Chicago, Satan’s Sanctum

The present Mayor of the City of Chicago was recently re-elected. A large number of independent voters, deeming one issue a dominant one, which, in fact, was no issue at all, assisted in again bestowing on him the most important office in the municipal government.

The legislature had repealed a law under which evil, through the threatened action of corruptionists in the Council, might have been visited upon the city. That they were powerless to inflict it had been demonstrated prior to the repeal of that law and prior to the election. His competitors entertained, upon the question of the extension of street car privileges, the same views as his own. Both were men of as great ability as he, and each had, and still has, a reputation for personal integrity not surpassed by his. Both were men more mature in years, and possessed wider business experiences than he. Hence, either of them could have been safely entrusted with the powers of the executive. Neither of them, however, could invent, for campaign purposes, so catching, so powerful, and yet so sophistical, a political phrase as “The streets may be dirty, but they still belong to the people.” To the inventor of that cry the Mayor owes no small political debt.

It might be inferred from the large vote he received that, as a public servant, he had been tested and not found wanting. With respect to his persistent opposition to the extension of street car privileges, without adequate compensation to the city, and for a period not in excess of twenty years, it should be said he bravely and manfully did his duty, following, however, not leading public opinion on that question. All danger from that source had disappeared when the polls opened in April last. His competitors stood, on that morning, as honorably pledged to throttle it, if it again appeared, should either of them be elected, as he did.

It cannot, however, be said that during his first administration he did his whole duty. It is a peculiarity of the American people that they always praise, with exaggeration, an official who partly does his duty, if the part performed is regarded by them as especially serviceable to the public. He had the benefit of so much exaggerated praise from a press that, for nearly two years then last past, had been condemning him, that some people were charmed into a sort of hysterical admiration for him. He had the happy faculty of concealing the shortcomings of his first administration, under cover of a supposedly overshadowing danger. Thereby he caused his previous record to appear as if free from blemish, and that he had performed every duty—and performed it well. The very adroit use of this faculty is the only reason why he received a plurality of votes so much larger than that of any other candidate nominated on the same ticket with him for a minor office.

His best friends did not contend that he did his full duty. They now only hope he will do so. A public official is not entitled to praise, or thanks, for doing his whole duty. He is elected for the purpose of its performance. But full performance is so rare that the people seem to be content if a public servant will do his duty only fairly well.

The vices which prevail in the city, and which grew to their enormous, threatening, and hideous proportions during the Mayor’s first administration, were known to the people to exist, but were forgotten by them at the polls, were known to the police, and are still known to them, and upon no conceivable basis of belief can it be supposed their existence may not have been known to him, and that he does not know of their continued existence.

It is for him to utter the command “Stop,” and they will cease, in so far as they can be kept within bounds by his authority. Their absolute suppression, under existing legislation is, perhaps, impossible, but their regulation thereunder is not wholly impracticable. Ordinances demanding, for instance, the imposition of a fine of $200 per day for keeping a house of ill fame, have, he may say, never been enforced, and have fallen into a condition of “innocuous desuetude.”

The field of observation on matters such as these is too wide to be entered upon here.

During the Mayor’s first term, one of his best friends, in the columns of his widely circulated newspaper, severely criticised his administration, but supported him for re-election, and explained in its columns, in response to an inquiry made by a correspondent just prior to the election, his reasons for doing so as follows, viz.:

“If Mayor Harrison shall receive the support of the independent voters because of the good points of his administration, that will show that his strength consists in doing right, not in doing wrong. It stands to reason that he would rather have the approval of honest and respectable men than of the vicious elements of the community. The R—— believes that Mayor Harrison’s present administration from first to last has improved and not deteriorated. The mayor himself ought to know what are the weak points in it, and if he has acquired wisdom by experience he should choose his heads of departments for his second term with a view to curing the evils and failures of his first term. The relations of the police department with gambling resorts, all-night saloons and other forms of vice have been indecent, and probably corrupt. The R—— has frequently urged the dismissal of Superintendent K—— and the appointment of some better man. It believes that Mayor Harrison is much to blame in permitting the evil conditions to continue.”

The support he received for re-election came from a very large and respectable element of the community, but nobody can doubt that he owes that re-election to the solidarity of the votes of “the vicious elements of the community!”

The respectable element did not vote with such allies in order that he should continue to conserve the interests of vice and criminality. The supporters of the all-night saloons, gambling halls, poker joints, and of all other nests of iniquity rallied to his assistance to a man. Without the massed vote of the saloon and its hangers on, he would not have been again chosen Mayor.

The leading financial paper of this city, non-partisan in its political views, said on the eve of the election: “An emergency exists. The government of the City of Chicago is held in contempt not only in Chicago but wherever Chicago is known. We are losing good citizens, property, capital, prestige. The very streets, with their filth and dust, repel the visitor; the servants of the city, whether in administrative or legislative positions, are objects of suspicion; the scheme of a well ordered civil service is breaking down; vice receives encouragement as the price of votes. What wonder that many believe the heart is rotten? But there is virtue and power enough to change all this. The moral sentiment and enlightened self interest of the city once aroused and properly guided would overwhelm all opposition.”

Few, if any, evidences have been given out from the City Hall since the Mayor’s re-inauguration tending to show that he proposes voluntarily to destroy this “contempt.” His new comptroller is a worthy successor to the departed Waller, while the selection for his corporation counsel is all that could be desired by the most captious citizen. But the vices and crimes which principally brought, through their unchecked prevalence, that contempt, find the man, under whom for two years the police force, which in his friend’s language has been “indecent and probably corrupt,” again in its command. Doubtless the army of the vicious rejoices. Certain it is the community wonders. He will be observed as time passes. May the results of observation redound to his everlasting credit and success, and to the benefit of the great city of which he is the executive head!

In the following pages references to the causes of that contempt will be made. The prurient will find nothing in them to their taste. These references ought to be of some assistance to the Mayor in finding out through a properly organized and well officered police force that these evil causes do exist. Having discovered them, their haunts, and their aids, if he does not already know of them, will he tolerate them any longer in this community? Will his continuous Superintendent of Police be further allowed to throw his kindly protection over them?

 

 

---

 

 

---

Chicago, with its world-wide fame as the most marvelous product of American enterprise among municipal creations in the nineteenth century, with its wonderful growth, from an Indian trading post in 1837 to a modern city of the second size in point of population in the year 1898, with the record of its stupendous strides in reaching its present commercial and financial position among the commanding trade centers in the world, with its strong civic pride, its numerous and admirable religious, educational and charitable institutions both public and private, its cultured development in literature, music, the arts and sciences, with its memorable disaster in the great fire of 1871, its speedy recoupment from that disaster, and its brilliant achievement in the organization and management of the magnificent “White City,” the wide range of the classified exhibits of which covered the entire and progressive contributions of mankind to all that goes to make up the civilization of the age from the earliest period of the commencement of that civilization, this Chicago, grand, philanthropic and patriotic, suffers, as for years it has suffered, from the most extensive and persistent advances in political power, along the lines of their respective crimes, of the criminal classes, until, from the wealthy bribe-giver to the lowest sneak thief and sexual pervert, these classes carry elections, corrupt the corruptible in the Common Council, sway justice in the forum of the lower courts, and govern the police force until it has become a municipal aid to the perpetration of crime.

From one administration to the other, the growing power of these lowest classes of society manifests a stronger hold upon civic administration. Pretenses of reform are all that, so far, have followed each bi-ennial election of a Mayor. Here and there, and now and then, gambling houses are closed, threats against police officers, who follow the well grounded practice of levying protection rates upon brothels, street walkers, gambling games of all descriptions, saloons, concert halls, and that varied combination of evils forming the working machinery of vice, are given publicity, and while the growth of these monstrous evils cannot but be known to public officials, both from observation, official reports, events as chronicled in the daily press, grand jury reports, civic and State investigations, and verdicts in the courts, a nerveless cowardice seems to seize each succeeding incumbent of the Executive’s office, under whatever political party’s banner he may be called to the chair, and prevents him from grappling with, and throttling, the ever increasing power of the combined votaries of all forms of vice and crime.

The Mayor recently congratulated the Common Council in these words, viz: “The report of the General Superintendent of Police contains assurance for all classes of citizens that the efficiency, vigilance and zeal that have characterized this department will permit them to pursue their avocations without fear of being robbed and assaulted by long and short men. One need not be exceedingly observant to note that with the approach of winter comes an annual outbreak of crime. We all noticed evidences of such a visitation at the advent of the winter just ended, but it should not be allowed to pass without comment that criminality rarely showed itself during last fall when it was crushed out with a suddenness and success that ought to be regarded with pride and satisfaction by every Chicagoan. There has been no evidence of crime through the recent year as in former years; the criminals came in the fall, but they were severely taught that Chicago was an unhealthy clime for them, with the result that they were wise enough not to linger here long.”

This statement, so self-satisfying to the official who made it, so totally false in fact, so dangerous to the welfare of the people, and so flippantly interwoven into a public document by one who either knew the contrary to be the truth, or who knowingly used his official position for the suppression of truth, if not of crime, is contradicted by the disclosures made by every organization devoted to the purification of the public morals, the betterment of civil administration, and the eradication of the bestial vices so freely and openly flaunted in the faces of a busy and apparently indifferent people.

Contrast the announcement of the Law Enforcement League with this official declaration. Said this League, composed of the pastors of churches and law-abiding people, “Chicago’s influence ought to be on the side of purity and good order, but the fact is that vice and crime are prevalent, lawlessness is defiant, recreancy to sworn duty is all but universal. The disorderly saloon is the nesting place of the terrible debaucheries which disgrace our city. Ordinances and laws which have for their object the suppression of venality and crime are trampled ruthlessly beneath the feet of a disloyal and un-American horde. * * * The public mind is profoundly agitated over the reign of lawlessness and moral disorder. * * * The co-operation of all decent and respectable people is absolutely imperative if municipal government is to be transferred from the baser to the better element. * * * We have a right to demand that lawlessness shall cease; that gang rule shall be broken; that partisan politics shall be made subsidiary to municipal righteousness; that the all but omnipotent power of the disorderly shall be broken; that the carnival of crime which curses Chicago shall end; that the law breakers, crime makers and bribe-takers shall be adequately punished and that the fair name of this imperial city shall be redeemed from the reproach of blackmail, wanton immorality and widespread disorder.”

A noted divine said recently, “I believe that this city is to be the greatest city of this continent and of the world. I believe that Chicago is the devil’s headquarters, and I think it is not far from the City Hall. If our own eyes could be fully opened we would see there infinite indecencies, bum politicians, ward workers, heel tappers, men who are the devil’s own and delivered body and soul to do his bidding.”

Another said, “Saloons and all other haunts of vice are wide open, as they have never been before in the city’s history.”

A distinguished lawyer, speaking before the Christian Convention recently held in this city, said, “Scourge off and out of your temples the political hyenas that prey on the municipal body politic, that fatten on the scarlet woman’s wages of sin, that share the gambler’s plunder and the blind pig’s profits.”

Another eminent divine declared at this meeting, “He knew that men have been kept from coming to, and investing in, Chicago because our morality is so low.”

Still another divine declared at the same meeting, “But when in one night five homes in the block in which I live—and I moved there because it was the safest place in the city—are robbed, and, within the same week, three men are held up within two blocks, the conditions are serious.” Serious, indeed, they are, despite assurances of protection by the police force emanating from the highest official authority!

A few plain truths as to the utter prostitution of the civil authorities to the power of the criminal classes in Chicago, and as to the filthiness of those classes, are attempted to be given in the following pages. They may assist in arousing the people to a keen sense of their duty as citizens to demand from a new administration a rigid enforcement of the law by public officers, and that these officers shall become the servants of the people rather than remain the slaves, as well as the persecutors for private gain, of the riffraff of the community.

 

 

---

The Police Force of the City of Chicago consisted on December 31st, 1897, of 3,594 men, of which number 2,298 were first-class patrolmen, the remainder being officers, sergeants, clerks, drivers and patrol-wagon men. The number of square miles of territory embraced within the city limits was, and is, 186.4.

The force is composed largely of men of one nationality or of their descendants. A large majority affiliates with the same church. Prior to the passage of the civil service law in 1895, each bi-ennial administration made the force its own valuable mine in which veins of rich rewards for its friends and political workers were found. To this force the aldermanic supporters of the administration attached their henchmen and ward heelers, and these, in turn, as public officers, looked after the political welfare of their backers and of the administration these backers supported. Thus, the political complexion of the force was liable to change every two years. Notwithstanding the presence of a civil service law on the statute books under which the force is now supposed to have been re-organized and re-appointed, its political complexion remains the same. The organization is dominated by the political party which alone uses the distinctive title of “Tammany.” The civil service law has been attacked, in behalf of this public force, by officials who were sworn to sustain it, until through their repeated assaults upon it, its administration is looked upon as farcical, and its administrators as its most cunning and relentless foes.

The duties of the police force are clearly defined in the city charter. Generally, that instrument provides, “The police shall devote their time and attention to the discharge of the duties of their stations according to the laws and ordinances of the city and the rules and regulations of the department of police, and it shall be their duty, to the best of their ability, to preserve order, peace and quiet, and enforce the laws and ordinances throughout the city.”

According to the school census of 1898, the population of Chicago was then 1,851,588. This population is one of the most polyglot of any city in the world. Each modern language is spoken by some one class of its people.

The population born of American born parents exceeds that of any other nativity, being in round numbers 486,000, while the Germans, born of German born parents, and Germans born in Germany, number in round figures 468,000. Of the Irish 131,000 are American born of Irish parents; born in Ireland, 104,000, making a total of 235,000. These are the largest classes, by nativity, of its people, and with the proverbial ability of the latter nationality to govern and “get there” it supplies the police force with the largest quota of men, year after year.

During the years 1897 and 1898 this force, and every man seeking to become a member of it, was taught by city officials, and by none more energetically than by the chief law officer of the city administration, that the civil service law was an especial enemy of theirs, inasmuch as it abridged their privileges and immunities as citizens of the United States, and was, therefore, a menace to their rights, wholly unwarranted by the Constitution of the United States.

It was accordingly attacked upon that ground by the officers sworn to enforce it, and, since the establishment of its validity by the highest courts in the land, its provisions are constantly sought, by them, to be avoided and defeated.

The efforts of the commissioners to enforce it were commented on in an official message by the city’s Executive, as if such efforts were in fact being made, and were part and parcel of an administrative policy; while, in practice, no possible legal device or illegal invention was allowed to fail of application by municipal officials to destroy its commands, even by its commissioners, who announced themselves as its greatest devotees. No more demoralizing example could have been set before the police force than the acts of the higher authorities. Such acts have produced the inevitable result, that, as such higher authorities saw fit to openly throttle a law they were sworn to enforce, the rank and file of the police force itself inferred that they, too, could seek to evade, and refuse to execute, all laws and ordinances which in their judgment affected the suppression of crime.

