, as he was then called, was adopted by

the Pennsylvanian troops under General Washington as their patron saint.

There were two reasons for this. In the first place, it was Hobson’s

choice, for St. Tammany was the only native American who had ever been

canonised; and, in the second place, nothing seemed more appropriate to

the revolutionary heroes than to adopt as their patron saint a brave who

had “whipped the Devil.” St. Tammany, therefore, came to be adopted by the

American army as a kind of counterpart to our own St. George. St. Tammany

and the Devil seemed to be a good counterpoise to the legendary tale of

St. George and the Dragon. The 12th of May was Tammany’s Saint’s Day, and

was celebrated with wigwams, liberty poles, tomahawks, and all the regular

paraphernalia of the Redskin. A soldier attired in Indian costume

represented the great Sachem, “and, after delivering a talk full of

eloquence for law and liberty and courage in battle to the members of the

order, they danced with feathers in their caps and buck tails dangling on

behind.” The practice spread from the Pennsylvania troops to the rest of

the army, and so popular did Tammany become that May 12th bid fair to be

much more a popular national festival than July 4th.

It was not until this century had begun that the Tammany Society was

domiciled in New York. It was introduced there by an upholsterer of Irish

descent, named William Mooney. He did not take much stock in St. Tammany,

but preferred to call his Society the Columbian Order, in honour of

Columbus. The transactions of the Society dated from the discovery of

America. Besides the European head, who was to be known as the Great

Father, there were to be twelve Sachems, or counsellors--“Old Men” being

the Indian signification of the word; a Sagamore, or master of ceremonies;

a Wiskinkie, or doorkeeper of the sacred wigwam; and a Secretary.

The Society from its outset appears to have been political, but in its

early days it combined charity with politics. In the second year of its

existence it undertook the establishment of a Museum of Natural History,

and got together the exhibits which formed the nucleus of Barnum’s famous

museum. It was a social and convivial club, which met first in a hotel of

Broadway, then in a public-house in Broad Street, and finally in the

Pig-pen, a long room attached to a saloon kept by one Martling. In 1811 it

erected a hall of its own. Its present address is “Tammany Hall,

Fourteenth Street.”

There is no necessity to do more than glance at the curious beginnings of

a society which is perhaps the most distinctively American of all the

associations that have ever been founded in the New World. A writer of

“The Story of Tammany,” which appeared in _Harper’s Magazine_ many years

ago, from which most of these facts are taken, says:--

The Tammany Society, or Columbian Order, is doubtless the oldest

purely self-constituted political association in the world, and has

certainly been by far the most influential. Beginning with the

government, for it was organised within a fortnight of the

inauguration of the first President, and at a spot within the sound of

his voice as he spoke his first official words to his countrymen, it

has not only continued down to the present time--through nearly three

generations of men--but has controlled the choice of at least one

President, fixed the character of several national as well as State

administrations, given pseudonyms to half a dozen well-known

organisations, and, in fact, has shaped the destiny of the country in

several turning-points of its history.

Few suspect, much less comprehend, the extent of the influence this

purely local association has exerted. To its agency more than any

other is due the fact that for the last three-quarters of a century

New York city has been the most potent political centre in the world,

not even Paris excepted. Greater than a party, inasmuch as it has been

the master of parties, it has seen political organisation after

organisation, in whose conflicts it has fearlessly participated,

arise, flourish, and go down, and yet has stood ready, with powers

unimpaired, to engage in the struggles of the next crop of

contestants. In this experience it has been solitary and peculiar.

Imitators it has had in abundance, but not one of them has succeeded

in catching that secret of political management which has endowed

Tammany with its wonderful permanency.

What is that secret? It is unquestionably to be traced, in part, to

the sagacity which Tammany’s leaders have at all times shown in

forecasting the changes of political issues, or availing themselves of

the opportunities afforded by current events as they have arisen.

Tammany has not only furnished the most capable politicians the

country has possessed, but has managed to ally itself with the

shrewdest ones to be found outside of its own organisation. It has

always shown a willingness to trade in the gifts at its command, and

rarely indeed has it got the worst of a bargain.

[Illustration: FIRST TAMMANY HALL, ERECTED 1811.]

The writer in _Harper_, however, while attempting to explain the secret of

Tammany, only raises a still more difficult question. How is it that

Tammany should have been able to discern the signs of the times better

than its rivals? How is it that Tammany has been able to furnish the most

capable politicians the country has ever possessed, and how is it that it

has displayed so much wisdom? There is one explanation, which, no doubt,

commends itself to many of those who have spent their life in fighting

Tammany Hall. Tammany has little regard for the innocence of the dove, but

it has always displayed the wisdom of the serpent. Considering the place

where the Author of all Evil found refuge after his discomfiture by St.

Tammany, a Republican may be pardoned for suggesting that the wisdom of

Tammany is due to the wisdom of the Old Serpent. Certainly, many innocent

persons have been accused of dalliance with the foul fiend on much worse

_primâ facie_ evidence than that which is furnished by the universal

admission that Tammany, out of the most uncompromising materials, has

succeeded in achieving exploits which antecedently would have been

absolutely impossible. For Tammany, although preserving and maintaining

from first to last a discipline which is the despair of all the other

political machines in the country, has never been without fierce

internecine fights. It has cast out leader after leader, and the ferocity

of the feuds within Tammany has exceeded that of any of the combats which

have been waged against the common enemy. Nevertheless, notwithstanding

all schisms, all reverses, all exposures, Tammany remains to this day the

strongest, the best disciplined, and the most feared political

organisation in the world.

[Illustration: TAMMANY HALL, OPENED 1860.]

Mr. Croker, in the series of interviews which I reported in the October

number of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS, argued with much force and plausibility

that it was contrary to the law of human nature that an organisation could

live and last so long if it were composed of Thugs and desperados, and

that witness no doubt is true. Even so stout and stalwart an opponent of

Tammany as Dr. Albert Shaw has frequently felt himself constrained to

admit that the insane fashion in which New York has been governed rendered

even the rule of Tammany preferable to the constitutional and legal chaos

which was the only substitute. Dr. Shaw, speaking of the system under

which New York has hitherto been governed, said:--

To know its ins and outs is not so much like knowing the parts and the

workings of a finely adjusted machine as it is like knowing the

obscure topography of the great Dismal Swamp considered as a place of

refuge for criminals.

Again he wrote:--

In New York, the absurdly disjointed and hopelessly complex array of

separate boards, functions, and administrative powers, first makes it

impossible for the community to focalise responsibility anywhere in

the formal mechanism of municipal government, and then makes it

possible for an irresponsible self-centred political and mercenary

society like Tammany to gain for itself the real control, and thus to

assume a domination that ought to be centred in some body or

functionary directly accountable to the people. Government by a secret

society like Tammany is better than the chaos of a disjointed

government for which there can be no possible location of central

responsibility.

It is not for me to dogmatise where experts, native to New York,

hopelessly disagree. But viewed from the outside the secret of Tammany’s

success seems to lie chiefly in the fact that Tammany has from the first

been really a democratic organisation. No one was too poor, too wicked, or

too ignorant to be treated by Tammany as a man and a brother if he would

stand in with the machine and join the brotherhood.

This secret of Tammany--the open secret--was explained to me in Chicago by

a saloon-keeper of more than dubious morals who had been a Tammany captain

in New York. I saw him the night after Dr. Parkhurst had scored his first

great success over the politicians of New York. The ex-Tammany Captain

shook his head when I asked him what he thought of Dr. Parkhurst’s

campaign. He had no use for Dr. Parkhurst. For a time, he thought, he

might advertise himself, which was no doubt his object, but after that

everything would go on as before. The one permanent institution in New

York was Tammany.

I asked him to explain his secret. “Suppose,” said I, “that I am a newly

arrived citizen in your precinct, and come to you and wish to join

Tammany, what would be required of me?”

“Sir,” said he, “before anything would be required of you we would find

out all about you. I would size you up myself, and then after I had formed

my own judgment I would send two or three trusty men to find out all about

you. Find out, for instance, whether you really meant to work and serve

Tammany, or whether you were only getting in to find out all about it. If

the inquiries were satisfactory then you would be admitted to the ranks of

Tammany, and you would stand in with the rest.”

“What should I have to do?”

“Your first duty,” said he, “would be to vote the Tammany ticket whenever

an election was on, and then to hustle around and make every other person

whom you could get hold of vote the same ticket.”

“And what would I get for my trouble?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said he, “unless you needed it. I was twenty years captain and

I never got anything for myself, but if you needed anything you would get

whatever was going. It might be a job that would give you employment under

the city, it might be a pull that you might have with the alderman in case

you got into trouble, whatever it was you would be entitled to your share.

If you get into trouble, Tammany will help you out. If you are out of a

job Tammany will see that you have the first chance of whatever is going.

It is a great power, is Tammany. Whether it is with the police, or in the

court, or in the City Hall, you will find Tammany men everywhere, and they

all stick together. There is nothing sticks so tight as Tammany.”

Therein, no doubt, this worthy ex-captain revealed the great secret, of

Tammany’s success. Tammany is a brotherhood. Tammany men stick together,

and help each other.

The record of Tammany, however, hardly bears out the claim made for it by

Mr. Croker as to the honesty and purity of its administration. From its

very early days Tammany has had a bad record for dishonesty and utter lack

of scruple. As early as 1837, two Tammany leaders, who had held the

federal offices of Collector of the Port of New York, and of United States

District Attorney for the Southern district of New York, skipped to Europe

after embezzling, the one £250,000, the other £15,000. About twenty years

later, another Tammany leader, who was appointed Postmaster for New York,

advanced £50,000 of post-office money in order to carry Pennsylvania for

Buchanan. These, however, were but bagatelles compared with the carnival

of plunder which was established when Tweed was Tammany Boss.

It was not until about the middle of the century that Tammany laid the

hand upon the agency which for nearly fifty years has been the sceptre of

its power. A certain Southerner, rejoicing in the name of Rynders, who was

a leading man in Tammany in the Forties, organised as a kind of affiliated

institution the Empire Club, whose members were too disreputable even for

Tammany. These men, largely composed of roughs and rowdies, who rejoiced

in the expressive title of the Bowery Plug Uglies, were the first to lay

their hand upon the immigrant and utilise him for the purpose of carrying

elections. Mr. Edwards, writing in _McClure’s Magazine_, says:--

It was the Empire Club, indeed, which taught the political value of

the newly-arrived foreigner. Its members approached the immigrants at

the piers on the arrival of every steamship or packet; conducted them

into congenial districts; found them employment in the city works, or

perhaps helped them to set up in business as keepers of grog-shops.

