TWEED.

There are many persons who wonder why Tweed did not evade justice by

forfeiting his bail. He had every chance to escape, they say; why did he

stay? His chief confederates are safe in Europe, where he might easily

have been, yet he was foolish enough to take the risk of a trial, and he

is imprisoned, probably for the rest of his life. The explanation,

however, is very obvious. He did not believe there was any risk. Tweed

was the most striking illustration of a very common faith--belief in the

Almighty Dollar. He is the victim of a most touching fidelity to the

great principle which every good American will surely be the last to

flout. His creed was very simple: it was that money would buy

everything, and he reposed upon his belief with the sweet security of

the Mussulman who sees by faith a heaven of houris. Certainly his

confidence was not surprising. He had proved his creed. He had seen

money work miracles. He had seen himself, a man of no cleverness and of

no advantages, rising swiftly by means of it from insignificant poverty

to the control of a great party. It had made him master of one of the

great cities of the world. It had secured for him Governors,

Legislatures, councils, and legal and executive authorities of every

kind. He invested in land and judges. He bought dogs and lawyers. He

silenced the press with a golden muzzle, and money made his will law.

Here was a man who wanted nothing that money could not buy: was it

strange that he had unbounded faith in it? Every form of virtue was to

him mere affectation, a more or less ingenious and tenacious "strike"

for money. If a man spoke of honesty, patriotism, self-respect, the

public welfare, public opinion, truth, justice, right, Tweed smiled at

the fine phrases in which the auctioneer, anxious to sell himself,

cried, "Going! going!" Argument, reason, decency--they were meaningless

to him. If an opponent held out, he simply asked, "How much?" The world

was a market. Life was a bargain. He felt himself with pride to be the

largest operator in his way, as Vanderbilt in his, or Stewart in his.

In Albany he had the finest quarters at the Delavan, and when he came

into the great dining-room at dinner-time, and looked at all the tables

thronged with members of the Legislature and the lobby, he had a

benignant, paternal expression, as of a patriarch pleased to see his

retainers happy. It was a magnificent rendering of Fagin and his pupils.

You could imagine him trotting up and down in the character of an

unsuspicious old gentleman with his handkerchief hanging out of his

pocket, that his scholars might show their skill in prigging a wipe. He

knew which of that cheerful company was the Artful Dodger and which

Charley Bates. And he never doubted that he could buy every man in the

room if he were willing to pay the price. So at the Capitol, where sits

the Legislature of a noble commonwealth of four millions of souls, he

moved about with an air of fat good-nature, like the chief shepherd of

the flock. If he stood at the door of the Assembly looking in, it is

easy to fancy him saying to himself, The State pays these men two or

three hundred dollars for four months' service; I will give them better

wages. He did not doubt that it was a fair transaction. What is the

State? It is only four millions of people, he thought, who are all

trying to be rich--struggling, cheating, by hook or by crook, every man

for himself, and the devil take the hindmost, to be rich. These men

would be fools not to take my money. And he smiled his fat smile, and

paid liberally for all that was in market.

There were some papers, whose price he could not ascertain, which

persisted in speaking ill of him and his pals. If the fools did not know

their own interest enough to be content with a good price--say, of

corporation advertising--they must be silenced. The conceit of virtue

must not be pushed too far. So one day his Legislature passed a bill

virtually giving his judges power to imprison editors at their

pleasure. But virtue--that is, in the Tweed theory of life, obstinacy in

holding out for a higher price--mustered such a really respectable

protest that the public project of coercion failed, and private methods

were tried. Tweed had no doubt that reputation could be bought as well

as power. Peter Cooper builds an institute for the education of the

poor, does he? You mean, said Tweed, a monument to his own glory. He

pays a certain number of thousands of dollars for the reputation of

philanthropy. And Mr. Stewart builds a working-woman's palace. Ah! And

Mr. Astor founds a library. Indeed! And they are benevolent gentlemen

and benefactors of their kind? Not at all. They merely invest money in a

certain kind of fame. That pleases their taste, as fast horses and

yachts and pictures please the taste of other people. I will show you

how 'tis done, says the faithful believer in the Dollar. And he gives

fifty thousand dollars to the poor just as winter is beginning. "Let the

cavillers say what they will," exclaim a myriad voices, "that shows a

good heart." Tweed, as it were, tips a wink. I told you how it was

done, he seems to say: what is there that money will not buy?

Is it surprising that such a man did not try to evade justice? Justice

in his view was a commodity like legislative honor, like newspaper

independence, like the reputation of benevolence. The reform movement

was to him a sudden and confusing flurry, in which strikers, to whose

terms he would not yield, had somehow gained a momentary advantage. He

had perhaps made a mistake in not buying them at their own price.

Success had possibly put him off his guard. He was sure that if an

indictment were found, that would be the end of it, and he had no

feeling of shame. His friend Fisk had shown what lawyers were made of,

and he himself would buy lawyers and judges, sheriffs and juries. He

knew that the one thing that in a needy and greedy world cannot fail is

money. He came to his first trial, and the jury disagreed: naturally,

for he had bought some of them. The evidence is, of course, moral only,

but it is conclusive. If justice, facetiously so called, wanted another

bout, he would "come up smiling." There was no trick or quibble that

lawyers could devise for which he had not made munificent preparation,

even to asserting that the judge who obstinately refused to name a price

was disqualified from sitting at the trial. Money had never failed

before; it certainly would not at this last pinch.