Consequently, that force has become demoralized and corrupt, openly levying a tariff for revenue and official protection upon all classes of wrong-doers, below those who commit felonious crimes of the highest grade, and when the rates are not promptly paid by the protected classes, they are coerced by arrest into the payment of fines and fees for division between the justices and the officers. It is a well known fact that a schedule of prices prevails for police protection, which prices must be paid for that protection. Gambling houses pay from $50.00 per month upwards; panel and badger games, $35.00 to $50.00; music halls with saloon and private room attachments, $100.00; houses of ill fame, from $50.00 upwards, according to the number of inmates at so much per capita; cigar store and barber shop gambling games, $10.00; “blind pigs,” the unlicensed vendors of liquors, $10.00 to $30.00, and with permission to gamble, $30.00 to $50.00; crap games, $10.00 to $25.00; opium and Chinese joints, $10.00 to $25.00; drug store “blind pigs,” $10.00 to $30.00, and prize fights and cocking mains, a percentage of the gate receipts—usually one-fifth.

Whenever a gambling house refuses to pay it is immediately pulled. These rates of police blackmail and of protective tariff have been sworn to before public investigations, and inquiry trials, as imposed and collected. The press has repeatedly commented upon these frightfully cruel persecutions, reeking with the infamy of the participation by public servants in a division of the fetid proceeds of the procuress, of the landlady, of her unfortunate slave, the harlot; of the skin gambler, the clock swindlers and tape gamesters, and of the operators of massage parlors, both male and female.

In one case, tried before the Criminal Court of Cook County, a lieutenant of the police force was convicted of the crime of exacting money from the owner of a “blind pig” paid to him by the owner for protection in his unlawful occupation. Going back a few years, during the World’s Fair period, as high as $2,000, it is said in public print, was paid for similar protection in a single instance.

The officer in charge of a given precinct makes the collections, retains his percentage, passes the remainder on to his next superior, who withholds his rake-off, and so on until the net profit reaches the highest police official. A leading city newspaper, in a caustic editorial, declared that “in Chicago protection means the privilege to commit crime upon the payment of a sum of money to the police. It has ceased to mean that the citizen will be guarded against the acts of criminals.” So thoroughly recreant to duty have some of the ranking officers of this force become, that one of the oldest captains when asked why he did not close, in his district, certain notorious saloons where depraved women robbed strangers in wine rooms, replied that “some people would steal in the churches, and you might as well close churches as close the saloons for that reason.”

Patrolmen in uniform are found in dives playing cards; and in others sleeping during the hours of their supposed presence on their beats. They know the women of the town, the street walkers in the territory they patrol, the keepers of every vile joint, where the most depraved practices are indulged in, the houses of ill fame, high-priced and low-priced, the “Nigger,” Japanese, Chinese and mixed bagnios, the policy shops, fences and schools for thieves.

All these vice mills and their operators contribute to the policemen’s demand, and thus obtain permission to carry on, in daylight, and at night-time, their nefarious, lecherous and disgusting crimes and orgies.

One officer gambled in a saloon with a citizen, lost his money, overpowered the citizen, recovered his lost money and then robbed his victim.

In broad daylight an officer held up a citizen and robbed him of his money and valuables. When the Chief of Police had this case called to his attention before a legislative investigating committee, he answered, “I tried that man yesterday. He got on the police department ten years ago, and he always had a reputation of being a good officer, and the other morning he had been drinking some, and, like everything else, became a little indiscreet and started out to hold up a man and got hold of a few dollars in that way, and under the impression, very likely, that he would never be discovered, and, like everybody else, with his good record in the past, he was discharged and reinstated, because many people vouched for him, and all said he was an excellent officer, but he stepped by the wayside and fell, and we had him arrested and discharged.”

Whether the many people who so generously interceded with the Chief of Police for the retention of a thief as a member of his force were that thief’s fellow pals and hold-up men, was not disclosed; but it may be said without hazard, that they were not reputable men—if they had any existence at all other than in the imagination, and as part of the bewildering policy of an incapable Chief.

Methods of levying blackmail upon other than the disreputable classes, but reaching through them, upwards and beyond them, are not only countenanced, but advised by superior officials and approved by the city’s highest executive.

On the 5th of November, 1897, a practical stranger in the city was given the following letter, signed by the Chief of Police, viz.:

This stranger had been denounced through the press as a fraud and a schemer, who had been arrested in other cities for obtaining money under false pretenses, which facts were known to the Chief of Police when his letter of recommendation was written. The stranger was to receive a commission of twenty-five per cent on all subscriptions obtained by him, and the treasurer of the fund, who was selected with the approval of the Chief, the Mayor, and his principal political satellite, ten per cent. Some $8,000 were collected under this scheme, one large railroad corporation subscribing $1,000 and a noted Board of Trade operator $500. Whence the remainder came rests in conjecture, with a well defined belief that noted gamblers, and keepers of houses of ill fame, were contributors to it.

A legislative committee’s inquiries prevented the consummation of the scheme, but, owing to the speedy departure from the city of the treasurer, the source of the remaining subscriptions could not be inquired into.

As a cover to the purposes of this scheme, it was proposed to place these collections to the credit of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Fund of Chicago, which, by reason of the failure of a bank, whose officials are now under indictment for the misappropriation of public funds other than those of this association, had become badly impaired. This proposal followed the appointment of the legislative committee of investigation, by way of preparation to conceal the real purpose of the swindle. That association repudiated the plan.

The Chief of Police was asked by the committee of investigation whether he thought it was the proper thing for him, as Chief of Police of Chicago, “to give to a man to go out among business men, corporations and manufacturing establishments of the city a letter telling them that everything this man did and said you would be responsible for, if you knew he had been indicted and arrested in different cities of the United States for defrauding the people out of money on this same identical scheme?” He answered, “I don’t believe it.” Immediately he was asked, “Have you heard A. was arrested a number of times?” and in reply said, “I read in the newspapers that he was arrested and had trouble in Detroit.” Again he was asked whether A. had given him any information as to the number of times he had been arrested for getting money on false pretenses, and his answer was, “I can give you some information on that subject.”

These extracts from the sworn testimony of this official, speak in no commendatory manner of his sense of official responsibility. They point to a mind deadened to all sense of the duties of his position; they elevate him before his force as a conspicuous example for them to follow, in his disregard of the principles of official decency. In themselves they urge upon that force, by their silent influence, an emulation of such a blackmailing course, even though in its accomplishment the assistance of a swindler is required, and deliberately accepted.

A brother of the Chief, a member of the detective force, was frequently found in poolrooms, assisting in their management, and yet the Chief seems to have been unable to acquire the knowledge that poolrooms were running wide open throughout the city. He probably knew it as an individual. In response to a question as to his information on this subject he answered, that no particular complaints were made—“the newspaper boys often came around and said there was pool selling going on at different places,” and he presumed “if a desperate effort had been made to look that kind of thing up, we might have possibly been successful.” More open admissions of official incompetency it would, perhaps, be difficult to make, and no more flagrant instances could be cited of official degeneracy than are these extracts from the sworn testimony of a defiant and dangerous public servant.

In the attack on the Police Pension Fund, which was established under an act of the legislature for the benefit of an officer who shall have reached the age of fifty years, and who shall have served at reaching that age for twenty years on the force, then be retired with a yearly pension equal to one-half of the salary attached to the rank which he may have held for one year next preceding the expiration of his term of twenty years, or who shall have become physically disabled in the performance of his duty, there was manifested a degree of moral irresponsibility, if not of criminality, and a blind adherence to partisanship in defiance of the laws, seldom found in the history of any municipal corporation, and unmatched even by the developments of the Lexow committee of New York City, in matters of a kindred character, inquired into by that committee.

For the sake of creating vacancies in the ranks of the police force, to be filled by appointments to be made by the Chief in defiance of the civil service law, and while that law was running the gauntlet of every conceivable attack, both open and covert, which could be made upon it by every department of the city’s administration, and by none more virulently than by the Law Department, a plan was devised and put into execution whereby officers of all ranks, after years of police service and experience and in strong physical condition willing and anxious to remain in their positions, were retired from the force against their protest, merely to make way for the substitution of new appointees—the political friends of the Chief and his superior. Men with good records and physically able to perform their duties were thus forced upon the rolls as pensioners, to deplete a fund, sacred as a trust, not only for the benefit of the living and necessitous pensioners, but also for the widows of the men who had lost their lives in the service and the wives and children of those who had died after ten years of police duty. One effect, as to the standing of this fund, was to reduce the balance on hand January 1, 1897, from $16,837 to $4,543 December 31st, 1897. Thus over $10,000 was raided, seized and forced upon unwilling pensioners, “still able bodied and anxious to retain their positions at their full salaries.” A more contemptible exercise of political power and administrative robbery could not well be imagined.

The omissions of the police force in the enforcement of the laws, their acts of commission in evading, attacking and disregarding others, especially those relating to all night saloons, the source of most of the arrests for disorderly conduct, where wantonness is displayed, assignations are arranged, drunkenness aided and brawls engendered, are blamable, not so much upon the patrolmen, as upon their superior officers. The patrolmen do as they are told. They report infractions of the law, or not, according to their instructions. Their eyes are opened or closed, as the “wink is tipped” to them from above. The men are brave in moments of danger, fearless in rescuing the inmates of burning buildings, risking their lives in stopping runaway horses, tender in caring for lost children, or destitute persons, both men and women, and faithful in the performance of their duties as members of the ambulance corps.

During the year 1897 one hundred and eighty were injured while on duty, and of this number forty-seven were on service in the first precinct, embracing the business district, the thoroughfares of which are the most crowded and in which the heaviest fires happen, while only seven were injured in the second precinct along the “levee”—the tough precinct. Given proper management, strict discipline and law abiding example, it could be made, and ought to be made, one of the “finest” forces in the world. Thugs and thieves, within the past two years, through the manipulation of the civil service law, have been admitted to its ranks, to its everlasting disgrace and that of the usurped appointing power.

The number of arrests in 1897 for those offences from the perpetrators of which the police are charged with receiving protection money, was less than in any of the previous years since 1895, notwithstanding the increase in population, according to the school census, from 1,616,635 in 1896, to 1,851,588 in 1898, an increase in round numbers of 234,000.

The following is the number of arrests for the years 1894, 1895, 1896 and 1897 for offences as named, viz.:

		1894.		1895.		1896.		1897.
Cock fighting		.....		156		69		.....
Decoy to gambling houses		.....		.....		.....		.....
Disorderly		49,072		44,450		50,641		45,844
Inmates of assignation houses		53		53		92		14
Inmates of disorderly houses		21		105		205		181
Inmates of gambling houses		879		1,802		2,535		725
Inmates of houses of ill fame		2,516		2,894		5,547		1,531
Inmates of opium dens		943		1,112		528		253
Keeping assignation houses		17		5		15		19
Keeping disorderly houses		39		28		30		139
Keeping gaming houses		238		300		310		155
Keeping houses of ill fame		174		210		241		648
Robbery		1,072		1,099		1,083		1,200
Violation saloon ordinance		717		1,283		1,359		559

In 1897, as compared with 1896, there was a decrease of 78 in the number of arrests of inmates of assignation houses, 24 of the inmates of disorderly houses, 1,810 of the inmates of gambling houses, 4,016 of the inmates of houses of ill fame, 275 of the inmates of opium dens, 155 of the keepers of gaming houses, and 800 for violation of saloon ordinances. That these offenses had not decreased in point of perpetration is a fact, patent to observation and well known to the people. On the other hand, the arrests for keeping disorderly houses increased 109, and for keeping houses of ill fame 407. In the year 1896, when some effort was made to keep the police out of politics, the total arrests were 13,167 more than in 1897, when the police force had passed into the hands of a political machine, which sought to erase the application of the civil law to its government. In 1896 the inmates suffered arrest, but in 1897 the policy of arresting fewer inmates and more keepers, except of gaming houses, seems to have been inaugurated. “The keepers” are more able to pay than the inmates. For every dollar collected from inmates, the keepers are able to pay ten, or fifty dollars if necessary. From these figures it is clear that the practice of assessments for police protection was maintained principally against keepers in 1897, and that few inmates, comparatively, refused to pay in that year, while a large number of keepers of immoral and gambling houses were tardy in their payments, consequently, the former were not arrested, while the latter were.

What the figures for the year 1898 will reveal is as yet unknown.

Not only is crime thus tolerated by the police, but its chief officials assume, also, to define the boundaries of the districts in which it may be freely and safely perpetrated.

The Chief of Police, testifying before a legislative investigating committee, said: “Now, any fellow who wants to bet on the races or anything of that sort cannot be allowed to do so this side of Jackson street, because we don’t want this section of the town polluted with this class of things. We want the boys who have an inclination to bet on horse races to go south.”

Q. What have you got against the people south of Jackson street?

A. I like them.

Q. Is that the reason you wanted that stuff to go down there?

A. Things are very lively in the lower part of the town, everything has a thrifty appearance, and everything——

Q. You mean south of Jackson street?

A. North of Jackson—and things up south of Jackson are virtually dead—there is nothing going on at all, and the stores are all empty. There is nothing doing, and the property, is depreciating in value, and the object was to liven things up a little bit.

That part of the city south of Jackson boulevard to Sixteenth street, and from State street on the east to the river on the west, embraces the tough part of the second precinct of the second police district. In the year 1897 of the total number of arrests of women and girls in the city, 17,624 in number, 8,957, or over 50 per cent, were, as the police term it, “run in” from this police district. How often the same women were arrested and re-arrested it is impossible to say, or whether they were “pinched” oftener than once in the same night. Of this latter number 7,364 were discharged by the magistrates, but the larger number contributed one dollar each to the justice for signing a bail bond for their appearance for trial. In addition, 300 women, known as “women lodgers,” were also “run in” in this district in 1897. Of these unfortunates 1,746 were fined; 140 held to the criminal court; 193 released on peace bonds; 209 sent to the house of correction; 10 held as witnesses; 10 were insane; 7 destitute, and 23 were sick and sent to the hospital. Of this total number of arrests of women and women lodgers, 9,257 in number, in this police district in 1897, only 2,288, or about 39 per cent were convicted of offenses by police magistrates, while 61 per cent of them were discharged.

Of the total number of persons arrested throughout the city in 1897, 83,680 in number, 55,020 were discharged by the police courts, 18,017 were fined, 4,138 held on criminal charges, and 2,947 bound over to keep the peace. The remainder were sent to various homes, refuges, asylums and humane societies. Over 50 per cent of those arrested were discharged. The percentage of those who furnished bail for their appearance, it is difficult to ascertain. That the practice exists is too well known to be proven, that a division of these bail bond fees is made between the magistrate and the police; the police furnishing the victims, the straw bailor his signature to, and the justice his approval of, the bond. The latter collects his fee and divides with the officers, while the straw bailor exacts his compensation in proportion to the ability of the victim to pay, then hands over a share to the arresting officers.

That such persecution should exist in a civilized community is a disgrace to its civilization, that public officers should, for one moment, be permitted to engage in such hideous traffic in the liberties of their fellows, is a scandal upon the administration of justice, and that executive officers of the law, sworn to its enforcement, should be ignorant of the infamy of such arrests, or knowingly permit them to be made, is malfeasance in office, and subversion of civil rights.

The portion of the fines (not by statute appropriated for other purposes) assessed upon, and collected from, this class of unfortunates by the justices, is required by the ordinances to be paid to the city at the close of each and every month, and is to be apportioned by the city authorities as the statutes and ordinances require. The salaries of the police magistrates are fixed by agreement with the city. These magistrates are chosen bi-ennially after the election of a Mayor, by that officer, from the appointed justices of the peace, and are generally of the same political faith as is the appointing authority. The system is a blot upon the impartial administration of justice. It has become a byword among the people as a malodorous cesspool.