“Politics in Louisiana,” General Grant is reported to have said on one

occasion, “are Hell.” They seem to have been very much like hell in the

days when the Plug Uglies with Rynders at their head ruled the roast at

Tammany. Mr. Edwards tells a story which sheds a lurid ray of light on the

man and manners of that time. Mr. Godwin, who preceded Mr. Godkin in the

incessant warfare which the _Evening Post_ has waged against Tammany, had

given more than usual offence to Rynders. That worthy, therefore, decided

to assassinate the editor as he was taking his lunch at the hotel. Mike

Walsh, however, a plucky Irishman, interfered, and enabled Godwin to make

his escape. When the intended victim had gone out--

Rynders stepped up to Walsh and said: “What do you mean by interfering

in this matter? It is none of your affair.”

“Well, Godwin did me a good turn once, and I don’t propose to see him

stabbed in the back. You were going to do a sneaking thing; you were

going to assassinate him, and any man who will do that is a coward.”

“No man ever called me a coward, Mike Walsh, and you can’t.”

“But I do, and I will prove that you are a coward. If you are not one,

come upstairs with me now. We will lock ourselves into a room; I will

take a knife and you take one; and the man who is alive after we have

got through, will unlock the door and go out.”

Rynders accepted the challenge. They went to an upper room. Walsh

locked the door, gave Rynders a large bowie-knife, took one himself,

and said: “You stand in that corner, and I’ll stand in this. Then we

will walk towards the centre of the room, and we won’t stop until one

or the other of us is finished.”

Each took his corner. Then Walsh turned and approached the centre of

the room. But Rynders did not stir. “Why don’t you come out?” said

Walsh. Rynders, turning in his corner, faced his antagonist, and said:

“Mike, you and I have always been friends; what is the use of our

fighting now? If we get at it, we shall both be killed, and there is

no good in that.” Walsh for a moment said not a word; but his lip

curled, and he looked upon Rynders with an expression of utter

contempt. Then he said: “I told you you were a coward, and now I prove

it. Never speak to me again.”

Mike Walsh, the hero of this episode of the bowie-knife, is notable as

having been the first man to publicly accuse Tammany of tampering with the

ballot-box. He was not the last by any means; but Tammany seems to have

begun well, for, says Mr. Edwards:--

Roscoe Conkling once said, chatting with a group of friends, that

Governor Seward had told him that the Tammany frauds committed by the

Empire Club in New York City in 1844 unquestionably gave Polk the

meagre majority of five thousand which he obtained in New York State,

and by which he was brought to the Presidency.

[Illustration: FERNANDO WOOD.]

It is not surprising that with this beginning things went on from bad to

worse until Mike Walsh, a few years before the War, publicly declared in a

great Democratic meeting in the city:--

“I tell you now, and I say it boldly, that in this body politic of New

York there is not political or personal honesty enough left to drive a

nail into to hang a hat upon.”

There is a fine picturesqueness about this phrase which enables it to

stick like a burr to the memory. It was not, however, until the Irish

emigration began in good earnest that Tammany found its vocation. Fernando

Wood was first elected to the Mayoralty in 1854. Fernando Wood was a ward

politician who first became known to the public by a prosecution in which

it was proved that he had cheated his partner by altering the figures in

accounts. He did not deny the charge, but pleaded statutory limitation.

Having thus succeeded in avoiding gaol, he promptly ran for the Mayoralty,

and was duly elected. With him came what Mr. Godkin calls “the

organisation of New York politics on a criminal basis.” The exploits of

Fernando Wood, however, were thrown entirely into the shade by the lurid

splendour of his successor.

This was William M. Tweed, the famous “Boss” Tweed, who began his life as

a journeyman, and ended it in Ludley Street Gaol, after having ruled New

York for years, as if he were a Turkish Pasha. After serving

apprenticeship as a Member of the New York Senate, Deputy Street

Commissioner, and President of the Board of Supervisors, he gradually made

his way upwards until he was recognised as Boss of Tammany. It was not,

however, until the year 1868 that he succeeded in giving the public a true

taste of his quality. Even hardened Tammany politicians were aghast at the

colossal frauds which he practised at the polls--frauds not only unique in

their dimensions, but in the exceeding variety and multiplicity of their

methods. On January 1st, 1869, Tweed and his allies began to plunder the

city in a fashion which might have made the mouth of a Roman proconsul

water. His ally, Connolly, was made Comptroller, while Tweed himself found

ample scope for his fraudulent genius in the posts of Deputy Street

Commissioner and Supervisor. In the first year he issued fraudulent

warrants for £750,000. The money was spent fast and furiously. Tweed was a

fellow of infinite variety, and he seemed almost to revel in the diversity

of methods by which he could plunder the public. One very ingenious and

simple fraud was his securing an Act of the Legislature, making a little

paper which he owned the official organ of the City Government. In that

capacity he drew £200,000 a year from the rates and taxes, as compensation

for printing the report of the proceedings of the Common Council. Mr.

Edwards says:--

He established a printing company, whose main business was the

printing of blank forms and vouchers, for which in one year two

million eight hundred thousand dollars was charged. Another item was a

stationer’s company, which furnished all the stationery used in the

public institutions and departments, and this company alone received

some three millions a year. On an order for six reams of cap paper,

the same amount of letter paper, two reams of notepaper, two dozen

pen-holders, four small ink-bottles, and a few other articles, all

worth not more than fifty dollars, a bill of ten thousand dollars was

rendered and paid.

The frauds upon which the conviction of Tweed was obtained consisted

in the payment of enormously increased bills to mechanics, architects,

furniture-makers, and, in some instances, to unknown persons, for

supplies and services. It was the expectation that an honest bill

would be raised all the way from sixty to ninety per cent. In the

first months of the ring’s stealing the increase was about sixty per

cent. Some of the bills were increased by as much as ninety per cent.,

but the average increase was such as to make it possible to give

sixty-seven per cent. to the ring, the confederates being allowed to

keep thirty-three per cent.; and of that thirty-three per cent.

probably at least one-half was a fraudulent increase.

After a time the outrageous nature of his stealings provoked a revolt in

Tammany itself. It is to this which Mr. Croker looks back with such proud

complacency as marking the advent of reformed Tammany. Tweed was beaten at

the elections, and his opponents secured a majority on the Board of

Aldermen. Thereupon the resourceful rascal promptly went down to Albany,

bought up a sufficient number of Congressmen and senators to give him

control of the Legislature, and so secured a new Charter for New York,

which legislated his opponents out of office. By this Charter a board of

audit was created which consisted of Tweed, Connolly and Mayor Hall. What

followed is thus described by the _Nation_:--

The “Board” met once for but ten minutes, and turned the whole

“auditing” business over to Tweed. This sounds like a joke, but is

true. Tweed then went to work, and “audited” as hard as he could,

Garvey and other scamps bringing in the raw material in the shape of

“claims,” and he never stopped till he had “audited” about 6,000,000

dols. worth. Connolly’s part in the little game then came in, and that

worthy citizen drew his warrants for the money, which that

simple-minded “scholar and gentleman” the Mayor endorsed, without

having the least idea what was going on. Tweed’s share of the plunder

amounted to about 1,000,000 dols. in all. The Joint Committee,

reporting on the condition of the city’s finances, declared that the

discoverable stealings of three years are 19,000,000 dols., which is

probably only half the real total.

Never was a more unblushing rascal, as Mr. Tilden said in his account of

Tweed’s sovereignty. The Tammany Ring

controlled the State Legislature, the police, and every department or

functionary of the law; several of the judges on the bench were its

servile instruments, and issued decrees at its command; it secured the

management of the election “machine,” and “ran” it at its own free

will and pleasure; a large part of the press was absolutely at its

disposal. In the course of three years it had paid to eleven

newspapers the sum of 2,329,482 dols. (about £466,000) nominally for

advertisements, most of which were never even published, or never

seen. Not only the City government, but the lion’s share of the State

government also had fallen into the hands of “Boss” Tweed and his

confederates. Millions of dollars were stolen by the conspirators by

means of “street openings,” “improvements,” new pavements, and other

frauds. The Ring took from the public treasury a sum amounting to over

£1,500,000 for furnishing and “repairing” a new Court-house. The

charges for plastering alone came to about £366,000. For carpets,

warrants were drawn for £120,000, although there were scarcely any

carpets in the building. The floors were either bare, or covered with

oil-cloth. Nearly £100,000 was alleged to have been paid for iron

safes, and over £8,200 for “articles” not defined and never found. The

total sum stolen was over £4,000,000.

[Illustration: WILLIAM M. TWEED.]

Tweed’s brief but dazzling career--for he was indeed a hero clad in

Hell-fire--is said by President Andrews to have cost the City of New York

160,000,000 dols. The fine levied by Germany on the City of Paris after

the War of 1870-1 was only one-fourth that amount. Fraud may be more

costly than War. The total direct property loss occasioned by the great

fire at Chicago in 1871, when three square miles of buildings were burned

down, and 98,500 persons rendered homeless, was only 30,000,000 dols.

above the plunder of Tweed and his gang. Thus Fraud can be almost as

ruinous as Fire.

[Illustration: MR. TILDEN.]

Tweed was a fellow, if not of infinite jest like poor Yorick, at least of

infinite insolent humour. In 1871 he boasted that he had amassed a fortune

of 20,000,000 dols. Nor did he in the least scruple to avow the means by

which he acquired it. President Andrews, of Brown University, in telling

the history of the last quarter century, says, “He used gleefully to show

his friends the safe where he kept money for bribing legislators, finding

those of the Tammany-Republican stripe easiest game. Of the contractor who

was decorating his country place at Greenwich he inquired, pointing to a

statue, ‘Who the hell is that?’ ‘That is Mercury, the god of merchants and

thieves,’ was the reply. ‘That’s bully,’ said Tweed; ‘put him over the

front door.’”

Tweed was to the last popular with the masses of the people. Even when the

whole town was ringing with proofs of his guilt, he stood as candidate for

the Senate of New York State, and was elected. He had distributed in the

poorer districts some £10,000 worth of coal and flour, and one of his

champions brought down the house by declaring that “Tweed’s heart has

always been in the right place, and, even if he is a thief, there is more

blood in his little finger and more marrow in his big toe than the men who

are abusing him have in their whole bodies.”

This man, with this excessive development of marrow in his big toe, was

ultimately run down by Mr. Tilden and the Committee of Seventy. Connolly,

the Comptroller, weakened and made terms with his opponents by appointing

Mr. Green as Deputy-Comptroller. Mr. Green had little difficulty in laying

hands upon all that was necessary in order to secure the prosecution and

conviction of Tweed. Tweed’s two infamous judges were driven from the

bench, and he himself was clapped into gaol. He made his escape, and

sought refuge in Spain. He was, however, delivered up to the American

authorities, and reconducted to prison, where he died. To the last Tweed

retained possession of much of his ill-gotten wealth. An offer which was

made to surrender the residue of his millions in return for his liberty

was rejected.

