babies died and he saw at
last the quality of the friendship Tammany professed for him. The
push-cart pedlers, blackmailed and driven from pillar to post, saw it.
They had escaped from unbearable tyranny in their old home to find a
worse where they thought to be free; for to their oppressors yonder at
least their women were sacred.

It is difficult to approach calmly what is left of the diabolical
recital. The police, set once more to collecting blackmail from saloon
keepers, gambling hells, policy shops, and houses of ill fame, under a
chief who on a policeman's pay became in a few short years fairly
bloated with wealth, sank to the level of their occupation or into
helpless or hopeless compliance with the apparently inevitable. The East
Side, where the home struggled against such heavy odds, became a
sinkhole of undreamt-of corruption. The tenements were overrun with lewd
women who paid the police for protection and received it. Back of them
the politician who controlled all and took the profits. This newspaper
arraignment published in January, 1901, tells the bald truth:

"Imagine, if you can, a section of the city territory completely
dominated by one man, without whose permission neither legitimate
nor illegitimate business can be conducted; where illegitimate
business is encouraged and legitimate business discouraged; where
the respectable residents have to fasten their doors and windows
summer nights and sit in their rooms with asphyxiating air and
one hundred degrees temperature, rather than try to catch the
faint whiff of breeze in their natural breathing places--the
stoops of their homes; where naked women dance by night in the
streets, and unsexed men prowl like vultures through the darkness
on "business" not only permitted, but encouraged, by the police;
where the education of infants begins with the knowledge of
prostitution and the training of little girls is training in the
arts of Phryne; where American girls brought up with the
refinements of American homes are imported from small towns
up-state, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and kept
as virtually prisoners as if they were locked up behind jail bars
until they have lost all semblance of womanhood; where small boys
are taught to solicit for the women of disorderly houses; where
there is an organized society of young men whose sole business