From the evidence heard before a legislative committee, that committee reported “that the present system of justice, or police courts, as run, is a disgrace to the present civilization. It shows that justice courts will open in the night time, policemen will go out and drag in men and women, 100 and 200, and even more at a time; that they are refused a trial at night, required to give a bond for which the justice charges them one dollar; that professional bondsmen are in attendance who will collect another dollar, and oftentimes much more, from the poor unfortunate to go on his or her bond until morning, thus making several hundred dollars ofttimes in a night to the police justices and other officers connected with the court, and this is done, as your committee believe, from the evidence, for the purpose of making money for the police justice, the professional bondsman, and the police officer in charge of the arrest.”

These magistrates are required to report at the “close of each day’s business,” but their night arrests are construed by them as not following within the definition of “a day’s business.” The fees arising from them are not, therefore, reported.

Civic bodies have denounced in the bitterest terms the evils of this system, and in a recent mayoralty message to the Common Council, in itself the hotbed of boodleism, it is said, “The justice shop system with all its necessarily attendant scandals is about to be wiped out.”

That desirable result awaits legislative action. The general assembly, if it has any respect for human rights, for commendable municipal government, for the performance of its sworn duty, will lay aside the struggle in legislative halls for political ascendancy, and hasten the day when this festering sore shall have applied to it an instrument of eradication which it alone can wield. It is proper to add that since the foregoing lines were written the night fees are better accounted for, under an agreement between the magistrates and the city by which the magistrates’ salaries are raised, as an inducement to them to be honest.

The appropriations for the year 1897, for the maintenance of the police force, amounted to $3,356,910. Other sources of income amounted to $17,635.03.

The salary warrants drawn against this fund amounted to $3,290,296.26; for other expenses, $167,369.63, making a total of warrants drawn of $3,457,665.89, leaving a deficit of $83,392.84.

The total income of the city for the year 1897 from saloon licenses was about $3,000,000. The saloons are, therefore, the policemen’s great financial friends in more ways than one, and largely defray the expenses of the department.

 

 

---

The breeding ground of disorder and crime is to be found in the all night saloons.

Despite the stringent ordinances prohibiting the “open door” after midnight, in the most dissolute districts throughout the city, along the streets and avenues of the north, west and south divisions, under ground and on its surface, these dens invite the depraved of both sexes to enter, remain, dissipate and carouse through the night. Murders, robberies and assaults are the necessary outcome of the unlimited drinking, the ribald language, the senseless jealousies, and the heated passions of the motley crowds which are at all times the fascinated patrons of these joints. A more rigid rule has recently been applied to the larger of the down town, or business district, basement saloons. Music is prohibited, and the closing midnight hour respected. These are but the depots for the all night saloons. When they close, the gathered crowds of dissolute women dissolve and betake themselves to the after midnight haunts, there to continue their calling—the solicitation of male visitors for drinks, meals and the ultimate purpose of their solicitation—prostitution. The male frequenters of these resorts belong to all classes of society. The “steady” visitors are thieves, thugs, pickpockets, gamblers, variety actors, “rounders,” that large and constantly growing class in great cities which is ceaselessly observing the shady side of life, “seeing the elephant,” and not infrequently becoming intimately acquainted with the beast, and pimps, who fatten upon the sinful earnings of abandoned women, whose fondness for their masters increases in proportion to the violence the masters visit upon their slaves. The transient custom is comprised of not only the old rounder, but also of those of younger experience, bursting, or not far advanced, into manhood; those who with a wide knowledge of the ways and wickedness of the world, more than their years warrant, are out for a “good time;” the observer of those ways; the “chiels” who are among them taking notes; clerks, cabmen and their “hauls;” the country buyer under the guidance of the entertainer of the wholesale house with whom the buyer is dealing; the delegates to conventions, out to view the town; the passer through the burg who has heard of the lights and shadows of Chicago; the swallow-tailed youth, and the middle-aged gentleman fresh from escorting to her home the virtuous female companion of the evening’s entertainment, the melodrama, the opera, or the social function. The women range from the one who has just “started out” to the most despicable and depraved member of the sex. The former is the observed of all observers, the object of conspicuous attention, and a veritable prize to be won by the most dashing attack and the most liberal offer. She is under the tuition of her female guide, who instructs her “what she has to do that she may not be raw in her entertainment.”

The basement saloons in the down town district with their brilliant electric lighting equipment, their reflecting mirrors and hardwood finishings, combine, in most instances, the facilities of the rum shop and the restaurant.

Here, from noon hour of the day until midnight, come and go the “sporty” women, who have not yet reached the lower degree of a brothel, the “roomers,” “the cruisers” of the street, the so-called keepers of manicure parlors, baths and dressmaking establishments, all bent upon a “mash” in its broadest sense, or a “pick up” of any male greenhorn, or sport, who can be ensnared by their wiles. Maintaining a semblance of decorum, they pass the earlier hours of the evening in drinking with the “guests” and in flitting about from table to table, with which each place is abundantly supplied. The conversation is loud, and at times boisterous. Its subject matter is beyond repetition in polite circles. Lecherous glances, libidinous gestures, open invitations, characterize the behavior of the audience. Sometimes personal liberties are attempted, but invariably suppressed by the management. From the private rooms come sounds of hilarity, and the intermixture of words of protest, inducement and vulgarity. The withdrawals of couples are marked, and their early return and ruffled appearance suggest patronage of not distant “hotels,” where no questions are asked. Generally, as the midnight hour approaches, the crowd decreases, signs of intoxication increase, and the exodus to the all night resorts is about completed as that hour is struck.

When the downtown basement resorts close, the profitable work of the all night joints commences. The attendants in them are joined by squads from the more pretentious and less favored half-night competitors. These resorts, as a rule, are all equipped with private rooms, and many of them, in summer, have a so-called garden attached. Some have vaudeville performances to attract crowds, which end after the midnight hour. Many have a “Ladies’ Entrance,” but most visitors pass through the bar to the sitting room beyond. The so-called music of the cracked piano and strident male voices now commences, and the hat is passed around by the artists and performers, for contributions for payment for their services, the “house” paying nothing for such services, but permitting the artists to “work” the crowd. Boys of sixteen, and under, join in the gaieties as buck, wing and jig dancers, and also pass the hat. As the hours lengthen, as the liquor begins its effect, freedom of action enlarges, and restraint is removed. Those attitudes at table indicative of respectability are abandoned for others hinting at the widest license, or actually, which is not infrequently the case, illustrating that license, so far as familiarities of the person are concerned. The dance begins, with all its contortions of the body derived from the couche-couchee exhibitions of the World’s Fair times, enlarged upon by the grossness of the two-step waltz of the slums. Strolling bands of negro musicians, scraping the violin and strumming the guitar and mandolin, or the home orchestra, composed of these dusky minstrels, add their alleged harmonies to the occasion, and, with nasal expression, roll of coon songs in the popular rag time, with their intimations of free love, warmth of passion and disregard of moral teachings. At times, with assumed pathos and mock dignity they warble a sentimental song with some allusion to “Mother,” “Home,” or “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me.” The spree goes on, with fresh additions from the bagnios. Women with the most repulsive signs of prolonged dissipation, of advanced disease, with the upper parts of the body exposed, not perhaps more than is customary at a fashionable charity ball, join in with salacious abandon. These women, in the phrase of the Bard of Avon, belong to the class of the “custom shrunk,” of one of whom a Roman satirist wrote:

“* * * but now,
That life is flagging at the goal, and like
An unstrung lute, her limbs are out of tune,
She is become so lavish of her presence,
That being daily swallowed by men’s eyes
They surfeit at the sight.
She’s grown companion to the common streets—
Want her who will, a stater, a three obolo piece,
Or a mere draught of wine, brings her to hand!
Nay! place a silver stiver in your palm,
And, shocking tameness! She will stoop forthwith
To pick it out.”

As the morning hours draw nigh blear-eyed men and women in all stages of intoxication, creep to their holes to sleep away the day for a renewal of their orgies when darkness again falls.

In these all night saloons robberies and burglaries are planned, and hold-ups arranged for. To them young girls are enticed when homeward bound from summer gardens and midwinter balls. Plans are laid for their ruin through drink, and the excitement of an experience new to them, which hide from their view all danger signals. Women are beaten and stabbed in them. Here young men begin their careers of dissipation, of lechery, and, perhaps, of crime, amid surroundings so contrary to the examples of home life, that before they are aware of it, they have become hopelessly enamored of what is termed a sporting life.

The flippantly spoken word provokes a heated reply, a jealous woman, surcharged with drink, precipitates a squabble that swells into a free fight, a free fight brings an indiscriminate firing of revolvers, and the consequent death—the murder—of some of the rioters follows. Then, and not until then, do the police raid the place. For a few weeks it is kept under the ban, but gradually the law’s grip is relaxed, signs of the old life revive, and soon the same scenes made more joyous and boisterous at the “new opening” are again enacted, to run the same course until another felony is committed, and another temporary closing of the doors enforced.

That the all night saloon where such depravity is permitted to hold sway is a menace to the peace, the sobriety, and the safety of the community, is a self evident proposition.

A minister in one of his sermons said, “The police wink when you call their attention to the fact that hundreds of saloons are running wide open all night. It is after midnight that the majority of the crimes are committed, and yet these places are allowed to run after hours, and have the protection of the police.”

The beardless boy and the habitual drunkard are, alike, supplied with drink without question. The former is flattered by being called “a dead game sport,” and the latter tickled with the oft-bestowed title of “old sport.”

Many of these notorious dens are located in the midst of a forest of houses of ill fame. The depraved inmates of these houses, partly clad, are the most indecent visitors to the all night saloons. Perched upon the bar, or peering out from the private wine rooms, they shout their infamous language at the visitors, with invitations to indulgence in the most bestial of practices.

Slumming parties, composed of respectable men and women whose morbid curiosity has been aroused by tales of the inconceivable vices forming the night-life of the demi-monde, are not infrequently found “going down the line” dropping into the houses of prostitution, viewing the bar, the private rooms, the dance hall, the crap games and the vicious surroundings of the all night pest holes. To slum has, in a measure, become a fashionable fad. Its purpose is, not to carry into these haunts the example of a better life, but to cater to a dangerous spirit of inquiry, upon the principle that excitement, even though it be found in the midst of the garbage boxes of vice, is relished now and then by the best of mankind. The only indication of a world outside, in which Christian principles prevail, is occasionally to be found, when some of the women garbed in the simple uniform of either the Salvation or Volunteer Army, engaged in rescue work, or in scattering a hopeful word, through the medium of their publications, pass among the crowd, receiving in most instances respectful attention, and, at times, but rarely, a jeer from some drunken sot or wrecked woman.

The houses of ill fame, whose stained glass windows with suggestive female figures in the nude advertise the abode of the scarlet woman, are as luxuriously furnished as is the home of the wealthy and respectable citizen. These “creatures of sale,” as Shakespeare puts it, are as clearly distinguished in public as members of the demi-monde, as if the Julian laws were in operation in Chicago. In early Rome, under these laws, the courtesan was compelled to dye her hair blue or yellow. Like the Grecian courtesan whose distinctive mark of her calling was blonde hair, the strumpet of today generally favors a fashion coming down from the past ages. The passer-by of these abodes of sensuality is invited by open solicitation or unmistakable gesture to enter them, especially by the more degraded of the women. A studied decorum is maintained in some of the parlors of the older establishments, presided over by a proprietress advanced in years, plentiful in wealth, and dictatorial in management. Harsh rules are prescribed for the maintenance of the condition of slavery into which the girls have fallen. Debts to the house tie them to it by bands too strong to be easily broken, in what are termed the aristocratic branches of this nefarious trade. These women are none the less free from indulgence in unnatural practices than are those of houses of reputed lower degrees of depravity. White and colored alike revel in the same scenes of carnality which, fragments of history state, prevailed in the declining days of Rome and of Greece. The inmates of the lowest of these houses, both in dress, or in the absence of it, and in deportment, follow the habits of the Dicteriades, or low down prostitutes, of Piræus in the time of Pericles. Their appearance in the reception parlors in a state of nudity, and their filthiness in practice is a renewal of the habits of the Lesbian lovers of the fifth century; or of the flute players of the Athenian banquets, accounts of whose indecent dancing and depraved ways are found in the most erotic chapters in ancient literature. From them come the terms applying to the devotees in these days of sodomitic indulgence, forming part of the slang of the neighborhood where they live a debauched and beastly existence.

The superstitions of the Grecian and Roman courtesan are carried into the beliefs of those of modern days. What the philters or love charms were to the former, luck powders are to the latter. They are known along the levee as “Sally White’s Brand” and “Sally White’s Mixed Luck.” The former is regarded as particularly lucky. It is a compound of “Sally’s” own prescription, and is secretly sprinkled on the floor, at stated periods, as luck is sought after, or is burned in a room and the fumes inhaled. The latter is a mixture of perfumed oils and is used in the bath. The women are the frequent buyers of Sally’s prescriptions, avoiding purchasing on a Friday.

The sources from which come the supply to the ranks of courtesans, whether inmates of the aristocratic, the middle, or the lowest grades of their temples of vice, are many, various and damnable. Aside from the mere desire to gratify passion, which medical writers maintain constitutes but a small percentage of those who join the army of prostitutes, attributable to an innate sense of virtue in the modern woman, cabmen, in spite of the municipal ordinances, have been known to drive women entering the city to these brothels on the pretext they were hotels. The procuress is at work all the while.

“Thou hold’st a place for which the paind’st fiend
Of hell would not in reputation change.
Thou art the damned doorkeeper to every
Coistril that comes inquiring for his Tib;
To the choleric fisting of every rogue
Thy ear is liable; thy food is such
As hath been belched on by infected lungs.”

The department stores, in which starvation wages are paid to girls and women, who are subjected to the attentions of designing men, invited to lunch, induced to drink; whose love for dress and whose vanity are worked upon; those whose want of education in the relations of the sexes brings about their speedy fall; the servant turned out from her employment ruined by her employer or his son; the seamstress; the victims of unhappy marriages and cruel homes; those compelled by poverty or necessity, and who support dependent relatives; the “chippies” of modern days; the massage parlor graduates; all contribute their distressed quotas to this ever increasing tribe of prostitutes.

It gathers in recruits from the overflow of the assignation houses, which are scattered over this city in astonishing profusion. They are found in boulevard castles and in back alley huts. They do not differ in character from those of all cities. Through them come the cast-off women, who, having satisfied the temporary infatuation of their seducers, find themselves victims of false promises, and the graduates from homes wrecked by the discovery of their daylight intrigues. So relentless a warfare is waged upon these private, and in some instances most exclusive, resorts, by the lynx-eyed police, that in the year 1897, nineteen keepers of such places were arrested! Some improvement is noticeable in their suppression from the fact that in 1894 seventeen, in 1895 five, and in 1896 fifteen keepers were arrested! Interference with this style of accommodation is, therefore, possible in Chicago, at or about the time of the arrival of the millennium!