Tweed thought himself on the whole, an ill-used man. The judge who tried

Tweed declared that he had perverted the “power with which he was clothed

in a manner more infamous, more outrageous, than any instance of a like

character which the history of the civilised world afforded.” But Tweed

himself declared that he believed he had done right, and was willing to

“submit himself to the just criticism of any and all honest men.” From

this it would seem that Mr. Croker is not alone in his imperturbable

consciousness of public rectitude. Tweed on one occasion admitted that he

had perhaps erred, but he explained he was not to blame. The fault lay

with human nature in the first place, and with the system under which New

York was governed in the second. Therein, no doubt, he was right. “Human

nature,” he said, “could not resist such temptations as were offered to

men who were in power in New York, so long as the disposition of the

offices of the city was at their command.”

The most outrageous thing that Tweed ever did was to pass a bill through

the State Legislature at Albany, giving the judges unlimited power to

punish summarily whatever they chose to consider to be contempt. By this

law, which was fortunately vetoed by the Governor, every newspaper in New

York would have been gagged as effectually as the press of Constantinople.

After Tweed fell, Tammany was reorganised under Honest John Kelly and

Richard Croker. Mr. Godkin declares that Honest John Kelly was only honest

in name. He says:--

John Kelly practised the great Greek maxim “not too much of anything,”

simply made every candidate pay handsomely for his nomination,

pocketed the money himself, and, whether he rendered any account of it

or not, died in possession of a handsome fortune. His policy was the

very safe one of making the city money go as far as possible among the

workers by compelling every office-holder to divide his salary and

perquisites with a number of other persons.

The same system had prevailed down to the year 1894, when Tammany, for the

first time in many years, was driven from power. Just before the upset,

the New York _Evening Post_ published the records of the twenty-eight men

who now or recently composed the Executive Committee of Tammany. It showed

that they were all professional politicians, and that among them were one

convicted murderer, three men who had been indicted for murder, felonious

assault, and bribery, respectively, four professional gamblers, five

ex-keepers of gambling houses, nine who either now or formerly sold

liquor, three whose fathers did, three former pugilists, four former

rowdies, and six members of the famous Tweed gang. Seventeen of these

held office, seven formerly did, and two were favoured contractors.

By these men New York was governed down to the year 1894. All the efforts

of the reformers seemed in vain. Mr. Godkin reluctantly confessed:--

The power of the semi-criminal organisation known as Tammany Hall not

only remains unshaken, but grows stronger from year to year. Every

year its management descends, with perfect impunity, into the hands of

a more and more degraded class.

But it is ever the darkest hour before the dawn. Although on the very eve

of the November election of 1894 it was declared that “Mr. Croker held

almost as despotic a sway over New York as an Oriental potentate over his

kingdom,” one month after that statement had been made he was hurled from

power by a great outburst of popular indignation. How that was brought

about I will now proceed to tell.

[Illustration: MR. E. L. GODKIN, EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST,” NEW YORK.

The sworn foe of Tammany.]

CHAPTER IV.

THE LEXOW SEARCHLIGHT.

Mr. Lowell good-humouredly chaffed John Bull when he declared that

He detests the same faults in himself he neglected,

When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected,

and we only need to glance at current English criticisms upon American

affairs to justify the poet’s remark. Especially is this the case with a

vice which of all others is regarded as distinctively English. John Bull

has plenty of faults, but of those which render him odious to his

neighbours there is none which is quite so loathsome as his “unctuous

rectitude.” That phrase, coined by Mr. Rhodes to express the contempt

which he and every one who knew the facts felt on contemplating the

hypocrisy and Pharisaism displayed in connection with the Jameson Raid, is

likely to live long after Mr. Rhodes has vanished from this mortal scene.

This tendency to Pharisaism and self-righteous complacency, which thanks

God that it is not as other men are, is one of those vices which John

Bull’s children seem to have inherited in full measure. We are pretty good

at Pharisaism in the Old Country, but we are “not a circumstance,” to use

the familiar slang, when we compare ourselves to some of the Pharisees

reared across the Atlantic. This has nowhere been brought into such strong

relief as when on the very eve of the exposure and discomfiture of Tammany

their spokesmen took the stump and talked like very Pecksniffs concerning

the immaculate purity of Tammany Hall.

The same characteristic is observable in all of them. Whether it is Boss

Tweed, appealing confidently to the verdict of honest men upon a career of

colossal theft and almost inconceivable fraud; or Mr. Croker, who, after

surveying his whole life, declares that he has not discovered a single

action which he has reason to regret, for he has not done anything but

good all his life; or Bourke Cochran, who was at one time the Apollo and

the Demosthenes of Tammany, the same unctuous rectitude oozes out of every

pore. When Tammany was at its heyday of prosperity and power in 1889, it

assembled in its thousands to cheer enthusiastically the impassioned

oratory of Mr. Cochran, who declared, as among the self-evident truths

which found an echo in every breast, that “if corruption prevails among

the people, liberty will become a blighting curse, subversive of order.

Corruption once begun, decay is inevitable and irresistible; the

destruction of the Republic is immediate, immeasurable, irredeemable;

since history does not record a case of a popular government which has

been arrested in its downward course.” Tammany listened to this with

ecstatic admiration, cheered to the echo their eloquent oracle, and then

went on using the proceeds of a system of blackmail for the perfecting of

an engine of corruption to which it is difficult to discover a parallel in

the annals of mankind.

In Mr. Croker’s case, his calm consciousness of incorruptible virtue seems

to be based upon a curious inversion of a belief in a Divine Providence.

Tammany is not strong in theology, but Mr. Croker, in talking to me, based

his argument in favour of the excellence of Tammany on the postulate that

the government of the universe was founded on the law of righteousness.

This being the case, it was only possible to reconcile the continued

existence of Tammany on one of two hypotheses. Either the domination of

evil was permitted for a season for some sufficient cause hidden in the

inscrutable mysteries of the Divine councils, or we must boldly assert

that, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Tammany rule was in

accordance with the eternal law, _Credo quia impossibile_, rather than

admit that so great an anomaly as a terrestrial Inferno could be permitted

to exist by the good government of God. Mr. Croker, of course, adopted the

latter hypothesis. There is much in it, no doubt, especially to those in

Mr. Croker’s position. It is, however, open to the fatal objection that

the same process of logic would _à fortiori_ secure a certificate of good

conduct for the Great Assassin of Stamboul himself. The Ottoman Empire has

lasted even longer than Tammany Hall, but even Mr. Croker would shrink

from maintaining that Abdul Hamid was on that account the exemplary

vicegerent of the Almighty.

This Pharisaic panoply in which Tammany was clad, as in a coat of mail,

was no small element of its strength. The consciousness of wrong-doing is

always an element of weakness. Not until a man can do evil and persuade

himself that he is doing good can he silence that conscience which makes

cowards of us all. Probably this unctuous rectitude on the part of Tammany

and its Boss should be estimated as one of the chief obstacles in the way

of the scattered and despairing band of reformers who, five or six years

ago, confronted the stronghold of iniquity entrenched in their midst.

Its position, indeed, appeared almost impregnable. Tammany Hall commanded

an annual revenue large enough to equip and maintain a small army. It had

under its orders the whole of the executive force in its police--a body of

men practically above the law, armed with powers hardly inferior to those

of the police of St. Petersburg. Besides the police, all the persons on

the pay-rolls of the City and County were under the thumb of the Boss.

There was hardly a city official, from the highest to the lowest, who did

not hold office by the sovereign will and pleasure of Tammany. As there

are 27,000 names on those pay-rolls, all of whom were voters and were

taxable to an almost unlimited extent whenever the Tammany exchequer

needed to be replenished, it is obvious how enormous were the odds against

the assailants of Tammany.

[Illustration: _Photo by Tom Reveley, Wantage._ RICHARD CROKER IN HIS

GARDEN AT WANTAGE, BERKSHIRE.]

But the unctuous rectitude of its leaders, the prompt obedience of the

police Janissaries, and the discipline of the standing army of the

twenty-seven thousand Pretorians on the city pay-rolls, were by no means

the only difficulties which had to be overcome. Tammany Hall itself might

be compared to a central citadel or keep of a Norman fortress. The

outworks consisted of all the saloons, gaming hells, and houses of

ill-fame in the City of New York. Some of these, no doubt, were by no

means enthusiastic in support of the powers that be, but they resembled

tribes which, having been subdued by force of arms, are compelled to pay

tribute and use their weapons in support of their conquerors. In New York,

just before the revolt against Tammany, the number of licences for the

sale of intoxicants in New York City was over 6,000. The number of

unlicensed drinking places was estimated at from 2,000 to 3,000. Each of

these saloons might be regarded as a detached outwork, holding a position

in advance of the main citadel, and covering it from the attack of its

foes.

In those days it used to be said that licences were granted by the Excise

Board to anybody who had not served a term in a penitentiary. One

indignant divine declared that it was perfectly safe to say that, if the

Devil himself should apply to the Excise Board for a licence to set up a

branch establishment on the children’s playground in the Central Park, it

would be granted. As to the other establishments of even worse fame than

the saloon, there was an unwritten contract by which, in return for

tribute paid directly or indirectly, they were shielded by the strong arm

of Tammany from the enforcement of the law. It was calculated that if all

the saloons in New York were placed side by side, averaging them at only

twenty feet frontage each, they would form a line of circumvallation

twenty miles long. To put it in another way, there was on an average one

saloon for every thirty voters.

In addition to its control of the saloon, Tammany had two extremely

important financial resources which have not yet been mentioned. The first

was the control of the city contracts. A great city like New York, with an

expenditure that exceeded that of the whole Federal Government of the

United States fifty years ago, had an enormous means of influence at its

disposal in the mere granting of contracts. But even this was a

comparatively trivial element in the financial strength of Tammany. There

existed in New York, as in almost every city, great corporations

representing enormous capital, and dividing gigantic dividends, which, in

the Tammany scheme of the universe, might have been created for the

express purpose of furnishing an unfailing supply of revenue to the party

chest. The corporations which enjoyed franchises from the city, giving

them control of the streets, whether for the purpose of traction, of

lighting, or of electrical communication, were Tammany’s milch cows. They

all possess monopolies, granted to them in the first instance either by

corruption or by negligence, which enable them to plunder the public.

These monopolies can only be terminated or modified by the Legislature,

and the Legislature can only act in obedience to the party machine. All

that needs to be done when the campaign fund runs low is for the Boss to

intimate to the various corporations that milking time has come, and that

if they do not contribute liberally of their substance to the party

treasury, Tammany will no longer be able to give them protection when the

usual attack is made next session upon their monopoly or their franchise.

Money is the sinews of war, and as the Tammany war chest was always full,

Tammany snapped its fingers at all its enemies, and contemptuously

declared that the reformers did not amount to a row of pins.

