in
life is to corrupt young girls and turn them over to bawdy
houses; where men walking with their wives along the street are
openly insulted; where children that have adult diseases are the
chief patrons of the hospitals and dispensaries; where it is the
rule, rather than the exception, that murder, rape, robbery, and
theft go unpunished--in short, where the premium of the most
awful forms of vice is the profit of the politicians.

"There is no 'wine, woman, and song' over there. The 'wine' is
stale beer, the 'woman' is a degraded money-making machine, and
the 'song' is the wail of the outraged innocent. The political
backers have got it down to what has been called a
'cash-register, commutation-ticket basis,' called so from the
fact that in some of these places they issued tickets, on the
plan of a commutation meal-ticket, and had cash registers at the
entries."

Lest some one think the newspaper exaggerating after all, let me add
Bishop Potter's comment before his Diocesan Convention. He will not be
suspected of sensationalism:

"The corrupt system, whose infamous details have been steadily
uncovered to our increasing horror and humiliation, was brazenly
ignored by those who were fattening on its spoils; and the world
was presented with the astounding spectacle of a great
municipality whose civic mechanism was largely employed in
trading in the bodies and souls of the innocent and defenceless.
What has been published in this connection is but the merest hint
of what exists--and exists, most appalling of all, as the
evidence has come to me under the seal of confidence in
overwhelming volume and force to demonstrate--under a system of
terrorism which compels its victims to recognize that to denounce
it means the utter ruin, so far as all their worldly interests
are concerned, of those who dare to do so. This infamous
organization for making merchandise of girls and boys, and
defenceless men and women, has adroitly sought to obscure a
situation concerning which all honest people are entirely clear,
by saying that vice cannot be wholly suppressed. Nobody has made
upon the authorities of New York any such grotesque demand. All
that our citizens have asked is that the government of the city
shall not be employed to protect a trade in vice, which i