Singular to say there are moralists who assign the prostitute a position of usefulness in modern civilization. One of the most distinguished of English writers, in tracing the effects of Christianity upon mankind and its beneficent influences in social life, says: “Under these circumstances there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and, in some respects, the most awful upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak, who counterfeits, with a cold heart, the transports of affection, and submits herself as a passive instrument of lust, who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed for the most part to disease and abject wretchedness, and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and the sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few, who in the pride of their untempted chastity think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame.

She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fade, the external priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.”

The entertainer of the wholesale house who conducts his country customer to see the sights of the town, whenever and wherever such sights are to be seen, “where everything goes,” pays the expenses of the round of debauchery from the fund provided by his firm; while from the floating, passing, male visitors, no less than from the resident male dwellers, young and old, rich and poor, come the thousands of dollars which go to the support of the lewd woman of the town, from the street walker, up through the mistresses and the shady wives, to the best dressed and most brazen wanton in the palaces—the “swell” houses so styled. The unrevealable indecencies which attend these infamous resorts are within the knowledge of the police, under any and every municipal administration. At times their pressure upon these unfortunates is heavier than at others. The necessity of raising campaign funds, the personal wants of the blackmailers of the police force, the revenges to be gratified for some jealousy aroused, or favor refused, all contribute to increase the weight of oppression. Meanwhile, in the absence of municipal regulations, which seem abhorrent to the average American mind as a recognition of the legalization of vice, diseases are wide spread, until, in the language of a distinguished physician, the most destructive of them have reached the blood of “the best and noblest families of the land.” Lecky, in his History of European Morals, speaking of the horrible effects incident to the non-regulation of houses of this character, says: “In the eyes of every physician, and, indeed, in the eyes of most continental writers who have adverted to the subject, no other feature of English life appears so infamous as the fact that an epidemic, which is one of the most dreadful now existing among mankind, which communicates itself from the guilty husband to the innocent wife, and even transmits its taint to her offspring, and which the experience of other nations conclusively proves may be vastly eliminated, should be suffered to rage unchecked, because the legislature refuses to take official cognizance of its existence, or proper sanitary measures for its repression.”

The protests of Christian organizations and of societies for the suppression of vice seem to be in vain. The city ordinances prohibiting, for instance, the employment of females in massage parlors patronized by men, and others, intended to keep the conduct of all manufactories of vice within limits, if not to accomplish their suppression, are not attempted to be enforced.

Some mitigation of the evils of police aggression has been brought about, as has been observed, by placing police magistrates under a salary sufficiently large to induce them to partly abolish the practice of wholesale midnight arrests, with their consequent fees and bailors’ exactions. These fees are now accounted for more rigidly and paid over to the city, whether they are the result of daylight or midnight arrests. These evils are not, however, wholly eradicated, nor will they be, until an aroused public sentiment shall give as much attention, public service, and personal endeavor, to the attainment of that most desirable end, as is given to the building of an armory, the establishment of lake front parks, Greater Chicago, the passage of revenue bills, and the defeat of the attempt to obtain public franchises without compensation to the granting municipality.

Whatever will tend to create wealth for the individual, to increase the volume of trade, or add to the attractiveness of the city in the improvement or adornment of its public parks, the energetic and pushing citizen aids with his personal services, and abundant wealth. Its moral attractions receive, in so far as the repression of villainy and of disgusting vice is concerned, but little, if any, personal or pecuniary assistance from the people. At a recent meeting of the Law Enforcement League, a clergyman, who had freely given his time and services in behalf of the objects of that association, begged for the paltry sum of $250 with which to carry on the work. It was received by contribution from his audience after repeated appeals. Had it been a meeting for stock subscriptions to some corporation promising large returns, or for the purpose of building a monument to some former day hero, or author, the appeal would not have had to fall upon the ears of the people repeatedly. The request would have been granted upon its first presentation. “This work,” said the preacher, “cannot be carried on by sympathy, or applause, or resolutions, or expressions of good will. There is nothing but hard cash that counts in the practical work of enforcing the law.”

 

 

---

That public opinion can be aroused on any question deemed of importance to the municipal welfare finds abundant confirmation in the history of Chicago, and that that opinion can make itself felt at the polls has but recently been most remarkably demonstrated. Admittedly deficient, both by friend and foe, in public assemblages called in behalf of its retention in power; permitting the violation of the law, in all its departments; openly consenting to the unrestrainted lechery of the debauched classes, the wide open running of gambling houses, pool rooms and disorderly houses; aiding by its refusal, or neglect, to stop the levying by the police of protection rates upon poker rooms, crap games, pool rooms and dens of that class, the pitfalls and snares set for the young men of the town; assessing for political purposes the keepers of disreputable resorts of all kinds, and the employes of the city under civil service rules in defiance of a law sternly prohibiting that demoralizing practice; an administration appealed to, and received, the support of nearly a majority of the whole people, upon one fictitiously dominant issue, under which all others were adroitly sheltered and wholly hidden from view.

That issue which concerned the people as an incorporated body, rather more than as individuals, was practically non-existing. The power to invade the rights of the people had been destroyed by State legislation. In the absence of new legislation, the extension of railroad franchises is now an impossibility, except under the terms of the existing charter. No legislation can be obtained in enlargement of such municipal power, until the next general assembly shall have convened in January, 1901, unless a special session should be called for that particular purpose, the probability of which is too remote to be considered. Meanwhile the new administration which will be carried on for the next two years by practically the same men as for the past two years, can find no refuge behind an issue of supposedly overwhelming importance to hide its neglect of others, which affect, if not directly, yet indirectly, the financial interests of the city. Those matters, to which the administration of the city must now give its attention, concern the purity of municipal legislation; the proper enforcement of the laws in all departments of the city government; no interference in matters of education; no attempt at the control of the civil service commission in the strict enforcement of the law creating it; the proper letting of contracts, and the preservation of pay-rolls from manipulation and fraudulent swelling. The purity of municipal legislation is assured by the election of a number of aldermen whose records as citizens warrant the prediction that they, joining with an already trusty minority, for the ensuing year at least, will conserve public rather than private interests, guided by the promptings of each individual conscience. There will be no opportunity to filch from them for party ends, or for personal advancement, due public acknowledgment of their integrity and ability. But the enforcement of the laws governing municipal administration in its several departments; the proper disbursement of its appropriation funds for street improvements, scavenger service, street and alley cleaning, public buildings and parks, etc.; the management of the school-board by its own officials, free from political suasion; of the civil service commission along the lines contemplated by the law free from party dictation, and the elevation of the police force to the plane of its non-political duties, for the prevention of the spread of vice and indecency, the repression of crime, the protection of life and property, are all matters, the non-attention to which can no longer be excused upon the theory of the necessity of first destroying an attempted private seizure of the public streets, a theory which has gone to its destruction by the repeal of an obnoxious law, under which seizure might have been accomplished.

So far as the suppression of vice is concerned, the initial duty of municipal administration is the education of the police in their duties as imposed upon them by law. For years, under every administration, with infrequent, feeble attempts at reform, that force has been rapidly becoming a fleet of harveyized steel battleships, sailing under the flaunting flag of vice, fully armed, and loyally serving the kings of the gamblers, the queens of the demi-monde, and their conjoined forces of thieves, confidence men, cappers, prostitutes, philanderers, etc., etc. It is not in the least fearful of public opinion. If wealth can snap its fingers and cry aloud “The public be d—d,” so can the force laugh in its sleeve, and, aping wealth, echo “To hell” with the public.

It is not different in Chicago from what it is in New York. The temporary disappearance from the “Tenderloin” of many of its flagrant vices, and the supposed purification of the police force following the astounding revelations of the Lexow committee, have given way under the ceaseless and insidious assaults of criminal and vicious influences. A New York journal recently said: “The reports to the Society for the Prevention of Crime show that the city is in worse condition than ever before. No paper would dare print all that is done openly in dens of vice that are tolerated by the police. The reports seem almost incredible; they show that with few exceptions the police force is corrupt from top to bottom. Gambling houses, disorderly houses and dives of the worst description flourish openly, a regular schedule of rates has been established which the police force charge for protection.

The flagrancy of crime which brought about a political revolution five years ago exists today as it did then. In some ways there is even less attempt at concealment than there was in the ante-Lexow days; in others the vice and immorality is more hidden. But it is here, and instead of there being one “Tenderloin” ulcer on the city there are now four, each fully as extended as was that old hotbed of vice.”

What the police force of New York was before the investigation of the Lexow committee, so the police force of Chicago then was; and what the New York force is today, so is the Chicago force. A new investigation is about to begin in New York city. Watch its revelations day after day. Change the names, and for every police infamy revealed, every unspeakable vice disclosed, every violation of law recorded, their counterparts can be found in Chicago, intensified, not modified.

The crimes which these “coppers” should, but do not, give their services to repress, are numerous, if minor in character. In flagrant cases of commission arrests may follow, and often do. It is the unused means of prevention deadened by the purchased indifference of the officers, that is the most glaring of police sins.

The location of “blind pigs,” or those places in which liquor is sold without a license, both within prohibition districts as well as without them, must either be known to officers traveling beats whereon they flourish, or such officers are too ignorant to belong to the ranks. It is not ignorance of the officers that prevents their suppression. Superiors are paid a price for non-interference. The patrolman follows his orders, permits the illicit traffic to be carried on by those who pay that price, and reports only those who do not pay it, but who seek to conduct the prohibited business without contribution to the permissive fund.

In the most respectable settlements of the city, in the very heart of prohibition districts, in which there would be spasms of protest and whirlwinds of indignation if it were even suggested that the lines separating the prohibitive from the non-prohibitive districts should be abolished, are to be found the highest grade of the breed of “blind pigs.” They are the brilliantly lighted, well arranged, and aristocratic types of the modern drugstore, where, as the evening shades descend, a band of friendly Indians assembles to discuss the events of the day, conduct wars, shape the destinies of nations, and draw their inspiration from spiritus fermenti op., a drug commonly known, however, as whisky, when obtained without a prescription at the bar of the ordinary licensed saloon. These whisky jacks express amazement at the want of proper regulation of the sale of liquor, while aiding in its unlawful traffic. They are typical Archimagos; high priests of hypocrisy and deceit. They are the open mouthed reformers who shout for a rigorous application of the law for the regulation of saloons outside of their own prohibition districts, for the maintenance of prohibition within those districts, and who wink at their own infractions of the license laws, behind the prescription case—their private bar.

This form of attack upon the license law exists all over the city, more so perhaps in prohibition districts than without them, but each drug store, as a rule, has its patrons from whom a yearly revenue is derived by the accommodating and equally guilty proprietor who vends his drinks without compliance with the law.

The other class of “blind pigs” owes its existence to a prearranged bargain between a policeman and the members of that class, who, for the entertainment of friends, and the turning of a penny, embark in the business without fear of arrest. As the sale of liquor for use upon the premises as a beverage is lawful when licensed, every combination to evade a license is not only an evasion of the penalties of the license law, but it is a conspiracy to rob the city of a portion of a large revenue, sufficient almost to support the police force. The city is thus plundered by its own servants who take its place in fixing the amount of the license, and who appropriate it when collected to their own use.

Some of these institutions are to be found in the rear of bakeries, in the costly barns of the wealthy classes with coachmen as bartenders, and at the gates of the silent cities of the dead.

They are a fruitful source of revenue to the police, and, consequently, difficult of discovery, since their patrons must be well known as non-squealers, and the police are too loyal to turn informers.

They exist in surrounding country towns and in classic neighborhoods, in Evanston and Hyde Park particularly. Both of these localities are the seats of institutions of learning; the Northwestern University at the one, and the University of Chicago at the other.

A Lieutenant of Police was arrested for extorting money for protection from the keeper of a blind pig in Hyde Park. It developed, in the course of his trial, that he was to pay part of the insurance premium to a brewery company. To such an extent has this blackmailing scheme gone, that its proceeds are distributed not alone among patrolmen and superior police officials, but also to brewing companies united in a trust affecting the price and the quality of the poor man’s beverage.

The national pastime of the Filipinos is of common occurrence in Chicago, and escapes the watchful eyes of the police, although its uniformed members pass the door of the saloon with which the principal pit is connected. The entering crowds, and the crowing of “birds,” never fail to announce the on-coming of the main, except to sightless eyes and deafened ears. No underground or out of hearing place is selected for these exhibitions of cock fighting. They are held in the rear of saloons, or in barns or stables connected therewith by covered ways of approach. One geographical division of the city is generally pitted against the other.

Usually the indignant police, even with early information of the time and place where and when this inhuman amusement is to be held, arrive upon the scene when the fight has ended, the lights extinguished, and the sports scattered. Although the city council possesses the charter power to prevent these disgraceful combats, that power remains unacted upon, and the offense falls within the definition of disorderly conduct, the penalty prescribed by ordinance, upon conviction for that offense, being a fine of from one to one hundred dollars.

Bucket shops have nearly disappeared from the public gaze. They are, nevertheless, still carried on in secret, for the purpose of enabling men and women to gratify their natural propensity for gambling. The active efforts of one man, having the courage of his convictions and with the support of a commercial organization, which is the only competitor of these gambling concerns, have kept them in comparative subjection. Yet, such is the resistance made by them, that this man, aiding also in the discovery and punishment of gambling in general, ran the risk of the destruction of his life, his home, and the loss of the lives of his family, by the explosion of a bomb thrown at night into, or against, his house, by some miscreant or miscreants, with the evident intent of “removing” him as an impediment to the transactions of their murderous employers.

The police, after much effort to discover the perpetrators of the outrage, finally dismissed it from further examination, upon the theory that this man had himself “put up the job,” to accomplish the destruction of his wife and children, and of his own life. Through this heroic man’s efforts, together with those of a fearless and outspoken clergyman, as in New York, and not by reason of police assistance, but in spite of police resistance, the convictions in the criminal court, in the past year for gambling, are wholly due. The latest accessible reports show that in the year 1897 the number of places closed during the two preceding years was one hundred and forty-six, and that at the end of 1897 there were twenty-nine still in existence, including tape games and fraudulent brokers’ haunts. These institutions possess a peculiar fascination for women. Three of them, patronized wholly by the female sex, were found under one roof. Of the leading one, a writer in a city daily newspaper, in a vivid description of its general surroundings, said:

“The atmosphere of the rooms is stifling and poisonous. The odor is rank with the effluvia of bodies, which, in many cases, present the appearance that would justify the belief that they have been strangers to the bath for weeks. To go into these rooms out of the fresh outdoor world is to almost suffocate at first. * * * The effects are plainly visible in the faces of the women. They had, with few exceptions, leathery, sallow skins, drawn and tense features, hard lines about the mouth, and wrinkles between the eyes, while the eyes themselves had acquired a restless, half cunning expression, composed of cupidity and uncertainty. As for their nervous systems they are wrecks. Take the hand of any woman in those rooms, especially if she has just made an investment, and the nervous vibration is plain—her hand quivers, her whole body is tense, her bulging eyes fix themselves on the board.”

Alluding to the men who hang around, furnishing “pointers,” and looking for an invitation to a fifteen-cent lunch, one of the speculating women said of them, “These men are the lowest creatures who come up here; most of the women are respectable, but these men are lazy, dirty, ignorant and infinitely low, and all they are after is to get money and a free meal out of women.”