But it did, and the bewilderment and consternation of this simple

devotee were pitiful. He had but one article in his faith, and that was

now destroyed. He had staked everything upon the certainty of the

Almighty Dollar, and he had lost. But there was something not less

noticeable than his unquestioning faith. It was that his faith was so

generally held. For what gave the universal and intense interest to the

Tweed trial? Here was a common thief, except in the amount of his theft,

of whose guilt nobody had any doubt, against whom, as the judge said,

the evidence was a mathematical demonstration, and his conviction was

hailed as a kind of national deliverance and vindication of human

justice. There was but one reason for this, and it was the feeling that

money would free him. Of course it was known that the judge could not be

bought, nor the Attorney-General, nor the prosecution. Tweed might as

well have offered to buy the moral law. But public knowledge ended

there. And in the degree of the universality of the belief that somehow,

by actual bribery, or by legal quirk or shift or sham, money would buy

him off, is the value of the lesson of his conviction, which is that the

utmost power of money fails before firm, sagacious, and intelligent

honesty. There is not a saloon in New York in which the Tweed contempt

of honorable motives is the sole faith which has not had an astounding

revelation, and learned that money is not omnipotent.

Those saloons have learned one other thing--that stealing is the same

crime, whether it be the theft of public or of private property. The

Robin Hood jollity that surrounded Tweed, his familiar name, the "Boss,"

the laughing stories that were told of him, showed that he was held in

very different estimation from an ordinary thief. The baser newspapers

evidently regarded him as the French nobleman regarded himself who was

firmly convinced that the Almighty would think twice before condemning

such a gentleman as he. So when Tweed went to the Tombs the same feeling

attended him. The officers could not believe that it was really meant so

rich a man, who had lived in so fine a house, and had spent money so

profusely, should be treated as a common offender. The wretch who steals

a loaf to feed his starving children must have short shrift, and Black

Maria despatches him at the earliest moment. But a "statesman" who

steals millions of dollars from the people--really the law must think

twice before handling him impolitely! A day or two after he had been

taken to jail, on his way to the penitentiary, the papers said, as if he

had been a beloved prisoner of state whom cruel governments might

torture, but whom the people would still honor: "A great many

improvements have been made in his cell by his friends, and it has now

quite a cosey, comfortable appearance. The floor is covered with a

carpet of a dark green ground. The walls are hung with dark green cloth,

and the panes in the windows, opening on Centre Street, which were

cracked and broken a few days ago, have been newly glazed. In the centre

of the room is a large round table, at which the 'Boss' takes his three

regular meals, served up in the best manner from the prison restaurant.

There is a luxurious leather-covered lounge in one corner, and five

chairs, including a large, comfortable rocking-chair. Besides these few

articles of furniture are a wash-stand and a book-case. The prisoner is

plentifully supplied with reading matter; and as for creature comforts,

the solicitude of his friends and relatives leaves nothing to be desired

except liberty. Crowds of people have called to see him for the past two

days, but none were admitted without passes from the Commissioners."

This feeling was akin to that which inspires the proverb and the

practice that "all's fair at the Custom-house." When Robin Hood stepped

politely to the door of my Lord Bishop's carriage and requested him to

alight under the greenwood tree, and proceeded to rifle the carriage of

all the treasure that his lordship was conveying, he was not felt to be

a common thief. Far from it; he was the people's tax-gatherer in green.

He scattered with a free hand among the poor the money which the rich

man could lose without feeling it. Nobody suffered. My Lord Bishop was

admonished that he had the poor always with him, and the poor rejoiced

in his involuntary largess. So "the boys" thought of Tweed. While the

"Boss" was king there was always money about, as they said; and when did

Robin Hood himself ever bestow fifty thousand dollars in a lump upon the

poor? Besides, who could say that he was robbed? The rich could not feel

it; and was any poor orphan defrauded by him, any poor widow pinched,

any honest laborer burdened?

Yes, they were. It was public money that he stole. And what is public

money? It is the taxes. And who pay the taxes--the rich? No, the poor,

the producers. They come out of the rent of the tenement-house; out of

the price of tea and sugar and coal; out of the pittance of the widow

and orphan, and the small wages of the laborer. It was from the poor who

cowered gratefully over the coal that he gave them that he stole the

coal. His confederate, Sweeny, planted hyacinths in the city parks, and

for every flower some poor soul was pinched. Gay Robin Hood strips the

baron, and the poor bless him as he flings them the gold. Then the baron

goes home to his castle and wrings teeth out of the jaws of Isaac of

York, to force him to give money. Then Isaac of York advances at a more

ruinous rate than yesterday the interest upon the money he lends. So

when Tweed steals from the public treasury he picks every private

pocket. Every stroke of his hammer, if he hammers stone with other

thieves, refreshes in the public mind these familiar truths. It is

humiliating that the conviction of an evident offender in a court of law

should be a cause of public congratulation. But, on the other hand, it

is cheering that shameless crime intrenched in every way, and defying

the course of law, should by that course be quietly convicted and surely

punished.