ontrol of one Patrick Shannon, owner of
two gin mills. Wearing the mask of reformers the most astute and
villainous politicians piloted themselves into power. They were all
elected, and it was necessary. It was necessary that New York should
elect the foremost gambler of the United States for State Senator,
before the people of New York could realise the depths of degradation to
which the politics of that time could sink. If Tweed had stolen only
half as much as he did, investigation and discovery and reform would
have been impossible. The re-election of Morrisey was necessary. He was
elected not by the vote of his old partisans alone, but by Republicans.
Hamilton Fish, General Grant's secretary, voted for him. Peter Cooper,
the friend of education and the founder of a great institute, voted for
him. The brown-stone-fronts voted for him. The Fifth Avenue equipage
voted for him. Murray Hill voted for him. Meanwhile gambling was made
honourable. And so the law-breaker became the law-maker.

Among a large and genteel community in Brooklyn there was a feeling that
they were independent of politics. No one can be so. It was felt in the
home and in the business offices. It was an influence that poisoned all
the foundations of public and private virtue in Brooklyn and New York.
The conditions of municipal immorality and wickedness were the worst at
this time that ever confronted the pulpits of the City of Churches, as
Brooklyn was called.

There was one bright spot in the dark horizon of life around me then,
however, which I greeted with much pleasure and amusement.

In the early part of November, 1877, President Hayes offered to Colonel
Robert Ingersoll the appointment of Minister to Germany. The President
was a Methodist, and perhaps he thought that was a grand solution of
Ingersollism. It was a mirthful event of the hour--the joke of the
administration. Germany was the birthplace of what was then modern
infidelity, Colonel Ingersoll had been filling the land with belated
infidelism.

On the stage of the Academy of Music in Brooklyn he had attacked the
memory of Tom Paine, assaulted the character of Rev. Dr. Prime, one of
my neighbours, the Nestor of religious journalism, and on that same
stage expressed his opinion that God was a great Ghost. This action of
President Hayes kept me smiling for a week--I appreciated the joke among
others.

During this month the American Stage suffered the loss of three
celebrities: Edwi