“The ages of the women range from twenty-five to seventy years. The older women peered anxiously through their spectacles at the board and whispered quietly to a companion; wisps of ragged gray hair escaped and waved below the little black bonnet. Heavy, thick-soled shoes stuck out from the hem of the modest black gowns; they grasped worn silk reticules in their nervous fingers, and got out the small sum which, in most instances, they did not have the nerve to invest.”

Describing the condition in life of these women, the reporter was told that some had been wealthy, and were now poor through speculation; while “more than two-thirds are the mothers of families and are eking out a little income, in many instances supporting an idle, worthless man, who should himself be out in the world earning a living.”

“If they make 75 cents a day it is a big day for them,” said the reporter’s informant. “How little you realize the state to which many of these women are brought! Many of them are almost penniless. Frequently they come here in the morning and borrow money with which to begin the day’s operations.”

Pool rooms, as a general rule, run wide open; occasionally they are “closed for repairs” caused by a police raid, forced by some flagrant outrage against the law. They flourish in the most public places, with no restriction upon admission to any visitor. The daily races all over the country are posted on large black boards covering the walls, with a list of the horses entered and a minute of the odds which will be given or demanded by the house, from which the room’s judgment of the “favorite” can be ascertained.

The money is handled openly, bet openly, and paid openly. City detectives assist in their management, and “play the races.” Raids contemplated by the police are tipped off to the managers, and when the officers arrive the game has closed.

The incidents attending an actual pull are in the main more laughable than impressive. The “hurry up” wagon takes its load away, and before many moments have elapsed the same faces are seen again returning to the one attractive spot in their daily lives. These rooms are munificent contributors for protection. They pay from $600 to $1,000 per month. They hold back telegraphic messages of the results of races until their confederates have placed bets. They are patronized by women of, apparently, all classes. In one raid eighteen women were captured, fifteen of whom claimed to be married. All of them, of course, gave fictitious names; three had babies in their arms; three claimed they were wives of policemen; a few were well dressed, and all were undoubtedly devotees of gambling, sporting women who fancied they had discovered the way to lead an easy and money-making life.

The following extract, taken from the examination of the head of the police force of the city, will show the view entertained by that official of the nature of his duties, in this regard.

Before the senatorial committee appointed January 6th, 1898, to investigate scandals in connection with the police force, its Chief was interrogated and answered as follows, viz.:

Q. How many pool rooms have you pulled, how many men have been arrested and convicted for pool selling since you have been chief?

A. I understand one fellow has been found guilty and fined $2,000.

Q. But he was arrested by the Sheriff of Cook County, indicted by the grand jury because the police would not do it?

A. I don’t know whether it was because the police would not do it, or because they could not do it.

Q. Well, it was because they did not do it. Do you mean to say that you, as Chief of Police, with 3,500 sworn men——

A. Don’t say 3,500 men. It is 2,500 men; don’t make it quite so strong.

Q. Do you say to this committee, that with 2,500 sworn men in this city you are powerless to stop the public running of pool rooms in this city?

A. I will say that I am powerless to stop a man from making hand books, or selling pools confidentially to his friends.

Q. Do you know of any pool rooms being conducted in this city during the months of October, November and December?

A. I don’t know of my own knowledge; I never was in one.

Q. Did any of the 2,500 men ever report anything of that kind to you?

A. I never had any definite report on that subject.

Q. They were giving the people a liberal government?

A. Yes, things were running very easy.

********

Q. I will get you to state if it is not a fact that a large number of pool rooms were running openly with telegraph operators in the place, pools were being sold, money paid, and everything running at full blast?

A. I never was present; I don’t know anything about it.

Q. Was there any complaint to you of that kind of thing being done?

A. No particular complaint at all. The newspaper boys often came around and said there was pool selling going on at different places.

Q. Could not the police of the city of Chicago as readily have found these people who have been fined for gambling as the Sheriff?

A. Well, I don’t know. I presume if a desperate effort had been made to look that kind of thing up we might, possibly, have been successful.

Through these resorts, which offer inducements for betting on distant horse races, the confidential clerk, the outside collector for business houses, the employes of banks, young men in all grades of employment involving the handling of the funds of their employers, together with the men of moderate salaries, working men, and the large number of sports who live by their wits, are assisted in a downward career, until defalcations, destitution in homes, and a still more acute phase of living on one’s wits, are reached, followed by flight, arrest, conviction, imprisonment, the breaking up of homes, and the necessity for the resort of the broken sport to the tactics of the hold-up man.

Yet they are tolerated, until their shameless management becomes a public scandal. Then follows a pull, a period of purification of very slight duration, and again a slow start. Speedily again they are in as full gallop as are the horses whose names they post, and as around the race track the horses go, so around the vice track the pool rooms go. The losing patrons pass under the wire at the end of their foolish struggle to win, some to the penitentiary, some to despair, and some to suicide.

The keeper and the landlord who knowingly permits his premises to be used for the selling of pools, are, under the laws of the State of Illinois enacted into an ordinance by the Municipal Code, guilty of a misdemeanor, and are liable to punishment by imprisonment in the county jail for a period not longer than one year, or by a fine not exceeding $2,000, or both.

The police make no complaints to justices for arrests, nor to their Chief, according to his testimony. The keeper pays a high rent, while the landlord, perhaps some sanctimonious deacon of a church, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, accepts his monthly returns with unctuous satisfaction, shouts his amens louder, confesses his sins more meekly, or excuses his violation of the laws of the state with a more emphatic shrug of his shoulders and a more fervid rubbing of his hands.

Book making, “in which the betting is with the book maker,” and pool selling, in which the betting is among the purchasers of the pool, they paying a commission to the seller, are both denounced by the statute, and the court of last resort of the state.

The unholy alliance between the police, the keeper of these law breaking and despicable haunts, and the conscienceless landlord, could be summarily dissolved. The police could be made the enemy of both. Their warm friendship for, and silent participation in the profits of, the partnership, can be destroyed by an executive order which needs but to be issued, with no possibility of an early revocation, to be implicitly obeyed by the sellers and “bookies.” If not obeyed, then drastic measures within the power of the police to employ should be applied. As these lines are written, some evidence is visible of action by the police. A raid has been made! The inspector, under whose order it was conducted, said, “The sooner these men begin to learn that I mean what I say, the better it will be for them. I want my officers to understand, also, that they will have to be more vigilant.” Threatening words, such as these, are common utterances by police officials, but heretofore as their echo died away their fierceness disappeared. No administration could lay claim to higher praise in any city in the land than that its police force is the guardian of the people’s rights, the stern foe of crime, and the relentless suppressor of vice and indecency through the enforcement of the laws created for that suppression.

If this is done in Chicago, a few of the devil’s aids in the diffusion of wickedness will disappear from sight so completely that Asmodeus would vainly tear off the roofs of the houses in a search after proofs of his demoniacal power.

While the police force is so closely leagued with pool rooms, and subjected to the power of the money their keepers are willing to pay for permission to carry on their demoralizing business, it is a matter of impossibility to destroy them. Vice works incessantly; the means for its destruction are employed spasmodically. New York City furnishes an astonishing instance of the political power exercised by a combination of the law breakers.

The Lexow committee demonstrated the almost total depravity of an officer, charged with a command over its “Tenderloin.”

The city labored and Greater New York was born. It would seem that greater crime and greater political power in the criminal classes were born at the same birth. That officer became Chief of Police of the expanded metropolis. He had been indicted under the scathing revelations against him made by the Lexow committee, and yet despite the evidence of his depravity, and the protests of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, he was, through the power of politics and crime, foisted upon the new municipality as the ranking officer of its police organization. The result was inevitable. New York, the greater, is now declared to out-Satan New York, the lesser. A new committee is probing into its police management. At the outset of its proceedings it wrung from this officer replies so self condemning as to stagger one’s faith in the possibility of such a quality as obedience to official oath in a police officer.

The Chief was asked: Q. Perhaps you can tell how it is and why it is, that even while this committee is sitting in session here, the pool rooms are open all around us, and I have in my pocket money that my men won in the pool rooms?

A. Perhaps some of my men have it, too. They are looking after it just the same as you are.

Q. But the pool rooms are running?

The Chief did not answer, but complained to his questioner that he had not been informed of the facts “officially.”

The examination then proceeded as follows, viz.:

Q. Do you mean to say, as Chief of Police, with the men and money at your command, you can’t close the pool rooms?

“No,” replied the Chief, “we do the best we can, as we did when you were a Commissioner.”

“I closed the pool rooms,” shouted his questioner. “You did not,” retorted the Chief; “they were alleged to be, on reports of commanding officers, then as now.”

“Yes,” said the questioner, “but there was some fatality about that business, if you know what I mean.”

“Some forced fatalities,” sneered the Chief. “Well, sir,” said the questioner, “here are three great evils of importance—gambling houses, pool rooms and policy shops—and you cannot recall from your own recollection—you who are in charge of the enforcement of the laws—a single arrest in any one of these classes of crimes within a month. What do you do for your salary as Chief?”

A. “I look after the force as a whole; I look after all reports that come in touching all matters of the kind you refer to and all kinds of crime.”

The questioner called the Chief’s attention to a newspaper and some advertisements it carried. In spite of the questioner’s declaration that the paper was a Tammany organ, and that all Tammany men were supposed to buy it and read it, the Chief declared that he never had done so. The questioner made the Chief a present of a copy of the paper, and asked him to read over the massage advertisements. The Chief thanked him and said, “I will attend to these places because I do not believe in such disguises for disorderly houses. Such places are usually in tenement houses and flats. I will attend to them and drive them out.”

“Will you make the same pledge about pool rooms,” demanded the questioner quickly?

“That I cannot promise,” replied the Chief.

“Why can’t you promise it?” asked the questioner.

“Because they conduct that sort of business in places where we can’t get at them, and you know it, but I will try and stamp it out.”

Chicago and New York methods quite agree, with the advantage in favor of New York. In the latter city, the Chief of Police “will try” to stamp pool rooms out. In Chicago, the Chief, in his reply to similar questions, said: “While a man may come to my office and give information that a certain individual is violating the law somewhere and it is a trivial offense, I do not pay so much attention to it as I do when a report reaches my office that a man has committed a serious crime, such as murder, that a serious crime has been committed on the outside. I should naturally abandon that part of it, and take up the more serious offense, and I have been looking up serious crimes, such as burglary, robbery and the hold-up people, and I have made a desperate effort to suppress that.”

It was in this connection reference was made by the committee to the fact that one of Chicago’s policemen had shortly before been arrested for holding up a citizen and robbing him in the daylight hours, which called forth the reply already quoted in these pages to the effect that this particular star had been tried, that he was a member of the police force for ten years, was a good officer, but got drunk and became a “little indiscreet.” For this he was dismissed from the force, but reinstated because “many people” vouched for him. It seems almost incredible that that man is today a member of Chicago’s police force; yet such is the shameful fact.

Without the aid of the telegraph, the daily newspaper and the race cards, pool rooms and book making could not survive. They are the means of giving vitality to this form of gambling. The telegraph furnishes the press with “events” all over the country, upon which pools and books are made up. The news of the result of a particular race is flashed by wire at once from the race track to the pool rooms all over the land. There is scarcely a daily newspaper in any city that does not devote a page of its issue to sporting events. Many of them have their “forms” or “forecasts” of races, which are the guesses of their sporting men as to the probable results of each race to be run on a particular track. The race card is distributed every evening throughout the city; to cigar stores, saloons and billiard halls. It contains the “results” of the day, together with information as to the entries for the following day’s races. Through these sources the sporting community keeps in touch with the world.

A Chicago afternoon newspaper upon the occasion of the opening of a race track in an adjoining state presented in its issue its “Form of Today’s Races.” To those unacquainted with the lingo of the track its guesses are delightfully humorous.

Predicting the possible result of the first race, the form says: “B. L. looks the best of the lot on paper. If the trip from the east did not take the edge off H. S. he should win easily, as he showed considerable sprinting ability in his last out. L. P. has a burst of speed which may put her inside of the money and with a good boy up is worth a show bet. The others are a poor lot and of uncertain quality, so that the finish will probably be B. L., etc.” Of the second it remarks: “Of these youngsters which have started C. has been the most consistent and is undoubtedly the best, but T. is rounding too rapidly and may run ahead of the mark. F. A. is a sprinter, but if pinched does not like the gaff. M. E. and M. are green ones, and this is the first time they have faced the barrier, so there is no line on them. C. T. and F. A. should be the order of the finish.” It says of the third race: “M. is a soft spot, and, if fit, she should win as she pleases. It looks as if the real race should be for the place and the show money, and will likely be between M. and A. H. and T. are also partial to the going, but as the latter has not started recently, T. should be the better if any of the others named are scratched. The result will likely be M. A., etc.” Of another, a colt race, its forecast is, “H. is such a good colt that he looks like a 2-to-5 shot in this bunch, and that will be about what the books will lay against him. Of course, he has dicky legs, but the soft undergoing will undoubtedly suit his underpinning. The finish should be H. K., etc.” The final race is thus placed in the form: “At the best this is a bad lot, and hardly worthy of doping, as so much depends on the jockeys and start that any one of the probable starters has a chance to get the big end of the purse.”

To this necessity has journalism come at last! While it urges the suppression, in thundering tones, of all manner of gambling, it is driven, by the necessity of competition, to aid the most injurious of gambling’s many attractive methods. Another Chicago newspaper, the columns of which every morning contain the world’s news of sporting events, said a short time ago, editorially: “Chief K——’s assurance that he will do his best to suppress gambling will be accepted in good faith. He has made a start in that direction, and the farther he goes the more plainly he will see that for the police to suppress gambling is a mere matter of lifting their hands. Gambling of the sort that the police department is expected to suppress does not flourish save by the connivance of police officers. It is quite true that to extirpate the vice of gaming is beyond the power of the police. Nobody has expected them to do that. While the board of trade and the stock exchanges remain open one form of the vice will be practiced publicly beyond the reach of the police. And so long as cards and dice boxes are to be procured, degenerate human nature will practice the vice in secret. But the police can stamp out the open and flagrant practice of gambling in forms inhibited by the law as easily as they can wink at it. It is a matter of saying “Yes” or “No.” A poolroom or a policy shop may open now and then, but it will quickly shut again if the police are in earnest.”

The assistance derived from the telegraph and newspaper by the gambling fraternity is commented upon by a modern writer, his subject being “The Ethics of Gambling.” He remarks, “But it is time to emphasize the fact that the real supports of the gambling habit in its present enormous extent are the telegraph and the newspaper. Half the race courses in the country would be abandoned almost immediately if newspapers were forbidden to report on betting, and if telegraph offices declined to transmit agreements to bet, or information which is intended to guide would-be bettors. How this is to be done it is not for me to say. My present object and duty are exhausted in pointing out the fact that the national life is being deeply injured, the State seriously weakened by the wide spread of the gambling habit, and further, that this habit in its present extent and intensity, is nourished most by the daily press and the telegraph. It must certainly be in the power of the State to deal with this, the most potent instrument by which the gambling fiend fights his way into home after home throughout the length and breadth of the country.”

