g sentiment in favor of opening the
saloons on Sundays; and, finally, there was a strong sentiment in favor
of keeping the saloons closed on Sunday. Unfortunately, many of the men
who favored honest government nevertheless preferred keeping the saloons
open to having honest government; and many others among the men who
favored honest government put it second to keeping the saloons closed.
Moreover, among the people who wished the law obeyed and the saloons
closed there were plenty who objected strongly to every step necessary
to accomplish the result, although they also insisted that the result
should be accomplished.

Meanwhile the politicians found an incredible profit in using the law as
a club to keep the saloons in line; all except the biggest, the owners
of which, or the owners of the breweries back of which, sat in the inner
councils of Tammany, or controlled Tammany's allies in the Republican
organization. The police used the partial and spasmodic enforcement
of the law as a means of collecting blackmail. The result was that the
officers of the law, the politicians, and the saloon-keepers became
inextricably tangled in a network of crime and connivance at crime. The
most powerful saloon-keepers controlled the politicians and the police,
while the latter in turn terrorized and blackmailed all the other
saloon-keepers. It was not a case of non-enforcement of the law. The
law was very actively enforced, but it was enforced with corrupt
discrimination.

It is difficult for men who have not been brought into contact with that
side of political life which deals with the underworld to understand the
brazen openness with which this blackmailing of lawbreakers was carried
out. A further very dark fact was that many of the men responsible for
putting the law on the statute-books in order to please one element of
their constituents, also connived at or even profited by the corrupt
and partial non-enforcement of the law in order to please another set of
their constituents, or to secure profit for themselves. The organ of the
liquor-sellers at that time was the Wine and Spirit Gazette. The editor
of this paper believed in selling liquor on Sunday, and felt that it was
an outrage to forbid it. But he also felt that corruption and blackmail
made too big a price to pay for the partial non-enforcement of the law.
He made in his paper a statement, the correctness of which was never
questioned, which offers a startling commentary