[Illustration: THE CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND, CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK.]

The outlook undoubtedly was very gloomy. From the point of view of

practical politics it was simply hopeless; nevertheless, in a couple of

years the fortress was stormed, and the government of New York placed in

the hands of the Reformers. The story of the way in which this was brought

about should never be forgotten by all those who are called upon to lead

forlorn hopes against immense odds. As long as the world lasts, such

narratives are among the most precious cordials which in times of danger

and distress restore the courage and revive the faith of man. Dr.

Parkhurst’s attack on Tammany is one of the latest of a long series of

victories achieved by the leader of an outnumbered handful. When Gideon

went forth against the hosts of Midian with only three hundred followers,

he left a leading case on record for the encouragement of all who should

come after. How many reformers and revolutionists who have helped the

world forward in the path of progress have been cheered by the dream in

which the Midianitish soldier saw a cake of barley bread smite and

overturn the multitudinous camp of the conqueror, history does not record!

But if ever a man needed the inspiration of that barley cake it was Dr.

Parkhurst, when in 1892 he set himself to the desperate task of wresting

New York City from the grasp of Tammany.

Dr. Parkhurst was a Massachusetts minister of Puritan ancestry, who, in

1880, at the age of thirty-eight, had been called to Madison Square

Church, in New York. For ten years he went in and out among the people,

quietly building up his church, ministering to his congregation, and

learning at first-hand the real difficulties which offered almost

insuperable obstacles to right living in New York. In 1890, on the eve of

the November election, he preached a sermon on municipal politics, which,

although it failed in influencing the polls, nevertheless marked Dr.

Parkhurst out as the man to succeed Dr. Howard Crosby as President of the

Society for the Prevention of Crime. He took office in 1891. In less than

twelve months he began the campaign from which he never withdrew his hand

until the government of the city was wrested from the control of Tammany.

Nothing is more characteristic, both of the state of things in New York

and the uncompromising directness of Dr. Parkhurst, than the fact that he

had no sooner assumed the control of the Society for the Prevention of

Crime than he adopted as his motto the significant watchword, “Down with

the Police!” That fact alone speaks volumes as to how utterly New York

City had fallen under the control of the Evil One. For a society for the

prevention of crime to adopt “Down with the Police!” as its watchword,

seems to us of the Old World absolutely inconceivable. The police exist

for the prevention of crime, yet here was a society of leading citizens,

presided over by a doctor of divinity, putting in the forefront of its

programme the formula “Down with the Police!”

Strange though it may seem to us, the best people of New York understood

and appreciated what Dr. Parkhurst was after. But it was not till the 14th

of February, 1892, that he put the trumpet to his lips and blew a blast

the echoes of which are still sounding through the world. His sermon was

an impeachment of the Government of New York, the like of which had seldom

been heard before in a Christian pulpit. If any one questions the justice

of the title of this volume, let him read what Dr. Parkhurst said in the

sermon, of which the following sentence is a fair sample:--

There is not a form under which the Devil disguises himself that so

perplexes us in our efforts, or so bewilders us in the devising of our

schemes, as the polluted harpies that, under the pretext of governing

this city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals. They are

a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot.

That was plain speaking in honest, ringing Saxon, for Dr. Parkhurst knew

that there was no better way of spoiling the trump card of the Devil’s

game than to refuse to let him keep things mixed. He maintained that the

district attorney, or, as we should say, the public prosecutor, was guilty

of complicity with vice and crime: that “every effort to make men

respectable, honest, temperate, and sexually clean was a direct blow

between the eyes of the mayor and his whole gang of drunken and lecherous

subordinates, who shielded and patronised iniquity.” Criminals and

officials, he declared, were hand-and-glove, and he summed up the whole

matter in the following concise exposition of the _status quo_ in “Satan’s

Invisible World” in New York, 1892:--“It is simply one solid gang of

rascals, half of the gang in office and the other half out, and the two

halves steadily catering to each other across the official line.”

[Illustration: From _Frank Leslie’s Weekly_. REV. C. H. PARKHURST, D.D.,

DENOUNCING TAMMANY’S GOVERNMENT OF NEW YORK.]

Of course there was a great outcry. Some good people were scandalised,

while as for the bad ones, they were simply outraged at such “violent and

intemperate utterances in the pulpit.” One of the police captains declared

“it was a shame for a minister of the Gospel to disgrace the pulpit by

such utterances.” Dr. Parkhurst was summoned before the Grand Jury, and

solemnly reproved for making statements which he could not for the moment

substantiate with chapter and verse. When the Grand Jury condemned him and

the judge rebuked him, Tammany was in high glee; but Dr. Parkhurst bided

his time. He was not a man to be “downed” by censure. Finding that his

general statements were scouted because he could not produce first hand

evidence as to the literal accuracy of each particular instance on which

he built up his general finding, he took the bold and courageous step of

going himself through the houses of ill-fame, gaming hells, and other

resorts which were running open under the protection of the police. He was

accompanied in his pilgrimage by a detective and a lawyer, and for three

weeks every night Dr. Parkhurst, to use his own phrase, “traversed the

avenues of our municipal hell.” They entered into no houses not easy of

access, went into no places which were not recognised as notorious, and

were perfectly well known by the constable on the beat. In one case they

succeeded in proving police collusion by getting the policeman on beat to

stand guard while they visited the house, ostensibly for an immoral

purpose, in order to warn them against any signs of a possible raid.

Having thus mastered his facts and obtained incontrovertible evidence at

first hand as to the fact of police complicity in the wholesale violation

of the law, Dr. Parkhurst stood up in his pulpit on the morning of March

13th, 1892, and once more arraigned the city authorities. This time,

however, he was armed with a mass of facts ascertained at first hand, and

supported by unimpeachable, independent testimony. He brought forward no

fewer than two hundred and eighty-four cases in which the law was

flagrantly violated under the noses of the police, who, he maintained,

were guilty of corrupt complicity in the violation of the law they were

appointed to enforce.

It was a great sermon, and one that shook the city to its centre. Some

idea of its drift and spirit may be gained from this extract:--

There is little advantage in preaching the Gospel to a young fellow on

Sunday, if he is going to be sitting on the edge of a

Tammany-maintained hell the rest of the week. Don’t tell me that I

don’t know what I am talking about. Many a long, dismal,

heart-sickening night, in company with two trusted friends, have I

spent since I spoke on this matter before, going down into the

disgusting depths of this Tammany-debauched town; and it is rotten

with a rottenness that is unspeakable and indescribable, and a

rottenness that would be absolutely impossible except by the

connivance, not to say the purchased sympathy, of the men whose one

obligation before God, men, their own consciences, is to shield virtue

and make vice difficult. Now, that I stand by, because before

Almighty God I know it, and I will stand by it though buried beneath

presentments as thick as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa, or snowflakes

in a March blizzard.

And stand by it Dr. Parkhurst did. He was promptly summoned again before

the Grand Jury, and this time he had his facts at command. Instead of

being rebuked, the Grand Jury reported emphatically that it was impossible

to reconcile the facts presented by Dr. Parkhurst with any other theory

than that of wholesale police corruption.

The following month various keepers of disreputable houses were prosecuted

upon Dr. Parkhurst’s evidence, when every effort was made to damage Dr.

Parkhurst by representing him as the vicious criminal who was responsible

for the very evils which he had brought to light.

It is the old, old story. As long as you sit still and say nothing you are

all right, but the moment you call attention to a hideous wrong or a

shameful crime, all those whose iniquities you have disclosed combine with

your enemies in order to make a busy public believe that it is you who

have exposed the crime who is the real criminal, while they, poor

innocents, are the injured parties, for whom a respectable public should

have nothing but sympathy, and commiseration.

The ferocity of the attacks upon Dr. Parkhurst provoked a reaction in his

favour. The City Vigilance Society was formed by the association of forty

religious and secular societies of the city. The work of sapping and

mining went steadily on. In order to bring odium upon Dr. Parkhurst, the

police suddenly decided to close up several houses of ill-fame, so as to

turn their unfortunate occupants into the streets on one of the coldest

nights of the winter of 1892. Dr. Parkhurst met this by promptly providing

homes for all the dispossessed women. Foiled in this cruel manœuvre, the

police prosecuted Dr. Parkhurst’s detective for an alleged attempt to levy

blackmail. This was Satan reproving sin with a vengeance, and for the

moment it had a temporary success. The detective was convicted, in the

first instance, but on appeal the verdict was set aside. Undaunted,

however, by this reverse, Dr. Parkhurst began to carry the war into the

enemy’s camp. He got up cases against forty-five of the sixty-four

gambling and disorderly houses which were allowed to run by the police

captain of a single precinct. The trials followed with varying results. It

was evident that the difficulties in the way of obtaining a full

disclosure of police corruption could only be overcome by special

measures. Public opinion was now deeply stirred, and the Chamber of

Commerce memorialised the Senate of New York City to hold an inquiry into

the Police Department of New York.

The Senate appointed a Committee of Investigation, and passed a bill

providing for the payment of its expenses. This bill was vetoed by

Governor Flower, himself a Democrat, whose veto elicited another

illustration, if it were wanted, of the marvellous Pharisaism of Tammany

and its friends.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR FLOWER.]

Where party feeling runs high, anything that one party proposes the other

one opposes, and Governor Flower, finding the Republican majority of the

Senate in favour of the investigation into the misdeeds of the New York

police, could only see in it a Republican plot for the manufacture of

political capital in the division of political patronage. So he took

special objection to any investigation of the Police Department of New

York. The following passage from the veto message deserves to stand on

record as one of the most extraordinary eulogies ever pronounced upon a

rotten system on the very eve of its exposure. Speaking of New York,

Governor Flower said:--

Except for political objects, there is no good reason why that city

should be singled out for legislative scrutiny. The same men who do

the investigating in public will admit in private what every

well-informed person knows is true--that no city in the State is so

well governed as New York. No city in the State has a lower tax rate;

no city has a better police regulation; no city has a lower ratio of

crime; no city has better streets; no city has a better fire

department; no city has better parks; no city has better schools; no

city has a better health department; no city has a better credit; no

city is so comfortable a place to live in. That bad men sometimes get

in office there is true. That frauds upon the city treasury sometimes

occur is true; that mal-administration sometimes happens is true; that

ideal municipal government has not yet been attained there is true;

but these things are as equally true of every city in the world, they

are truer of other cities of our State than they are of New

York.--Lexow Commission, vol. i., p. 10.