“Hold up” men find Chicago their least dangerous and, perhaps, their most profitable field of operations. In all the various forms of this robbery upon the street in day or at night time, or in raiding saloons and stores, it is merciless in its methods. Robbery accomplished, brutality follows. The criminals who resort to it at night, not satisfied with acquiring their victim’s property, usually knock him unconscious with the butt end of a revolver, with a billy or sand bag, or blind him with cayenne pepper, and in that hapless condition leave him to be found, no matter what may be the state of the weather. This form of criminality is a winter’s occupation. It is occasionally, but rarely, followed in the summer months.

Women are held up in the streets at midday, in the evening when returning home from labor, on the street cars, and at the doors of their own homes, and within them. No class is exempt from the attacks of these marauders. The poor suffer with the rich. They are of such frequent occurrence that it is believed not one-fourth of their number is reported to the police. The inefficiency of the force to prevent them is proverbial, and that inefficiency finds much of its origin in the utter disregard of the rules of the department requiring patrolmen to travel their respective beats. The discipline of the force in this respect is nothing; it is worn away by abrasion.

The colder the night and the warmer the nearest saloon or kitchen range, there will the patrolman be found. In the former case he is merely dreaming of his duty; and in the latter, he is engaged in a terrific struggle between love and duty. Some back door of a house of ill fame is open to him for shelter, for wine, and oftentimes for food. The good-hearted landladies of these abodes know full well that one way to reach the patrolmen stationed in their neighborhood is through their stomachs, not because they are officers, but because they are men. In localities away from the bagnios, some servant girl, friendly to the “copper,” protects him from the inclemency of the weather. To her he gives his time and his devotions at the city’s expense. If on some, or on any winter’s night, an observation flight could be taken through the air, and over the city, by the Chief, that official would believe his occupation was gone; for, except here and there as some of his subordinates were wending their way at the appointed hour to a patrol box to report, he would fancy he was a general deserted by his army. Closer inspection would, however, reveal to him that never an army had such comfortable winter quarters as has his. While the patrolman thus enjoys his siesta, or indulges in his love making, the hold up man lies in wait on the unguarded beat, to slug and rob the first belated wayfarer whom he may confront.

The number of hold ups in Chicago in the year 1898, it is believed, exceeded in number those of any two large cities in the United States combined. The press, in fact, claims that their number was greater than in all of the cities of the United States. They were of almost daily occurrence. They are just as numerous, and just as ingenious and murderous in design, since the continued administration was inaugurated, as before.

In the morning edition of the daily press of April 11th, 1899, the re-elected Mayor’s felicitations to the council in his annual message delivered on the previous evening were published in these words:

“The people of Chicago have reason to congratulate themselves on the successful manner in which the police department has coped with crime. It is acknowledged on all hands that Chicago is a singularly good place for thugs and thieves to avoid, and this notwithstanding the fact that the size of the police force is utterly inadequate.”

The evening papers of the same date report the following as examples of how the thieves and thugs avoid Chicago:

“L. was arrested early yesterday morning for alleged participation in a daring hold up, which occurred near the corner of Van Buren and State streets about an hour before. A cab containing Mr. and Mrs. L. B., who live on Pine street, and Mrs. C. D., of North Clark street, approached the curb. As the three occupants alighted four or five men rushed at them. One drew a revolver and shouted: “Hands up.” The other made a dash at Mrs. D., who displayed some valuable jewelry, and snatched a watch worth $225 and a diamond ring valued at $125. The highwaymen then disappeared around the corner.”

“Attacked by Three Negroes.—Stanton Avenue police are looking for three negroes who held up Albert T., of 37th street, at 33rd and Dearborn streets last night and relieved him of $4.00 and a watch. T. was standing under the shadow of a building at the corner when three negroes approached him. One of them drew a revolver and threatened T., while the other two searched him. Many people were passing at the time, but the party escaped all notice in the deep shadows.”

“As Thomas L. and Joseph S. left Ald. K.’s saloon early today, S. says he was robbed of $2.45—all the money he had.”

“Robbed in a Saloon.—August J., bound for Minneapolis from Finland, came to Chicago last evening. He met a woman, and the two went to Samuel M.’s saloon on State street, where J. claims the woman held him up at the point of a revolver and took all his money—$25. J. reported the matter to the Harrison street police, and Officers C. and S. arrested Albert B., the bartender. He was arraigned before Justice F. today on a charge of being accessory to robbery. The woman has not been arrested.”

Following this, two men boarded an outgoing railroad train at night, and at one of its stopping stations captured a passenger who was standing on the rear platform of a coach, dragged him away, robbed him of a small sum of money, a lady’s gold watch, took a plain gold ring from his finger, then bound and gagged him and threw him into an empty freight car near by.

Within three weeks after the publication of this effusive compliment to the police, a citizen sent the following communication to an evening paper, which, together with the comments of that paper upon it, is here inserted, as the best criticism of the Mayor’s optimistic view of the efficiency of his police force:

“April 26, 1899.—Editor the J.: Not fewer than 15 flats and residences in the district bounded by West Adams street, Kedzie avenue, Homan avenue and Washington boulevard have been plundered recently. The thieves reside at ----, a fact well known to the police, but all the efforts of the suffering tax payers are unavailing in having them arrested.

“The police authorities will not act. The rascals have been at their present abode (——, first flat) since early last autumn. Their landlord is (well, I won’t mention his name) well known.

“Our community has become so terrorized that no one dares remain out after dark. Can’t you assist us in our troubles? The police don’t act.

“Resident of the District.”

The comments of the paper read as follows, viz.:

“The author of the above is a well-to-do West side manufacturer. He says in a note which came with this communication: ‘Do not under any circumstances couple my name with it. We are all afraid of our lives, believing that the thieves are so desperate that they would murder any one disclosing their method and abode.’

This is the district in which George B. Fern and Cora Henderson met their deaths under such mysterious circumstances.

Here is a partial list of the happenings of recent date in this one neighborhood, the first four named cases being within one business block:

GEORGE B. FERN, dry goods merchant, 1393 West Madison street; found in his store with bullet hole in his head, mask and revolver with one chamber empty at his side; police say he committed suicide; coroner’s jury returned a murder verdict; the grand jury also declares it was a case of murder.

CORA HENDERSON, blind woman, 1385 West Madison street; found dead in her house, hole in her skull; murder theory worked upon by police; later theory advanced that she might have met her death by a fall.

F. W., tailor, West Madison street; robbers drove up to his store in broad daylight while he was eating in a restaurant next door and intimidated clerk with revolver, loaded in tailor’s cloth, drove away.

W. H. D., West Madison street, grocer; hole drilled in his safe; burglars scared away when D. came to open store.

MRS. FRANK W., Washington boulevard, house entered; $200 stolen.

MRS. MARGARET D., Washington boulevard; house entered; $200 worth of property taken.

MRS. WARREN F. H., Warren avenue; house entered; $500 worth of property taken.

MRS. CHARLES C., Washington boulevard; hearing a noise at her front door, went onto the porch; a burglar who had been trying to force an entrance into the second story dropped at her side, revolver in hand; he escaped, frightening off pursuers with his revolver.

DR. F. F. S., West Monroe street and Homan avenue; two men attempted to hold him up in his office; frightened away by the arrival of a patient.

PROF. CHARLES E. W., Chicago Piano college; chased by mounted foot pad.

MRS. ELIZABETH H. T., M. D., Warren avenue; swindled out of $60 by men who had a ‘sure thing’ on the races.

JOHN V., West Monroe street; swindled by same game.

WILLIAM H. P., bookkeeper for C. S. & Co., West Monroe street; house robbed.

HERMAN W., West Monroe street; house robbed of diamonds, jewelry and silverware; Mrs. W. coming home, encounters robbers as they were leaving; they politely raised their hats and walked on.

H. S. B., real estate, West Adams street; candidate for president of M. club; house robbed.

ARTHUR W. C., Illinois Credit Company, West Adams street; house robbed.

JOHN G., grocer; attempt made to swindle him out of $100 by men with ‘tip’ on races.

The above list was obtained by a brief canvass of the neighborhood.

The house given as the abode of the “thieves” is situated right in this neighborhood, which is one of the best residence districts. It is a gray stone structure and is said to be owned by a well known West side politician. In this place lives at least one of the men who have swindled numerous West side residents of this district by means of the ‘tips’ on the races. These men, it is said, have operated successfully for a year, few of their victims making complaint on account of the unenviable publicity the affair would thus attain. This gang, too, has headquarters in a West Madison street block within a few doors of the Fern store.

This neighborhood is included in the Warren avenue police district. None of the officers at this station, or any of the Central station detectives familiar with the case, believes that the ‘jockeys’ have anything to do with the ‘holdups’ and robberies of flats, and laugh at the idea advanced by the author of the letter to The J—.”

The names and addresses of these victims are printed in full in the newspaper referred to, but for obvious reasons they are not used in reproducing the article.

Immediately following the publication of this startling list of crimes, a grand jury submitted to the court the following report. The reader can harmonize, as best he may, this official statement, with that of a lighthearted and self satisfied Mayor who controls, or does not control, as one’s thought may elect, the Chicago police force.

“In closing our work the members of the jury desire to report to your honor some slight comment on the various matters which have been brought to our attention during our session, and to submit for recommendation to the proper authorities suggestions that may check the amount of crime which has been brought to our notice.

“Our city seems to be the asylum of habitual criminals of all classes, who have terrorized the people to an alarming degree. We would particularly call attention to several instances within our knowledge where persons have been found dead, investigation made by the proper authorities, verdicts rendered according to the evidence with recommendations by the coroner’s jury that the guilty be brought to justice. These deeds wherein the perpetrators in several instances have not been detected are largely due to the fact that this city is made an asylum for habitual criminals, and we strongly recommend that every measure be taken to close the gates of the city to such people.

“Were the statute of the state regarding the arrest of vagabonds more strictly enforced by the proper authorities the number of habitual criminals at large could be largely reduced and Chicago made a less attractive place of residence for this class. The law itself is broad and ample in its provisions. Places under the guise of saloons, duly licensed, are merely rendezvous for thieves, murderers and prostitutes, and notwithstanding the fact that such vile places are well known to the authorities they are permitted to continue without molestation. The defilement of our youths of both sexes should receive the severest penalty of the law. It is our duty to protect and guard the manhood and womanhood of the young.

“The continued violation of the ordinance fixing the closing hours of saloons is a great factor in the number of crimes committed in the city, and we earnestly recommend a strict enforcement of the ordinance.”

Apparently, a few of these criminal gentry regard Chicago as a safe field for their labors!

Boys in their teens, men and women, both black and white, the latter of the strong armed class, comprise this coterie of criminals. The strong armed women, generally negresses, have the developed muscles of the pugilist and the daring of the pirate. They entice the stranger into dark passage ways, that innocent stranger, so unfamiliar, but so willing to be made familiar with the wickedness of a great city, who seeks out its most disreputable quarters and scours its darkest byways, to report to his mates, on his return to his country home, the salacious things that he has heard of, and a few of which he witnessed. In these dark and dangerous ways the strong armed women garrote and rob their victims, or they entice the innocent, but lustful, stranger to their rooms, and there, through the panel game, or by sheer strength or drugged potations, appropriate the innocent stranger’s valuables. Mortified and humiliated, the stranger usually has nothing to say to the police of the affair. Then the emboldened strong armed women go upon the street in couples, and rob in the most approved methods of the highwayman. Alone, one of these notorious characters is said to have pilfered to the extent of $60,000. She was, and is, a terror to the police force. Released from the penitentiary not long ago, she is now undergoing trial for a fresh offense. Approaching a commercial traveler from behind, she is charged with having nearly strangled him, and then robbed him of his money and jewelry.

“Only one man ever got the best of E. F.,” said detective Sergeant C. R. W., of Harrison street station, who had arrested E. F. frequently.

“Once she held up a cowboy and took $150 from him. He came up to the station hotfoot to report the robbery. We were busy and a little slow in sending out after E., whereupon the cowboy allowed he’d start out after her on his own hook. He met her down by the Polk street depot, and the moment he spotted her he walked right up close to her and covered her with two six-shooters.

“You’ve got $150 of my money, now shell out nigger,” he said.

“Go and get a warrant and have me arrested then,” replied the big colored woman, who wanted time to plant the coin.

“These are good enough warrants for me,” returned the cowboy significantly, as he poked the revolvers a trifle closer to her face. “Now, I’m going to count twenty, and if I don’t see my money coming back before I reach twenty, I’ll go with both guns.”

“When he reached eighteen, E. weakened. She drew out a wad and held it out toward him. But the cowboy was wise and would not touch the roll till she had walked to the nearest lamplight under the escort of his two guns and counted out the $150. Then he let her go and came back to the station and treated.”

Conductors of street cars are often the victims of the hold up men. Here in Chicago they invented the plan of placing the saloonkeeper in the ice chest, while the looting of the place went on. In another instance a baker was imprisoned in a hot oven. Women in their homes are thrust into closets, gagged and bound, while their houses are ransacked and their property stolen.

The want of an energetic police is the cause of the prevalence of such abominable offenses as hair clipping, or the severing from the heads of young girls upon the public streets their braids of hair. One of these perverts was arrested and excused himself upon the ground that it was a mania with him, and that the temptation to cut off the braids of hair from every young girl he met, was almost irresistible. If detectives, instead of lounging around their daily haunts for drinking purposes, loafing in cigar stores, and playing the pool rooms, were mingling with the crowds upon the streets, offenses of this character would be nearly impossible, although this particular weakness seems to lead its impulsive perpetrators to less crowded thoroughfares, and selects the hours of going to and returning from school, as the most favorable parts of the day for its gratification. It may be prompted by a morbid desire, but it is none the less a serious offense, which, as yet, the criminal law has not defined, and has therefore not provided a proper penalty for its punishment. No evidence, so far as it is known, has yet been adduced to show that the braids of hair are ever sold to dealers in that article, such as wig manufacturers, etc. If such evidence should be forthcoming, the ingenuity of the average criminal for the discovery of new methods of despoliation will receive additional confirmation.

One peculiar method of protection to the criminal classes is in vogue. A new thief arrives in the city; his arrival is noticed by a detective and the fact reported to headquarters. The thief is invited to visit the Chief. Upon his appearance, permission is given him to remain, provided he “does not work his game” within the city. He can plunder all the neighboring towns he may select, but the price of his remaining in security in Chicago is, that he shall be good and gentlemanly to its people. The “Safe Blowers’ Union” has its home in Chicago, from which it radiates, as the spokes of a wheel, to the circumference of its limit of operations. It is a trust; a protective association. It pays for the privilege. It attacks the country bank, blows it, in the silence of the night, to pieces with dynamite if necessary, and murders if interfered with. It returns with its loot to the city, makes its dividends among its membership, police included, and awaits the pressing necessity for a renewal of its suburban raids. It is under the king’s mighty shield, the king of the criminals, over whom he reigns with leniency, and whose gifts he accepts with condescension.

The fakes of a great city are beyond enumeration. There are fake information bureaus, fake advisory brokers, fake safe systems of speculation, fake music teachers, fake medical colleges, fake law schools, fake lawyers, fake “Old Charters for Sale,” fake corporations, fake relief and aid societies, fake preachers and fake detective agencies. The latter, and the street fakers, are friendly with the police. So are the fruit vendors, and the all night lunch counters on wheels. The latter stand where the officers say they shall stand, and the location once found, the officers at once become landlords.

