ating conventions.
They carried the banner of the Republican party, the dominant party in
Philadelphia and in the State, under which they more easily controlled
elections, for the people voted "regular." Then every one of the city's
servants was made to pay to the Gas Ring money as well as obeisance.
Tradespeople who sold supplies to the city, contractors who did its
work, saloon-keepers and dive-owners who wanted protection--all paid.
The city's debt increased at the rate of $3,000,000 a year, without
visible evidence of the application of money to the city's growing
needs.

In 1883 the citizens finally aroused themselves and petitioned the
legislature for a new charter. They confessed: "Philadelphia is now
recognized as the worst paved and worst cleaned city in the civilized
world. The water supply is so bad that during many weeks of the last
winter it was not only distasteful and unwholesome for drinking, but
offensive for bathing purposes. The effort to clean the streets was
abandoned for months and no attempt was made to that end until some
public-spirited citizens, at their own expense, cleaned a number of the
principal thoroughfares.... The physical condition of the sewers"
is "dangerous to the health and most offensive to the comfort of our
people. Public work has been done so badly that structures have to be
renewed almost as soon as finished. Others have been in part constructed
at enormous expense and then permitted to fall to decay without
completion." This is a graphic and faithful description of the result
which follows government of the Ring, for the Ring, with the people's
money. The legislature in 1885 granted Philadelphia a new charter,
called the Bullitt Law, which went into effect in 1887, and which
greatly simplified the structure of the government and centered
responsibility in the mayor. It was then necessary for the Ring to
control primaries and win elections in order to keep the city within
its clutches. So began in Philadelphia the practice of fraudulent
registering and voting on a scale that has probably never been equaled
elsewhere in America. Names taken from tombstones in the cemeteries and
from the register of births found their way to the polling registers.
Dogs, cats, horses, anything living or dead, with a name, served the
purpose.

The exposure of these frauds was undertaken in 1900 by the Municipal
League. In two wards, where the population had decreased one per cent
in ten years (