In order to get round the Governor’s veto, prominent members of the

Chamber of Commerce guaranteed to the Committee counsel’s fees to an

amount necessary to enable them to prosecute the investigation. Thereupon

the Committee was appointed and set to work. All its members were Senators

of the State of New York. It was presided over by Mr. Clarence Lexow. The

names of the other members were Edmund O’Connor, George W. Robertson,

Cuthbert W. Pound, Charles T. Saxton, Jacob A. Cantor, Daniel Bradley,

with William A. Sutherland and John W. Goff as counsel. The only member of

the Committee representing New York City was Mr. Cantor, who presented the

minority Report, which maintained that the Republicans were as bad as the

Democrats, and that most of the officials in the Police Department

implicated in blackmail, fraud and corruption were Republicans.

[Illustration: JOHN W. GOFF.]

The Committee held its first meeting on the 9th of March, 1894. At the

earlier sittings the Police Department was represented by counsel, but

after a while he was withdrawn, and the Committee was left to conduct its

inquiries as best it could. It was fortunate in securing the services of a

famous lawyer, Mr. John W. Goff, who is now Recorder of New York,

“succeeding a man who fined him for contempt because he insisted upon his

rights as counsel in protecting one of Dr. Parkhurst’s agents.” As even

the one dissentient member of the Committee reported, “No more tireless,

industrious or effective counsel was ever employed by a Committee charged

with the responsibility of its character.” As I read over the voluminous

reports of the evidence taken by the Lexow Committee, I could not repress

a sigh: would that we had enjoyed the privilege of having such an examiner

as John W. Goff on the South Africa Committee! But, of course, there was

one great difference: the Lexow Committee was appointed for the purpose of

finding out the facts and exposing scandal, whereas the South Africa

Committee seems to have accepted the theory that it was appointed for

exactly the opposite purpose of hushing them up, and of screening Mr.

Chamberlain at any cost.

The members of the Lexow Committee when they undertook their duties had no

idea as to how far it would lead them. They thought that two days a week

for three weeks would complete the investigation. No sooner, however, had

they begun to apply the probe than they came upon evidence of such

rottenness that even the laziest of them felt they had no option but to go

on. Go on they did day after day, taking evidence from morning till night,

but it was not until the end of the year that they were able to finish

their Provisional Report. This was dated January 16th, 1895. In the Report

they thus summarise the evidence which they took:--

The record shows a total of 10,576 pages of proceedings. This does not

include a mass of documentary exhibits which were read and considered

in evidence, for the purpose of information. Of this testimony, 1,077

pages embrace the subject-matter of police interference at the polls,

and the balance, or almost 9,500 pages, refer to the subject-matter of

blackmail, extortion and corruption. In all, 678 witnesses were

examined, of whom 81 were examined on the first and 597 on the second

branch of the inquiry. In all, about 3,000 subpœnas were served, of

which upwards of 2,750 were with reference to the second branch of the

inquiry.--_Ib._, vol. i., p. 4.

It is upon this immense body of evidence taken on oath, under

cross-examination in public audiences, that I have based this volume.

“Satan’s Invisible World” is thus displayed, not by a stranger or a casual

observer, or an amateur investigator. The revelation has been made by

American subjects testifying on oath before an American tribunal as to the

state of things that actually existed in the City of New York. As the

result of the investigation the old system of Tammany rule was overthrown,

and the police thoroughly reorganised. They have now as Chief Commissioner

Mr. Moss, who, after Mr. Goff, was the chief instrument in exposing the

corruption of the old system. If any one doubts the accuracy of the

picture of what actually existed down to 1894, which is set forth in this

and the following pages, I can only refer him to the volumes of evidence

to which reference is made throughout in the passages quoted.

It is not surprising that men who have lived in the midst of such a city

should sometimes burst out like Dr. Parkhurst with the despairing cry:--

You can love your country and work for it, pray and plead for it, but

there is a stage of rottenness which once reached, the country is

damned beyond the power of the Holy Ghost to do anything for it.

That such a state of rottenness has been reached in any part of the

English-speaking world we must all be loath to admit. The great popular

uprising which swept Tammany from power in 1894 was a healthy sign that

the rottenness had not eaten to the vitals of the community. But the

Charter of Greater New York proves only too well how deeply distrust has

sapped the faith of the citizens in the possibility of governing their

city by the ordinary democratic machinery of an elective assembly.

[Illustration: SENATOR LEXOW.]

PART II.

SATAN’S INVISIBLE WORLD.

CHAPTER I.

THE POLICE BANDITS OF NEW YORK.

The Lexow Committee experienced great difficulty in procuring evidence

owing to the Reign of Terror which was established in New York by the

police. The story reads more like a description of an Indian province

terrorized by a band of Thugs than a statement of how New York was

governed. When unwilling witnesses--and the vast majority of witnesses

were most unwilling--were placed on the stand, they were thus addressed by

the Chairman:--

Any testimony you give now, under oath, before this Committee with

reference to bribery or corruption, cannot be used against you in any

form, shape, or way. The fact of your confession here before this

Committee will be a complete bar against any prosecution against you

for that offence. In other words, if you sit here and tell the truth,

and confess that you have committed any crime of that description, you

will be absolutely relieved from any punishment for the commission of

that crime. On the other hand, if you swear to anything that is false,

then, not only could you be punished for the crime that you committed,

if you did commit the crime of bribery, but for the crime of false

swearing, or perjury, besides; you understand that?--Vol. iv., p.

3,615.

Notwithstanding this, the amount of perjury committed, especially by

policemen, was appalling. One of them, of the name of Interman, admitted

frankly that it was the common understanding among the members of the

force that it was their duty to swear falsely to conceal the facts about

bribery and corruption. If they spoke the truth they would be bounced or

persecuted, whereas if they came forward and perjured themselves they

would stand high with their superiors. The wrath of a captain who can make

it hot for you next day evidently weighed much more with the police than

the wrath of an offended God, whose mills grind so slowly that retribution

may not begin till the day of judgment.

The answers to questions put to brothel-keepers and others as to their

belief in the binding character of an oath and the reality of a future

state were hardly edifying. One woman, Julia Mahoney, broke the record

for the unhesitating candour with which she answered counsel’s questions.

“Do you not know,” said Mr. Goff, “that you would meet your punishment in

the world hereafter?”

“I hope not,” Julia replied simply.

“And you know that you would be liable to go to the State’s prison?”

persisted Mr. Goff. But Mrs. Mahoney was proof against that threat.

“If I was in prison I would be out in twenty-four hours,” she remarked.

“She has got a pull,” sagely observed Senator Bradley.

It must be admitted that it was a task of uncommon difficulty to extract

the truth from witnesses such as these, who fear not God neither regard

man. Why should they? They have got a pull, and the pull ends all things.

Two competent American observers have recently told us what a policeman is

in an American city. Both confirm to the letter what was stated by a

leading citizen of Chicago five years ago. “Never mind what is said about

this or that system of city government. In Chicago and all the West the

police govern the city, and that is all there is to it.” In New York it

would appear to have been much the same. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, who was

head of the New York police in the first two years of the Reform

Administration, writing in the _Century Magazine_ for October, says:--

The police occupy positions of great importance. They not merely

preserve order, the first essential of both liberty and civilisation,

but to a large portion of our population they stand as the embodiment

as well as the representative of the law of the land. To the average

dweller in a tenement-house district, especially if born abroad, the

policeman is in his own person all that there is of government: he is

judge, executive and legislature, constitution and town meeting.

The other witness is Mr. Godkin, the editor of the _Evening Post_, who,

writing in the _North American Review_ seven years back, says of the newly

landed immigrant:--

No sooner has he established himself in a tenement-house or a

boarding-house than he finds himself face to face with three

functionaries who represent to him the government of his new

country--the police justice of the district, the police captain of his

precinct, and the political “district leader.” These are, to him, the

Federal, State and municipal governments rolled into one.... These

three men are to him America. Everything else in the national

institutions in which Americans pride themselves he only sees through

a glass darkly, if he sees it at all.

These dwellers in tenement-houses in New York, to whom the police--of whom

there were then 4,000--are judge, executive, and legislature, constitution

and town meeting, comprise two-thirds of the population of the city. To

the foreign denizen of these districts--say one-half of the whole--the

policeman and his masters of the political machine are all of America that

he can see or understand.

Now let us see what kind of an America the New York police presented to

the eyes of the majority of the population of the city. The Lexow

Committee in its final Report, after commenting on the difficulty of

obtaining evidence owing to the terrorism practised by the police, said of

a typical case:--

This situation was characteristic. A consuming desire to put an end to

an outrageous servitude on the one hand, and a dread lest failure

might result in a still more galling thraldom on the other! It seemed,

in fact, as though every interest, every occupation, almost every

citizen, was dominated by an all-controlling and overshadowing dread

of the police department.

Those in the humbler walks of life were subjected to appalling

outrages which to some extent continued, even to the end of the

investigation. They were abused, clubbed and imprisoned, and even

convicted of crimes on false testimony by policemen and their

accomplices. Men of business were harassed and annoyed in their

affairs, so that they too were compelled to bend their necks to the

police yoke, in order that they might share that so-called protection

which seemed indispensable to the profitable conduct of their affairs.

People of all degrees seemed to feel that to antagonize the police was

to call down upon themselves the swift judgment and persecution of an

invulnerable force, strong in itself, banded together by self-interest

and the community of unlawful gain, and so thoroughly entrenched in

the municipal government as to defy ordinary assault. Strong men

hesitated when required to give evidence of their oppression, and

whispered stories; tricks, subterfuges and schemes of all kinds were

resorted to to withhold from this committee and its counsel the fact

that they had knowledge of acts of corruption or oppression by the

police. The uniform belief was that if they spoke against the police,

or if the police discovered that they had been instrumental in aiding

your Committee, or had given information, their business would be

ruined, they would be hounded from the city, and their lives even

jeopardised.--Vol. i., pp. 25, 26.

For wrongs inflicted by the police there was no redress. Mr. Goff in the

concluding stages of the investigation referred to this phase of the

question in the following significant terms:--

A great many innocent people who have been clubbed by the police in

our city have thought that the city was responsible for the actions of

its employés; but the courts have held time and time again that the

city is not responsible; and then from the further fact that nearly

every policeman in the city has his property in his wife’s name, it

has become a notorious thing that it is useless to bring an action for

assault against a policeman.... Mr. Jerome reminds me now of the

celebrated case of Mr. Fleming; I think it was a Decoration Day

parade. Captain Williams clubbed him in Madison Square, and he got a

judgment of $2,500; but the judgment was never collected. We have

never been able to get it on the record that a judgment against a

police official has been paid.--Vol. v., p. 4,661.

It is not surprising after this to read the answer of a witness, a

journalist of standing, who had been nearly murdered by a police captain

in the cells of the police-station. He was asked if he had taken

proceedings against his assailant. He replied:--

“I never did, sir. It is no use going to law with the Devil, and

Court, and Hell!”