As to private detective agencies, without reference to agencies of an established local and national reputation, they are principally constituted of thieves, pickpockets, blackmailers, and porch climbers.

In the trial of a case before the Criminal Court of Cook County, a few months ago, a witness acquainted with their inside history, swore that there were men connected with these fake organizations who would commit murder for $50. They enter into conspiracies to ruin the private character of men and women in divorce cases, and for blackmailing purposes. Three of these hounds were lately convicted of conspiracy in less than one hour, by a jury in the same court. These three worthies comprised the entire agency. Their punishment was fixed at imprisonment in the penitentiary. They were employed in getting revenge on a man, who was supposed, by their employer, to have been the cause of his discharge from his commercial position. In getting this revenge they fell upon their shadow, pummelled him with great severity, and badly injured him. So grievous was the offense, that the State’s Attorney demand no less a punishment than the jury awarded.

They manufacture testimony in divorce proceedings, at the suggestion and upon the request of the parties willing and desirous of cutting the matrimonial tie; or, upon the instigation of one of the parties, they will endeavor to entrap and compromise the other. They revel in the destruction of the character of a good woman, as the vulture revels in the foulness of a carrion. The man of wealth must be on his guard against their attacks, for they would as lief magnify his peccadillos into felonious crimes and attempt his plunder by blackmail, as they would accept the earnings of the Mistresses Overdone, the exhausted bawds, whose pimps they are.

Theirs is only another but a more vicious form of depravity than that practiced by the panel house keepers, who send their single workers upon the streets to entice men to their abodes, where they are met by the expert workers of the game. While thus entrapped, and indulging in the sensuality which aids so readily in his allurement, the adroit “creeper” enters the room through a movable panel, or by some other prearranged method of ingress, and takes the watch, the coin, or “any other old thing” of value, found about the removed and scattered clothing of the greenhorn. The police are as well acquainted with these “single workers” as they are with the street walkers. They know their haunts, and their fields of labor. The hotels, and places where crowds are gathered in the early evening, attract the “single workers” as the most promising ground for a successful capture.

“Badger games” are not infrequently played in Chicago. Such as are successful are generally kept from the police records, through the preference of the blackmailed subjects to say nothing about them, in dread of their personal exposure. A man, generally one of means and standing, is marked for conquest. The first class hotel is the scene of operations of the female in the case. Fashionably dressed, handsome, with jewels for adornment, she strikes up a flirtation with the selected person. Fool like, as most men are in the case of handsome and well gowned women, he responds to the invitation, an acquaintance is formed and an assignation made. The place is of the woman’s selection and known of course to her paramour, styled her husband. The room is entered, compromising situations reached, when, suddenly, the indignant husband appears, the woman screams in terror, and a storm rages. It is calmed by the payment of the price demanded for concealment, and the “sucker” escapes with a load removed from both his pocketbook and his mind.

A noted instance of this kind happened to a wealthy and prominent merchant, whose indiscretions in the acceptance of inducements for sexual enjoyment held out to him by a stylish and beautiful woman, and his blindness in not observing his surroundings, enabled the fake husband to photograph him in flagrante delicto. Under threats to distribute the pictures it is reported he paid $10,000 for them and the negative. This is a fact easily susceptible of proof. One at least of these proofs did not accompany the package he received, which was supposed to contain all of the pictures.

Photographing from the nude is not the fad of the harlot alone. Women infatuated with their shapes begin with the exposure of a beautiful foot, arm or well rounded bust, then a leg, etc., etc., until they stand before the camera almost in puris naturalibus. These pictures are taken for pure self admiration, the love of self study and comparison with the forms of celebrated actresses, or the paintings of the masters, famous in art for their conceptions of the perfect woman. They differ from those obscene pictures designed for sale, for which purpose the depraved couple are photographed in situations, attitudes and conditions, natural and unnatural, which appeal to the grossest instincts in man, and shock, also, the moral sense of every one not in himself a sexual pervert.

The latter are eagerly sought after, are quite salable, and are carried about the persons of fast young men about town, with intent, upon opportunity, to influence the passions of women. They are the solace of the aged sport, who, having lost all recollection of the ordinary affairs of his youth, still fondly retains the memory of the amours of his younger days, and of the orgies of his middle age. Then recalling with sadness the first appearance of the lamentable indications of his decline, he contentedly yields the passing of his power—“sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

These are the men, who, if they had lived in the early days of the Roman Empire at or about the date of the Floralian games, would have been the principal patrons, or, if at the time of the prevalence of the Bacchanalian mysteries, the prominent members, of societies organized for the purpose of gratifying unnatural desires; or if they had been Romans in the declining days of that empire would have figured as the most frantic and most lustful of the worshippers of Priapus.

The methods of the vendors of obscene literature are innumerable, and all are formed along the lines of extreme caution and cunning. They are keen judges of human nature, quick to detect the inquisitive stranger, or the sporting gent of the town, and adroit in introducing their filthy stock. The purchaser is more than liable to be swindled in the deal, as the fakir requires immediate concealment of the purchase, which, when examined by the vendee in the quiet of his own room often turns out to be a harmless work resembling only in the binding the supposed purchase.

The confidence men, who invite the incoming visitor to view the scene of the great explosion on the lake front, and suggest trips to other places where startling events have not occurred, discover, by skillful questioning, the weaknesses of their dupe. They arouse his innate, but dormant, wish to take a chance at some game that seems to him certain of a rich return. He is easily induced to play and allowed to win a small stake, merely to excite greater interest and establish the conviction that he can “beat the game.” Naturally he plunges ahead, until the moment comes, set by his trappers, when he is cheated, robbed and goes “flat broke.” The dupe may, or may not, report his loss to the police. If he does, and it happens to be one of consequence, detectives may be detailed to search for the swindlers; but if the loss is small in amount, however important to the loser, the dupe is more likely to be laughed at than aided by the officers of the law.

To this class belong cabmen who rob drunken men, and “divvy” with the police; commission houses, which secure consignments of goods for sale by false representations; grocery grafters, who solicit throughout the country orders for groceries, claiming to represent wholesale houses, ship an inferior grade and collect C. O. D. at the prices charged for the superior grade; Board of Trade sharks, who “welch” their clients’ money by charging up fictitious losses, when the figures will not appear to lie; the false claimants for personal injuries alleged to have been caused through the negligence of wealthy corporations, such as street car lines, manufacturing companies and rolling mills, or by the city, from defective sidewalks, unguarded street excavations, etc., etc.; bakers who sell unlabeled and underweight bread; the gold brick and gold filings sharper; the electric and mining stock swindler, and the advertiser seeking a governess to accompany himself and family abroad. These men have “irresistible tendencies” to work their several games. They cannot help it, they say. Like kleptomaniacs, or “Jack the Hair Clipper,” they are impelled by nature to the commission of their crimes. In their own judgment they ought not to be punished, because they are the victims of defective brains. But they are just as cunning as the hair clipper, just as conscious that they are law breakers as he was when he mailed to the Chief of Police in his own words the following note, enclosing some of the braids of hair he had clipped from the head of a young girl, viz:

Of this same class are men who conduct “diploma mills” and make doctors, especially in one day. They sell their parchments as freely as a saloonkeeper does his beer, and then claim that because a college confers distinctive degrees upon men of prominence, without a course of study and examination, they are justified in launching doctors by the score upon unsuspecting communities, “without study and examination,” to discredit the medical profession, and send men, women and children to premature graves. Like McTeague, who acquired his knowledge of dentistry from the seven volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist,” they obtain their knowledge of diseases from quack publications, newspapers and magazine articles. They use nothing but “the purest of the earth’s productions in their treatment, and no minerals or poisonous materials of any kind are ever permitted to enter your system.” Their prices range from “one dollar up.” “A positive guarantee is given in every case treated, so you have nothing to risk in any way. Your money back on demand if not satisfied.” They can wash kidneys so clean, that if you are a woman and have not extended your arms in years, after taking the first box of kidney pills you “can raise them, and twist your hair,” and after the second, “dress yourself, perform your household duties,” and “life will again take on a bright hue” for you. Bald heads respond to the “remarkable effects” of their discoveries, with joyful alacrity. Gray hair goes into hiding, and “thick and lustrous eyebrows and eye lashes” blossom forth on one application, as lilac bushes do in the spring time at the first touch of the warmth of the sun’s rays. Their remedies are “no longer experiments, they are medical certainties.” They “create solid flesh, muscles and strength, clear the brain, and make the blood pure and rich.” For humanity’s sake, distinguished Mayors, ex-Mayors, city treasurers, scholars, soldiers, ex-state senators and senators, representatives, lawyers and judges, lend their beaming countenances, when fully restored to health, for the uses of these quacks, until the daily press has become a portrait gallery of rebuilt and revitalized men, who, if disease had the clutch upon them they so felicitously describe—in the stereotyped words of the quack—ought to have been dead, buried and mourned long ago. These distinguished men in American life, are merely selling their faces for promotion purposes, much as the titled Englishman sells his title.

Of all the sources of police graft, in addition to pool rooms and policy shops, gambling is the most prolific. There are in Chicago over 7,000 saloons and nearly 2,000 cigar stores. The number of gambling houses proper is unknown, but the list swells into the hundreds. The saloon and cigar stores have as a general rule a gambling annex. Gambling houses proper, as known some years ago, have no longer the permanency they then had. Roulette and faro, especially, are sleeping, and awaken only at infrequent intervals. The negro game of craps, and the national game of poker, particularly stud poker, have become the substitutes for the wheel and the lay out. In two-thirds of the saloons and cigar stores poker and stud poker are played, and in many of the saloons, especially the all night variety, the crap table is part of the necessary equipment. It is estimated that poker games are in progress in over eight thousand of the saloons, cigar stores, barber shops and bakeries, every night, while gambling houses with the roulette and faro barred, add over one thousand to the number. Craps are shot even at the doors of some of the theaters. All this is known to the police, tolerated by the police, and taxed by the police. Take the average cigar store for illustration. In the rear are rooms neatly fitted up and supplied with three or more poker tables. The rake off to the house goes on just as in the regularly equipped gambling house. The games are played by men of all classes in life below the society men and men of wealth, who get their amusement at the club. The clubs all forbid poker, but the tabooing order is “more honored in its breach than its observance.” In the cigar stores and saloons, workingmen, artisans, clerks, and the loafing skin gambler, participate in the game. The latter is quickly spotted, and placed under the ban. The proprietor requires the games to be square, in so far as he can control them. The losses of the cigar store players are more severe upon them than are those of the gamblers who play for higher stakes. The wages of the workingman, clerks and artisans are their only gambling capital. They have no bank accounts to draw upon. The home suffers; wife and children are the indirect victims. Theirs is a cash game. When wages are exhausted, the unearned wage is mortgaged to the loan “sharks.” These greedy and heartless wretches lure the clerk earning a fair salary to borrow from them at reasonable rates, and upon a “strictly confidential” basis. The employer is not to know of the transaction. The clerk is soon in the shark’s strong jaws. He must pay what is demanded, or the employer, the rules of whose establishment forbid dealings with the “shark,” will be made aware of the violation of his rules, and the clerk’s embarrassment commences. Rather than risk discharge from his position, and to escape from the “shark” jaws, the frightened clerk pays in monthly installments double the amount of his loan, plus a sum for a fee to an attorney who was never retained. All this is so much blood money, flowing from the wounds made by the “shark’s” sharp teeth.

The minor is not prevented in the cigar store joints from gaming any more than he is prevented from drinking at the saloon bar. Nightly, over this vast city, young men are succumbing to the terrible fascination of gaming. Nightly, temptations, almost irresistible, are preying upon their minds. The honesty of their intentions is gradually undermined, and almost before they awaken to a realization of the truth, they have committed some theft and commenced a downward career. Men who filled high positions of trust and earned large salaries are today inmates of the state penitentiary, led away by the fascination and excitement of the gaming table. The evils of gambling, the intensity of the love of the average man for indulgence in its exhilaration, the wide spread use of it in the home, the club, the stag parties, and so on down to the lowest joints in the slums, have been the themes of every writer who attempts to depict the daily life of great cities.

It exists in the form of prizes in progressive euchre parties, in social gatherings, in the raffles of the church fairs, the voting for the most popular man or woman, as city or county stenographer, popular firemen or policemen; in guessing contests in the solution of puzzles; or wherever the element of chance enters into the affairs of life, from which amusement is sought to be drawn. Whether it is a wheat deal on the board of trade in which millions are involved, or the cast of the dice by newsboys and boot blacks in the alleys and upon the sidewalks of the city, the controlling passion is there—the passion for gain at the whim of chance. Judgment may prompt the wheat deal, but unless judgment promises large profits the incentive to engage in the manipulation of the markets is absent. The possible toil and mental worry is overlooked in the hope of great gain without correspondingly prolonged labor. Millions fly away in great gambling speculations as easily and as swiftly as the penny of the newsboy takes its flight from one to the other of the inveterate little gamblers, to be found among these sharp witted waifs of the street. It goes on in billiard halls, where “hap hazard” is openly played; at saloon bars where the loser at dice “pays for the drinks.” It is to be seen in beer halls, summer gardens, among well dressed people who carry the dice with them, of the usual size, or smaller, with fancy box-guard, and who “shake” for the drinks and dinners, not so much as a matter of gambling, as for the zest it gives to their party, or their outing. It controls political picnics in the fakers’ attractions that follow them, and in the prizes offered to the winner, of boys’ and girls’, women and fat men’s, races, or for which artistic cake walkers and ragtime dancers compete. Civil and criminal trials are even chosen as events upon which to place a wager. The frequency of elections, the daily horse racing contests throughout the world, base ball games in season, prize fights between professionals, club athletic contests, policy shops with their daily drawings, and lotteries, all arouse the cupidity of the seeker after quick gains without physical labor. “Bet you five” settles many a mathematical, historical, political or economic proposition, contrary to the truth.

Races, accompanied by the usual retinue of book makers, are conducted by a wealthy club, many of whose members are leaders in civic bodies formed for the betterment of local government, and consequently for the suppression of vice. Grand juries report month after month their inability to obtain the co-operation of the police in gathering evidence against gamblers and landlords whereon to found indictments. Each grand jury when empanelled hears from the bench the monotonous song “Gentlemen, bucket shops exist, investigate them,” together with such musical accompaniment, as may be added by the judge, in the way of moralizing upon their wickedness.

Fashionable women have their down town clubs. There they meet, smoke cigarettes, take their drinks from the sideboard “just like men,” gamble for excitement, lose their pin-money and diamonds with the abandon of a virgin, “willing to be rid of her name.”

The vice and fascination of gambling are so well known and understood by great merchants that they employ a corps of detectives to keep watch over their confidential employes, whose movements are the subject matter of daily reports to their employers. The bond companies, which insure the honesty of clerks and managers entrusted with the handling of money, receive from their spotters the earliest reports of the actions of employes indicative of living beyond the yearly salary paid them by the houses with which they are connected.

