will be
$120,000,000 by August, 1872; which have paid to these robbers millions
of dollars for work never performed and materials never furnished; which
paid astoundingly exorbitant rents to them for offices and armories, many
of which were never occupied and some of which did not exist--which
remitted their taxes, released their indebtedness, and remitted their
rents, to the city due and owing--which ran the machinery for widening,
improving and opening streets, parks and boulevards, to enable these men
to speculate in assessed damages and greatly enhanced values--which
created unnecessary offices with large salaries and no duties, in order
to maintain a force of ruffianly supporters and manufacturers of
votes--which used millions of dollars to bribe and corrupt newspapers,
the organs of public opinion, in violation of laws which narrowly limited
the public advertising--which camped within the city a reserve army of
voters by employing thousands of laborers at large pay upon nominal work,
neither necessary nor useful--which bought legislatures and purchased
judgments from courts both civil and criminal.

* * * * *

"Fellow-citizens of the City and State of New York, this report of the
doings of the Committee of Seventy would be incomplete if it did not
fully unfold to you the perils and the difficulties of our condition.
You know too well that the Ring which governs us for years governed our
Legislatures by bribing their members with moneys stolen from their
trusts. That, seemingly, was supreme power and immunity. But it was not
enough. A City Charter to perpetuate power was needed. It was easily
bought of a venal Legislature with the proceeds of a new scoop into the
city treasury. Superadded to this the Ring had devised a system,
faultless and absolutely sure, of counting their adversaries in an
election out of office and of counting their own candidates in, or of
rolling up majorities by repeating votes and voting in the names of the
absent, the dead, and the fictitious. Still their intrenched camp of
villainy was incomplete. It was deficient in credit. This is a ghastly
jest, the self-investment of the robbers of the world with a boundless
financial credit. And yet the Ring clothed themselves with it. They
entrenched themselves within the imposing limits of some of our most
powerful bank and trust companies. They created many savings banks out
of the forty-two which exist in the city and county of New Yo