To quote the more formal but not less emphatic finding of the Lexow

Committee:--

It appears, therefore, that the police formed a separate and highly

privileged class, armed with the authority and the machinery for

oppression and punishment, but practically free themselves from the

operation of the criminal law.--Vol. i., p. 30.

[Illustration: A VIEW IN ST. PETERSBURG. A City where the Police have as

much power as in New York.]

CHAPTER II.

THE POWERS AND THE IMPOTENCE OF THE POLICE.

One of the most pathetic of human fallacies is the assumption that you

have only to pass a law in order to extirpate an evil. The touching faith

of English-speaking men in the efficacy of statute-made law is nowhere

more strikingly illustrated than in the great cities of the United States.

The fact that a statute is only so much good paper inked by a

printing-press does not seem to occur to the citizens, even after the

repeated demonstrations of its impotence. Nowhere can severer laws be

found for the suppression of all manner of vice and crime than in those

cities where vice and crime hold high carnival under the patronage of the

police. It has been frequently observed that this habit of finding relief

for moral indignation by placing a stringent law upon the statute-book is

exactly the instinct which leads the private citizen to say “Damn!” There

is a great deal of this swearing at large in the passing of rigorous

statutes, which are no sooner passed than they appear to be forgotten.

Take, for instance, the laws which were passed from time to time to secure

the extirpation of vice and crime in the City of New York. They certainly

did not err in the direction of leniency. The usual complaint of the

police elsewhere is that they are not vested with sufficient power in

order to deal with the vicious and criminal classes. This cannot be said

with truth of the New York police, as will be seen from the following

extract from the proceedings before the Lexow Committee:--

Mr. Moss: We have got a situation here as autocratic as anything than

can be found in St. Petersburg; a law was passed in 1873 for the

purpose of giving the police abundant opportunity to enter such places

for any purpose that they might see fit to enter.

Mr. Goff: Judicial functions have been vested in the Superintendent of

Police, in a policeman of this city, who, on his own motion, can under

Section 285 of the Consolidation Act issue a warrant, and on the

execution of that warrant the doors of any house in the City of New

York may be broken in. If we had time to introduce evidence of cases,

we could do so where from spleen and malice on the part of some common

policeman, the respectable houses have been invaded without colour or

authority of right, except this arbitrary power given to the police by

law.

Senator O’Connor: That is simply a horrible condition of affairs;

better submit to a thousand disorderly houses than that one decent

house should be treated in such a manner.

Mr. Goff: Under the law as it exists to-day in the City of New York, a

policeman who is the Superintendent of Police--that is all he is, a

policeman--has the power to issue his warrant fully equal to that

exercised by the Prefect of Police in St. Petersburg....

Counsel then read as follows:--

“If any member of the police force, or if any two or more

householders, shall report in writing under his or their signature, to

the Superintendent of Police that there are good grounds, and state

them, for believing any house, room or premises within the said city

to be kept or used as a common gaming-house or common gaming premises

or room for playing for wagers, or for money at any game of chance, or

to be kept or used for lewd and obscene purposes or amusements, or the

deposit or sale of lottery tickets or lottery policies, it shall be

lawful for the Superintendent of Police to authorise in writing any

member or members of the police force to enter the same, who may

forthwith arrest all persons there found offending against the law,

but none other, and seize all implements of game or lottery tickets or

lottery policies and convey any person so arrested before a magistrate

and bring the article so seized to the office of the clerk; it shall

be the duty of the said Superintendent of Police to cause such

arrested person to be rigorously prosecuted and such articles seized

to be destroyed as the orders, rules and regulations of the Board of

Police shall direct.”

There has been no law in our country under our system of a more

complete, sweeping and comprehensive measure placed within the powers

of a simple executive office, as the Superintendent of Police is, as

this law. It exceeds that of the Common Law, where the power is vested

in a judicial officer to issue a warrant; but here a policeman may

authorise in writing any members of his police force to enter any

place complained of by either a member of the police force or by two

householders, and arrest all such persons found therein.--Vol. iv.,

4,493-7.

Notwithstanding this right of domiciliary visitation, which equals or

exceeds that possessed by the Prefect of St. Petersburg, we have it

admitted on all hands that it utterly failed in attaining its end. The

police machine, Mr. Goff declared, was by no means inefficient. Regarded

as a machine it was indeed, in his opinion, the most perfect machine ever

invented in New York. Notwithstanding all its mechanical perfection the

result was nothing but organised impotence.

Witness after witness appeared on the stand to attest the extraordinary

inability of the police authorities to cope with the flagrant evils in the

city or in the force under their command. On one occasion it was proved

that the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Crime had been hunted

by a mob of bullies and crooks for half a mile through Bowery. It was a

regular riot, in which the agents for the Society were struck and stoned

through the whole of Captain Devery’s precinct; the police officers

looking on as amused spectators. They were appealed to for assistance, and

took no notice. At last, the hunted men jumped on a car, and escaped with

their lives. But although this riot had taken place in the heart of the

city, and created a scandal through the whole of New York, Superintendent

Byrnes reported that he could not find any evidence that there had been a

riot (p. 4,834.) The extraordinary inability of the police to see what was

going on under their noses, although apparently phenomenal, was so

habitual that it ceased to excite any surprise. Saloons ran open all

Sunday under the eyes of the patrolmen. The Superintendent of the Society

for the Prevention of Crime gave evidence on this subject as follows:--

I pointed out an open saloon to a patrolman, whose name I do not know,

and inquired why he did not close it; he said that if I insisted upon

it, he supposed he must do so; but it would do no good, and only get

him in trouble with the department and cause his removal to some

undesirable precinct.--Vol. v., p. 4,835.

[Illustration: JOHN C. SHEEHAN. Ex-Police Commissioner. Boss of Tammany.]

But it is only when the Police Commissioners, who stand at the head of the

whole force, are under examination that we discover the extent of their

utter inability to find out anything. There was, for instance, Mr.

Sheehan, who at that time was Police Commissioner, and who now is the

titular Boss of Tammany Hall. The question of pool-rooms was under

consideration when he admitted that they existed, and that he knew they

were corrupting the police. Then the Chairman put the following

question:--

And, notwithstanding the fact that you knew or had heard that those

pool-rooms were corrupting the police, you thought it was not

necessary to take any action upon it?

Mr. Sheehan replied:--

I did start an inquiry to find out if those pool-rooms were paying,

what they were paying, and who they were paying it to. I did that

within a few months after I became a Police Commissioner, but I

couldn’t get any authoritative information of any kind on the subject;

but I got it from all sides that they were paying, and it was

believed that they were, but no person would substantiate or stand for

it.--Vol. iv., p. 3,765.

So he abandoned the subject as one which it was no use discussing any

further.

It was just the same with Mr. Commissioner Martin. He was asked concerning

the existence of corruption in the police force. I quote the following

from the Record:--

Examined by Mr. Sutherland: What did you do to restore the tone and

efficiency of the police?

A. The Board of Police was waiting for any evidence of that character

to be brought to it.--Vol. i., p. 483.

Q. What investigation has the Police Commissioners ever instituted to

discover the falsity of those charges?

A. No special investigation.--Vol. i., p. 484.

It was the same thing with disorderly houses.

Examined by Mr. Nicoll: And, during all the years you have been Police

Commissioner, you never have examined the record to see how many there

are or where they are located?

A. No, sir; I have not.

Q. And hasn’t that led you to go to these records to see what houses

were put down as disorderly in this category?

A. No, sir; I have not.

Q. Has the subject of suppression or diminution of these disorderly

houses been a matter of discussion before the Board of Police?

A. No, sir.--Vol. i., p. 528.

Even when crime was discovered, when the criminal was, as it were, taken

red-handed, there seemed to be a strange paralysis that prevented his

appearance in court. This affected other Boards besides that of the

Police. When the action of the Excise Board was under consideration, it

was admitted by Mr. Andrews, a Commissioner of the Board, that in one

notorious case the licence had been obtained by false swearing. Mr. Goff

asked:--

Q. Did you ever, when you discovered these false papers, as you say,

and of perjuries having been committed before the Board--did you ever

take any steps to have the perpetrators called to answer for the

crime?

A. No steps were ever taken for indictment; no.--Vol. iv., p. 4,386.

It was not for want of painstaking on the part of the Legislature that the

police force was not more efficient. Every constable before being

appointed had to comply with the provisions of the Civil Service law,

which were thus explained by Commissioner Martin:--

The candidate is required to have the names of a certain number of

citizens, usually five, to vouch for him as to his character--their

acquaintance with him; and all those papers having been finally

completed, the papers are sent to the Civil Service Board, where

examinations are held from time to time of batches of such applicants.

Application is made to the captain for examination of his character

and as to the persons who signed the paper, and a report is made in

writing by the captain. There are three Civil Service Commissioners

appointed by the Mayor; I do not recollect the names just at this

time. Once a year the Civil Service Board made an examination of all

applicants for patrolmen, and they usually examine in batches of from

400 to 600.--Vol. i., p. 567.

The Commissioners themselves, when asked about the subject, were at a loss

to explain how it was vice and crime flourished under their very eyes. Mr.

John McClave, the Republican Police Commissioner, told the Committee that

he had always voted with his Tammany Commissioners on the Board, because

“he had never known them to do anything wrong.” There was a very touching

little scene described by Mr. McClave’s son-in-law, as to the grief which

the appointment of the Lexow Committee occasioned Mr. McClave. Mr. and

Mrs. McClave were going to a reception one night, and, said Mr. Gideon

Granger, the son-in-law--

Mr. McClave was quite nervous, and Mrs. McClave turned to him and

said, “Why, Johnnie, what is the matter with you?” And he says, “Oh,

nothing, nothing.” And she says, “Oh yes, there is; it is that police

investigation business. I would not worry over that.” And he said, “I

don’t see why it is those hayseed politicians up in Albany want to

come down here and bother us honest men.”--Vol. i., p. 1,162.

Notwithstanding Mr. McClave’s pathetic lament, the Lexow Committee went on

with its work, and the conduct of these “honest men” was brought forth to

the light of day. With results.

[Illustration: SUPERINTENDENT BYRNES.]

[Illustration: NEW YORK AND BROOKLYN BRIDGE.]

CHAPTER III.

PROMOTION BY PULL AND PROMOTION BY PURCHASE.

The New York Police Department as it existed in 1894 was like the Scribes

and Pharisees in the Gospel. It was like unto whited sepulchres, which

indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones

and of all uncleanness. Hardly a single thing that was proved to exist

could have existed if the laws, rules and regulations had been faithfully

enforced. Therefore until the searchlight of the Lexow inquiry was turned

on, it was the correct thing to deny that the abuses, the corruption, the

blackmail had any existence. On paper the New York police was the finest

in the world. It was the most perfectly equipped, and it was armed with

authority as great as that of any autocrat. What then could possibly be

wrong?

The answer of the Lexow Committee, after hearing the evidence, was short

and succinct. Their answer to the question, What is wrong in the Police

Department? might be summed up in one word--Everything. From the crown of

the head down to the sole of the feet, the department was proved to be one

mass of putrefying sores. There was no health in it, and it was worst of

all at the top.

The Lexow Report says:--

The conclusion which has impressed itself upon your Committee is that

the disorganising elements at work in the Police Department are such

that operate from the higher officials down, rather than from the

patrolmen up.--Vol. i., p. 29.

But the origin of the mischief was found to exist not in the department at

all, but outside the department. The first thing that was wrong was that

the police were practically run by Tammany Hall politicians in the

interest of their party, and that the real governing power in the force

lay outside of it. Two of the Police Commissioners in whose hands the

control of the force was nominally lodged were leaders in their own

districts for Tammany Hall, and their sense of their obligations to their

party far outweighed their obligations to the law or to the city. As one

of the witnesses put it bluntly:--

So long as our municipal departments are run by Boss Croker, they will

be regarded as adjuncts of a political organisation, and will be used

to perpetuate its power. A police commission controlled by such

influence is incapable of rendering justice.--Vol. i., p. 114.

From an English point of view what New York needed most was a City

Council, with some effective control over the affairs of the city. The

shadowy unreality known as the Board of Aldermen cuts no figure in the

inquiry into the forces which actually governed New York. Tammany Hall,

the executive committee of Tammany Hall, came much nearer to the ideal of

a Municipal Assembly than the Board of Aldermen. It was to Tammany Hall,

and not to the Board of Aldermen, that the Police Commissioners appealed

when they wanted to enforce their authority over the men under their own

orders. This came out very plainly in Commissioner Martin’s evidence. He

found that his subordinates were taking so active a hand in politics,

joining political clubs and the like, that he wished to check it. He went,

not to the Board of Aldermen, but to Tammany Hall. He was asked:--

Q. Why did you go there?

A. I took occasion to speak in Tammany Hall about it, because there I

could reach people from different assembly districts; I have spoken to

representatives of the different districts about it in my office.

Q. And you went to Tammany Hall to engage their co-operation in

securing greater efficiency of the police force in New York city?

A. To aid in making it efficient; yes, sir.

Q. Was that because there was no other place to go to?

A. There was no other place to go to that would be as effective as

that.--Vol. i., p. 443.

No wonder the Committee reports:--

No stronger illustration is necessary to show how under the then

existing conditions a political faction had impressed itself so

strongly upon the police force that its authority was more potent than

that of the nominal chiefs of the department.--Vol. i., p. 19.

It was to Tammany Hall also that the liquor dealers appealed for

protection from the intolerable exactions of the police. “There was no

other place to go to.” The legal authorities were paralysed by the extreme

distrust felt by Americans in all elective assemblies. Tammany Hall

naturally and inevitably became the one living centre of popular authority

in the city. Its moral authority in New York was something like that of

the Land League over Ireland under Mr. Parnell. The Lexow Committee report

with a certain jealous awe concerning the “supreme head of authority,” Mr.

Richard Croker, who, although a private citizen, unconnected with the

Police Department, but leader of Tammany Hall, “was able to do what all

the other legally constituted authorities failed to accomplish.” They

say:--

The same private citizen whose authority was so potent to accomplish

all this, was able, by a word of command, at once to shut up all the

pool-rooms then in full operation, and which, according to the

testimony up to that time, neither the whole force of police, of

detectives, of superintendent, or of the Commissioners themselves

could effectively close.--Vol. i., pp. 18-19.

“Taken as a whole,” says the Lexow Report, “the records disclose the fact

that the Police Department, from the highest down to the lowest, was

thoroughly impregnated with the political influence of Tammany Hall”; and

they add, what naturally follows, “that the suppression and repression of

crime depended not so much upon the ability of the police to enforce the

law, but rather upon the will of that organisation or faction to have the

law enforced” (vol. i., p. 19).

The leaders of Tammany, no doubt, were not “agin the law” in the abstract.

But they owed their first allegiance to their party, and their first

thought was not of the duty they owed to the city, but of the duty they

owed to Tammany. The claims of that great brotherhood had precedence over

such trifles as the laws of the State, which after all were passed by

“Hayseed” legislators, or, in plain English, by the rustic vote of the

rural districts of the State of New York. One redoubtable worthy, Judge

and ex-Senator Roesch, who figures conspicuously in this American Tartarus

as one of the minor Plutonian deities, gave very interesting evidence on

this point. He was a Judge, an ex-Senator, and a leader of Tammany Hall.

His aid in the latter capacity seems to have been generally invoked by the

various law-breakers of the neighbourhood. He was asked by Senator

O’Connor whether it was not one of the duties of the district leader, “if

the members of his party were labouring under any kind of difficulty at

all, for the purpose of conducting his organisation and making that solid

with the parties, to do what he could to give them aid?”

The Senator answered unhesitatingly, “In every case.” When he was proved

to have received money from keepers of disorderly houses, whose girls were

run in by the police, he said that he received it entirely as a lawyer for

giving legal advice. But he admitted that when he went to the

station-house to bail out the girls, he acted as a political leader. So

the Chairman observed, “You advised as a lawyer and acted as a political

leader in carrying out your advice.” Mr. Senator Roesch is in many ways a

more typical representative of Tammany than Mr. Croker himself. Both,

however, agree on one principle. They always stick by their friends, and

when anything is going they see that, their supporters are not left out in

the cold. This, which would be denounced as scandalous nepotism on the

part of a less democratic Government, was unblushingly proclaimed as the

sole saving principle of appointing officials under Tammany. Senator

Roesch had used his influence or political pull in order to induce the

Police Commissioner Martin to transfer one Sergeant Schryer to another

precinct. Questioned by Mr. Goff before the Committee as to the grounds

for this intervention on his part in the promotion of the police, he made

the following answer:--

A. I will tell you; when a man comes to me and wants to get an

appointment or transfer, or anything like that, I never stop to

consider who is in the place he wants to go to, but my object is to

get him there; necessarily, somebody has got to get out of the way,

and here it happened to be Sergeant Schryer....

If I can get a friend of mine on the force, or get him a promotion or

position on the force, I always try to do it.

Q. And without inquiring, whether or not the man who is going to

suffer by the removal, who was to suffer?

A. That was none of my business; it was sufficient for me to know the

man they appointed to that place was competent and worthy of it, was a

friend or party organisation.

By Senator O’Connor: A political leader or a man holding a high

position here in the city, regardless entirely of the merits of the

man whom he seeks to remove, when requested by one of his

friends--political friends--to secure his position, that leader does

everything in his power to bring about that result?

A. For his friend.

By Mr. Goff: Now, we have it that both parties do it?

A. Certainly.

Q. Only that the Republican leaders do not have a pull?

A. Well, Republican leaders are not in the majority; New York city is

more a Democratic city.--Vol. ii., pp. 1,283-4.

Mr. Roesch confessed with frank brutality the principle upon which all the

politicians acted in relation to the patronage to which they believed they

were entitled. To make room for their friend, to secure a place on the

city pay-rolls for a political comrade, was ample justification for

insisting upon the removal of any officer who might happen to be in the

way. Let no one imagine that this was an exceptional case. Commissioner

Martin admitted frankly that from eighty-five to ninety per cent. of all

the appointments which he had made when he was chairman of the Police

Board were endorsed, in the first instance, by the district leader of

Tammany Hall for the district in which the applicant resided.

Under such a system promotion by merit was practically non-existent. On

this point Commissioner Martin was equally frank. He was questioned very

closely as to whether he had ever promoted an officer simply for merit.

After thinking a bit, he said he thought he could name one or two cases.

Then said Mr. Goff:--

So far as your recollection goes, with the exception of two instances,

so long as you have been police commissioner, you have not recommended

for appointment, promotion or transfer a single man, except one, who

was backed by political influence?

A. I do not recollect of any others. I think there are others of

them.--Vol. vi., p. 448.

But if a district leader of the type of Roesch was able to nominate

officers to the police, what becomes of the law by which all officers were

to be appointed by open competition in an examination conducted according

to Civil Service rules? The answer to this question is twofold. In the

first case, a certain margin was allowed to the Commissioners. They were

not bound always to appoint the candidates who came out on top. If they

were tolerably near the top, it was held to be sufficient. The second

answer is much more extraordinary. It was proved before the Committee that

by connivance with a police clerk it was quite possible for candidates to

be returned as having passed their examinations who had never been in

the examination-hall, and who never had written a single answer to any of

the questions! This was done by personation. A competent person entered

himself in the name of the candidate, filled in his examination papers,

and passed in his name. By this means there was no difficulty in driving a

coach and four through the Civil Service rules. The persons who obtained a

position on the force by this means were known as the pupils of those who

passed their examinations in their study, and were blackmailed

accordingly.

[Illustration: CITY HALL PARK, BROADWAY.]

John Schlie, examined by Mr. Moss, described how one of the personators

went gathering in his fees:--

I went down one day with Dave Brant to the police headquarters. We met

an officer; the next thing I know I saw two 10-dollar bills slipped in

his hand: he said, “That is good;” I said, “How did you get that?” He

said, “That is one of my students;” I said, “What do you mean?” he

said, “I passed for them people;” he said, “That is good;” so we went

and had a drink and walked a couple of blocks; he commenced scratching

his head, and he said, “I guess I have another student;” he goes down

there and gets 15 dollars more.--Vol. ii., p. 1,474.

Of course, it was impossible thus to cheat the Civil Service examinations

without the connivance of some of the officials, and this connivance had

to be paid for at a price. Thus the natural process, promotion by pull,

led up to promotion by purchase. The evidence on this point was

overwhelming. It appeared that in a very great number of cases--so many

indeed as practically to establish the rule--candidates who wished to be

appointed to the force had to pay 300 dollars to a go-between, who

negotiated the matter with the police authorities. How much money stuck to

the fingers of the go-between, and how much was passed on to those in

authority, does not clearly appear, but there is no doubt that the sum of

300 dollars was demanded, and paid, as a preliminary before the candidate

could assume the uniform of policeman.

This practice once begun, it rapidly extended. As the initial cost was 300

dollars, each step in promotion cost a larger sum. To be made a sergeant

cost 1,600 dols., while the price of a captaincy was 15,000 dollars! The

police who had purchased their promotion in this fashion naturally felt

that they had a vested interest in their posts. In the British army a

similar system of purchase grew up, but it was one which was regulated by

law and sanctioned by custom, whereas in the case of the New York police

the whole system was under the ban of the law. The Lexow Committee

remarked in their report upon this subject:--

The policeman who pays for his appointment commences his career with

the commission of a crime, and it is not strange that the

demoralisation thus engendered should follow him in his further

career. The captain who pays a fortune for his appointment finds

himself compelled to recoup in order to return the moneys loaned to

him by his friends by resorting to the practices which have been

disclosed in the record before us. It seems incredible that men who

are otherwise law-abiding and efficient should stoop to the

perpetration of the monstrous and debasing practices revealed by this

record, unless influenced by a system existing as the result of the

conditions hereinbefore alluded to. Nor is it strange that, in the

contemplation of these practices by superior officers, inferior

members of the force should have become demoralised, until the

contamination has spread throughout the entire department.--Vol. i.,

pp. 49, 50.

It may be asked how was it that, while the evil was still in its infancy,

and the force as a whole was not yet tainted through and through, its

honest members did not expose the corruption which was being established

in their midst? The answer is that the evil began at the top and spread

downwards. Hence, it was impossible for the private constable to make a

stand without exposing himself to a severe punishment for daring to be

more virtuous than his superiors. The following extract from Gideon

Granger’s evidence will show how this pressure from above operated upon

those below:--

A. I did not come to court because of the threats that were made by

Mr. McClave and Mr. Nicoll, and I knew the power that a police

commissioner has got, to use every bit of the department against

anybody, to accomplish their own ends, and, in fact, he has boasted of

that.

Q. Mr. McClave?

A. Yes, sir; endless power he has boasted of.

Q. What has he said in his boasting?

A. He said police commissioners had more power than the President of

the United States had; repeatedly said that.--Vol. i., p. 1,142.

In considering the action of the police, we ought in justice to remember

that they were living in a city the whole administration of which was

infected by this money canker.

Mr. William M. Ivins, private secretary to Mayor Grace, by whom he was

appointed City Chamberlain, estimated that in his time “assessments”--that

is, money paid by candidates to “guarantee the result” of their

elections--averaged £40,000 per annum. He wrote:--

“The existing system amounts to an almost complete exclusion from

official public life of all men who are not enabled to pay, if not a

sum equal to the entire salary of the office they seek, at least a

very large percentage of it. The poor man, or the moderately

well-to-do man, is thus at once cut off from all political ambition,

because the only key to success is wealth or machine power. The ablest

lawyer at our Bar could not secure a nomination for a judgeship unless

he were able to pay an assessment of from 10,000 dollars to 20,000

dollars (£2,000 to £4,000); while a mere political lawyer, if he have

the means of paying his assessment and stands well with the party

leaders, can without great difficulty secure a nomination, and even an

election, to an office for which he has no peculiar qualifications.”

It would therefore be unjust to judge the police without making due

allowance for the condition of their environment.

One of the most interesting witnesses who came before the Committee was

Captain Creedon. It was in his case that the facts concerning the purchase

of promotion were brought out most clearly.

Creedon was an Irishman, with a distinguished record and a high character.

He joined the police force in 1864, and was made sergeant after fifteen

years in the ranks. He remained sergeant for thirteen years, when he was

promoted to a captaincy. Before he entered the police he had served with

great gallantry in the Union army. He served with his regiment in no fewer

than twenty-three engagements. He entered as a private, rose to be a

sergeant, and his name was down for a first lieutenancy when he left the

army. His record on the police for thirty years’ service was extremely

good, hardly anything being entered to his discredit. Such entries as were

to be found related only to breaches of the technical rules of the force,

and in no way implied any moral guilt.

Captain Creedon was put in the witness-box, and asked how much he had paid

to be made a captain. He denied he had paid anything. As the facts were

perfectly well known, the Committee was much startled by Captain Creedon’s

perjury. But after adjournment had given time for reflection, the worthy

Captain came to the stand and explained that he had denied everything

because he was an Irish revolutionist, and that he had such a dread and

terror of being regarded as an informer, that he preferred to perjure

himself rather than incur that disgrace. He was willing to sacrifice

himself and risk going to gaol for perjury rather than in any way

implicate any of his friends in the improper and illegal transactions in

which he had been engaged.

It was carefully explained to him that he was not in Ireland, and that

nothing he could possibly say on the stand could expose him to the

imputation of being an informer. Having received this assurance, Captain

Creedon opened his mouth and spoke.

The story he had to tell was very simple. Three times he had gone up for

examination for a captaincy before the Civil Service Board. He had passed

creditably every time, but notwithstanding this, he seemed no nearer to

securing an appointment. His friends kept on telling him that he was

simply wasting his time going up for examination after examination. He had

much better stay at home unless he made up his mind to do one thing. He

steadily turned a deaf ear to their representations, until at last four

years after his first application, seeing that no one was promoted without

bribing their superiors, he consented to fall in with the general

practice. As soon as he did this, the way was made plain before him. Mr.

Reppenhagen, the representative of the New York Democracy in his district,

was indicated as the man to approach Police Commissioner Voorhis. Mr.

Reppenhagen saw the Commissioner, and reported to the Captain that the

place could be had for 12,000 dollars. Creedon had not at that time 12,000

dollars to invest in the purchase of a captaincy, but on talking it over

with his friends, they agreed to make up a purse, so as to enable him to

acquire the position which he coveted. While they were raising the money,

Reppenhagen reappeared, and announced that a certain sergeant named

Weigand had offered 12,000 dollars for the captaincy, and that if Creedon

wished to secure it, it would cost him 15,000 dollars. Creedon’s friends

were men of mettle, and they agreed to raise the full sum. Creedon gave

the subscribers notes acknowledging their subscriptions as a loan, which

he afterwards repaid. The money was raised, and deposited in a bank. A Mr.

Martin then appears on the scene as the confidential man of the Police

Commissioner, smelling round after the 15,000 dollars as a rat noses round

a cheese. For some reason or other there was a hitch in the appointment,

and Creedon’s friends and Reppenhagen passed some days in horrible

suspense as to whether or not, in spite of the money being “put up,” the

appointment might go to Sergeant Weigand, while Martin was equally alarmed

lest the 15,000 dollars should slip through his fingers.

The Record contains the following entries:--

John W. Reppenhagen examined by Mr. Goff: Do you remember saying to

Martin further, that as long as Creedon’s friends had put up more

money than Weigand was reported to have put up, that it would play the

devil in the organisation in that district if Creedon was not

appointed?

A. I might have said that.--Vol. v., p. 5,010.

Q. Don’t you remember when you said that to Martin, that Martin said

in word and in substance as follows: “I will go right down and I will

see Voorhis, who is too damned hoggish about this thing.” Do you

remember those words?

A. I don’t remember the words.

Q. When he was in that condition of excitement, and when he struck the

bar several times with his clenched fist, didn’t he say those words,

“That Voorhis wanted everything, almost the earth; he was hoggish, and

he would go right down to New York and talk right up to him, and tell

him he must do the right thing?”

A. In substance he said that--yes.--Vol. v., p. 5,014-5.

Reppenhagen was evidently in a state of great uneasiness about securing

the patronage for which the money had been raised by Creedon’s friends. By

way of enforcing his representations, he reminded Mr. Martin pointedly

that the only chance he had of fingering any of the money was to see that

Creedon’s appointment went through, otherwise he would not make a cent.

Thus pressed, Martin went off to see Voorhis. When he next saw Reppenhagen

he assured him that it was all right, and that Voorhis had pledged his

word to appoint Creedon the next Board Day. Even after this there was a

hitch. It was reported that Weigand was going to be appointed after all.

Reppenhagen then found it necessary to take hold of the affair with a

strong hand.

“John,” said he to Martin, “you had better go down yourself, and stay by

the Commissioner until the appointment is made.” Thus adjured, John went

down, vowing that he would not leave the Commissioner until he had

appointed Creedon. Then at last Creedon was duly appointed.

After this another hitch arose as to the difficulty of paying over the

money. Then it was Mr. Martin’s turn to be uneasy. He said he thought he

had been bilked, and that the money would never be turned over. Creedon’s

friends, however, were men of affairs, and knew the kind of gentry they

were dealing with. They had refused to hand over the money until the

Captain was duly appointed. But now that Creedon was a captain at last

they released the money. When Reppenhagen handed over the fifteen thousand

dollars to Martin, that functionary handed him back five thousand dollars

for himself. How much of the ten thousand dollars went to Commissioner

Voorhis or how much of it stuck to Martin’s fingers the record does not

show. Here, however, was clear and unmistakable evidence as to the

systematic manner in which promotions were arranged for and carried

through between the Commissioners on the one hand and the candidates on

the other.

There is a sequel to this story, which is so exquisitely absurd that it

seems more like _opera bouffe_ than a chapter from recent history. While

the Committee was still engaged in ferreting out how the money was paid

which secured Captain Creedon his captaincy, a startling rumour reached

the Committee that the Police Board had suspended Captain Creedon from

duty on account of his having obtained his captaincy by corrupt means. A

bombshell falling in the court could hardly have created greater

consternation.

To begin with, the Committee was a privileged body. All its proceedings

were privileged. For any outside authority to act upon the testimony which

it had taken without the direct authorisation of the Committee would be a

contempt of the Senate. Further, the evidence given by Captain Creedon was

tendered on the assurance of the Committee that no action could be taken

upon it by any outside authority. They had promised him protection and

immunity from persecution and prosecution, and for the Police Board to use

his own admissions against him, which were privileged communications, the

making of which secured him protection from any action based upon such

admissions, was an indictable offence at the common law. But what made

things worse was that, when the Captain left the stand, he had been

addressed in eulogistic terms by counsel. This was not without cause. His

candour in owning up and admitting everything had enabled the Committee to

penetrate into the depths of the mystery of promotion by purchase. Mr.

Goff had concluded his little speech by declaring that, “In view of

everything; in view of your splendid service to your country, and your

good service on the Police Department, it is the unanimous expression of

the Committee that the public interests would not be served were you to be

disturbed in your present position as police captain” (p. 4,982).

Within an hour of this emphatic and public certificate of commendation,

the Police Board met and suspended Captain Creedon from duty. Not a single

captain or police officer of all the black regiment of clubbers and

blackmailers, whose infamy had been proved before the Committee, and who

had been indicted before the Grand Jury, had been removed from duty. Only

when this honest officer had admitted the truth did they pounce down upon

him and make an example. It is only fair to say that the Board was not

aware when it suspended Creedon of the remarks that had been made by the

counsel of the Committee as he left the witness stand. When they were

rebuked they restored him to his post. But even with this allowance, the

fact that the Commissioners should have only made one suspension, and that

of a man who had confessed and repented of his wrong-doing, while they

left all the other scoundrels unwhipped, was one of the most significant

incidents in the whole course of the inquiry.

But after such an illustration of the methods of the Police Board, is it

very surprising that until the Lexow Committee sat the authorities were

utterly unable to discover any specific evidence as to the corruption into

which the whole force had sunk?

[Illustration: CAPTAIN CREEDON.]

[Illustration: CAPTAIN MAX F. SCHMITTBERGER.]