Gambling, although condemned by all moralists as a degrading vice, is recognized by some as aiding the development of certain qualities of immeasurable service in the intensity of the struggle for business existence prevailing in the aggressive commercialism of this age. Lecky asserts: “Even the gambling table fosters among its more skillful votaries a kind of moral nerve, a capacity for bearing losses with calmness, and controlling the force of the desires, which is scarcely exhibited in equal perfection in any other sphere.” Whatever may be the meaning of the phrase “controlling the force of the desires,” it is certain that among the young men of today, in all classes of society, the desires for intoxicants and sensuality are past control when associated with gambling. In its most seductive forms its principal aids are the gilded saloon, and the harlot’s enslaving smile. The necessity for means with which to gratify aroused passion in both respects, comes through contact with the gaming table; hence, the houses of ill repute, assignation houses and the innocent looking “Hotel” nestling in the middle of the down town business blocks, are the direct allies of the gambling hells in the development of crime—in adding to, rather than in “controlling” the force of the desires. “Sensuality,” said a distinguished writer, “is the vice of young men and of old nations.” Another, tracing the effects of gaming on human passions, wisely observes, “the habit of gambling is very often allied with, and is even an incentive to, the practice of other vices, whose darkness is beyond dispute. The ordinary aspect of a return from a race meeting will fully confirm this. There we find that drunkenness, licentiousness and gambling go hand in hand, a well assorted trio whose ministry to separate passions is not inconsistent but consistent with mutual incitement and co-operation in the destruction of the honor and purity and strength of men.”

While gambling is not now conducted “openly,” a word which has reference only to the maintenance of down town establishments in which faro and roulette were formerly played, it is conducted under police protection all over this city in forms more inviting, more disastrous to the embryotic gamblers who patronize it, than if the large establishments were in full operation as of yore. The latter could not invite the younger class of gamblers to enter the play, because of their lack of capital; the smaller, widely scattered, and police guarded, cigar store and saloon games, accept smaller sums of money, parts of a dollar, for a stack of poker chips, from the anxious entrant to the game. Prior to the last election a leading evening newspaper accused the city executive with farming out the slum district to two aldermen of unsavory reputation, with leave to them to extort money from gaming houses, high and low, within its limits, for their personal benefit, in consideration of their opposing, in the council, the passage of ordinances relating to the extension of street car privileges. Its condemnation of this bargain was severe, and yet, later on, it was the most persistent of that executive’s supporters for re-election.

The coon gamblers, thieves, thugs and pimps were all on the staffs of these aldermen. They followed these worthies into the campaign, under the leadership of the eminently respectable newspaper referred to. Inspired by such leadership “Spreader,” “Sawed Off,” “The Cuckoo,” “Book Agent,” “Deacon,” “Grab All,” “Duck,” “Shoestring,” “Scalper,” “Humpty,” “Hungry Sid,” “Seedy,” “Talky,” “Whiskers,” “Noisy,” “Fig,” “Old Hoss,” “Slick,” “Ruby,” “Sunday School,” and “Mushmouth,” captains in the corps of sports felt themselves respectable, led their followers from the barrel and lodging houses with a rush to the polls, and achieved a startling victory. Over all this horrible saturnalia of vice, the colors of the police force float in token of protection. The brave men of that force, morally degraded by the obedience they are compelled to yield to unworthy superiors want merely the opportunity to perform their full duty, not only as patrolmen but as patriotic American citizens. The time when they will be permitted to do so seems far distant, unless an aroused public opinion shall speedily pronounce against the further continuation of a policy of protection to crime and debauchery supported by the men chosen to war unceasingly with both.

The dens of the sexual pervert of the male sex, found in the basements of buildings in the most crowded, but least respectable parts of certain streets, with immoral theaters, cheap museums, opium joints and vile concert saloons surrounding them, are the blackest holes of iniquity that ever existed in any country since the dawn of history. A phrase was recently coined in New York which conveys—in the absence of the possibility of describing them in decent language—the meaning of the brute practices indulged in these damnable resorts, and the terrible consequences to humanity as a result of unnatural habits—“Paresis Halls.”

No form of this indulgence described by writers on the history of morals, no species of sodomy the debased minds of these devils can devise, is missing from the programme of their diabolical orgies. In divine history we read of the abominations of the strange women of Israel, with their male companions, in their worship of Moloch, Belphegor and Baal, and of the death penalties pronounced by Moses against the participants in them. To suppress the brutish immorality, and prevent the spread of disease arising from it, the Jewish law giver put to death all his Midianite female captives except the virgins. Profane history tells of the infamies of the Babylonian banquets, of the incestuous and “promiscuous combats of sensuality” of the Lydians and the Persians; of the Athenian Auletrides, or female flute players, who danced and furnished music at the banquets of the nobility and wallowed in the filth of every sensual indecency, and of the polluted condition of Roman life, prior to, and as the Christian era dawned, but in all the untranslatable literature of eroticism no description of the debaucheries of the ancients, if freely interpreted into English from the dead languages in which they are preserved, could depict the nastiness these yahoos are reported as having introduced into our midst, and rendered more hateful and disgusting by the squalor of their underground abodes. The young are lured by them, ruined in health and seared in conscience. The very slang of the streets is surcharged with expressions, derived from, and directly traceable to, the names of these unmentionable acts of lechery.

Not content with the private and crafty pursuit of their calling, they must flaunt it in the faces of the public and under the very eyes of the police, in a series of annual balls held by the “fruits” and the “cabmen,” advertised by placards extensively all over the city. At these disreputable gatherings the pervert of the male persuasion displays his habits by aping everything feminine. In speech, walk, dress and adornment they are to all appearances women. The modern mysteries of the toilet, used to build up and round out the female figure, are applied in the make-up of the male pervert. Viewed from the galleries, it is impossible to distinguish them from the sex they are imitating. Theirs is no maid-marian costume; it is strictly in the line of the prevailing styles among fashionable women, from female hair to pinched feet. The convenient bar supplies the liquid excitement, and when the women arrivals from the bagnios swarm into the hall, led in many instances by the landlady, white or black, and the streets and saloons have contributed their quotas, the dance begins and holds on until the morning hours approach. The acts are those mainly suggestive of indecency. Nothing, except the gross language and easy familiarity in deportment, coupled with the assumed falsetto voice and effeminate manners of the pervert, would reveal to the uninformed observer what a seething mass of human corruption he is witnessing. As the “encyclopedia of the art of making up” puts it, “the exposed parts of the human anatomy” usually displayed in fashionable society are counterfeited so perfectly, the wigs are selected and arranged with such nicety, the eyebrows and lashes so dexterously treated, and the features so artistically touched with cosmetics, as to make it very difficult, at first glance, to distinguish between the impostor and the real woman. The big hands and tawdry dresses, the large though pinched feet and the burly ankle, betray the sex of the imitating pervert.

No reason, except that the police are paid for non-interference with these vice pitted revels, can be given for their toleration. The city’s officials are either in collusion with their projectors, they are incompetent, or are the willing tools of these stinking body scavengers. These beasts look with disdain upon the votaries of natural pleasures, and have an insane pride in their hopeless degradation.

The opium joints are closely related sources of iniquity to the pervert’s haunts. Under one of the worst of the all night saloons, conducted by a politician of the first ward, who belongs to the party of the Bath House and Hinky Dink, and who “touched” the Hon. Richard Croker of New York for a small loan, the largest of these execrable cellars is protected. It is but a step from the wine rooms of the saloon to the solace of the pipe. The depraved of both sexes in those moments when despair seizes them, when some recollection of childhood, or of home, arouses in them the dormant good still remaining in their hearts, when, as they look into the future, they can discern no ray of hope, but are appalled at the frightful end which must be theirs, shut out the horrors of their situation in life by seeking a paradise built upon “the baseless fabric of a vision.” In this joint, since reference to it was written, a man died from the effects of smoking the pipe. The woman who accompanied him, the bartender and the keeper of the joint were placed under arrest. The police expressed amazement at the revelation of the existence of the joint, as did the proprietor of the saloon. It was, of course, closed, and a number of other like resorts were then raided. Press comments upon this death appeared as follows:

“In spite of the fact that there are plenty of laws against them, opium dens and objectionable grogshops are among the hardest things in the world to exterminate. The only reasonable explanation for this is that their proprietors must have influence with officers who are employed by the people to execute the laws. ‘The police close these places,’ said an officer despairingly, referring to dens like that in which the man Adams died Sunday night, ‘but they spring up again in a day.’

“The police seem to be downcast over it. Yet the causes of the ‘springing up’ are as plain as the nose on one’s face, and the means of removing them as evident as one’s hand.

“Access to the den in which Adams died was had through the delectable O. saloon, operated by S. V. P., and the den itself was rented by V. P. The levee statesman says he had no idea his basement was used for an opium den. He thought the procession of drunken and dazed men and women who tottered through his saloon and went down his basement stairs all night were going for their laundry.

“V. P.’s statement is entitled to as much consideration as the guileless protestations of the gentleman who is caught with the chicken under his coat. V. P. is responsible for the opium den and as soon as the law lays a hand, in earnest, on the landlord the opium dens will cease ‘springing up.’

“The police knew that an opium den was running in V. P.’s basement. They had been amply warned of it. If they had raided the place a few times and sent the proprietor and inmates to the bridewell it would have stayed closed.

“There is a little virtue in sticking to one’s native vices. Western races come honestly by drunkenness and gambling. But why tolerate the deliberate importation and cultivation of this strange oriental bestiality? This ingrafted vice must make its own soil. Why should the police treat it so leniently? A hundred-dollar fine for every person found in an opium joint and a modicum of police activity, with the demanding of a strict account from the guilty landlord, will quickly put a damper on the opium dens. Every month that they are tolerated they get a firmer root.”

These resorts are patronized by others than the fallen women and the criminal classes. Like slumming, it is a fad “to hit the pipe just once” by some adventure seeking people in other walks of life. The habit of opium smoking is easily acquired, and, when acquired, the smoker becomes a slave to its use. There are between two and three hundred of these smoking rooms in Chicago. The number of persons addicted to smoking opium cannot be stated with accuracy. Estimates vary from ten to twenty thousand, the number probably lies between these two estimates. In the Chinese quarters the penetrating odor of opium smoke is plainly perceptible and is thrown off from the garments of passing Chinamen, or is detected as one enters a restaurant or laundry presided over by the oriental. The “dope” soon affects the complexion, and the features wear a dejected appearance. The movements of the victims are listless, almost lifeless. In the saloon referred to, a constant procession of men and women, old and young, come and go up and down the stairway to the region below. It is not guarded with any degree of care, because it is protected from the law’s aggression, except occasionally, when by way of diversion it is pulled. Then its patrons get a quiet tip to keep away, consequently few occupants are found. The old pipes and a small quantity of the dope are graciously permitted to be borne away in triumph by the officers. New supplies are provided, and the baleful business resumes its accustomed routine.

 

 

---

For a generation the Common Council of Chicago has been governed by a majority of “boodlers.” Aldermen have been, in that period, fairly representative of the wards by which they were elected. The various nationalities, clustered together in such a manner as to give rise to the naming of a ward according to the nativity of its inhabitants, such as Polish, Swedish, Bohemian, German, Irish, etc., have selected as their representatives in the Council, men who, as a rule, in private life were honest. Their selection was usually upon strictly party grounds. The “independent” voter, in municipal elections, is a growth of quite recent years. The class appears to be increasing with great rapidity and to be finding a means of concentrating its strength at the polls.

As honest as an alderman may be when he first takes his seat, he soon finds himself surrounded by influences which appear to exert a fascinating power over him. He must elect to be for or against the gang. Prior to the allowance of a yearly salary the temptation to join the gang was heightened by the promising returns, in a pecuniary way, which the gang could almost guarantee the incoming member. An alderman “once prepossessed is half seduced” and, since it is almost axiomatic that the total seduction of a prepossessed alderman is a mere matter of time and opportunity, the fall always comes when some high spirited, progressive, and perhaps, God-professing citizen, offers from his purse a goodly compensation to the gang for the grant of some public privilege. Thus the public privilege is seized upon by the aldermanic gang as a private privilege which it disposes of to the broad-clothed briber at a price satisfactory to its members. The bribers are found in that sanctified element of the community which attends church under the pretext of fearing and worshipping God.

“But yet, O Lord! confess I must,
At times I’m fash’d wi’ fleshly lust;
An’ sometimes, too, wi’ worldly trust
Vile self gets in!
But thou rememb’rest we are dust,
Defil’d in sin.”

On secular days, its leaders, the accomplished, in thieves’ parlance, the “slick” bribers, whisper their temptations into the ears of public servants willing to become their private tools, like the devil in the garden of Eden, “who squat like a toad close to the ear of Eve.”

The “gang” spots its man with remarkable foresight, and year after year its power to manage public affairs to its own private advantage has become more and more felt by the public.

For the first time in a generation, in this year 1899, it is believed an honest majority is in control of the council. The pleasurable fact is that the majority was elected upon a non-partisan basis, the recommendations of a civic body, as to the honesty and capacity of the candidates in the several wards, having been acted upon by the voters in preference to those of party nominating conventions.

It is, however, too early to predict a new era in the history of the council. “All signs fail in dry weather,” and at this moment there are no indications of an approaching shower of “boodle.” The street car franchise question is drowsy and will not be awakened until the corporations controlling the lines are ready to do so. That they will not do so until some legislation is enacted in 1901, is too apparent to require an effort to prove. For one year at least there is a majority in the council which will, it is hoped, protect public rights; and it is also hoped that in 1900 this majority will not only be retained, but also greatly augmented. Projects may be hidden which in the near, or not distant, future, will come forth to plague the consciences of a number of newly admitted members and put their integrity to the severest of tests.

The power of the Common Council, as confided to it by legislation, over the affairs of two millions of people, is too immense to be wielded by a single ordinance making body. Under our form of municipal government it controls the finances and the property of the city, regulates licenses to sell liquor and to carry on various classes of business, such as auctioneers, distillers, grocers, lumber yards, livery stables, money changers, brokers, junk stores, billiard, bagatelle and pigeon-hole tables, pin alleys, ball alleys, hackmen, draymen, omnibus drivers, carters, cabmen, porters, expressmen, hawkers, peddlers, pawnbrokers, theatres, shows and amusements, and many other classes of occupations.

Its power over the uses to which the streets may be applied is, in one sense, limited; in another almost unlimited. While limited by the charter to the power to lay them out, open, widen and improve them, prevent encroachments and obstructions thereon, lighting and cleansing them, its power to regulate them is almost unlimited. “To regulate” the use of the streets is a broad power, and while several distinct grants of power of regulation are contained in the statute, such as preventing the throwing of ashes and garbage upon them, their use for signs, sign posts, awnings, etc., the carrying of banners, placards, advertisements, etc., therein, the flying of flags, banners or signs across them from house to house, or traffic and sales upon them, nevertheless, the uses to which they may be applied in the way of business enterprises for advertising purposes, are as numerous and as varied as the minds of the originators of the schemes are original and unique.

For the right to use, therefore, in a given way in a given ward, the “gang” alderman long ago established and still maintains a schedule of rates. They are graduated from the insignificant charge for permission to “string a banner,” or establish a fruit stand, up to the highly respectable “rake off” demanded for the use of them for switch tracks, or street railway purposes. It is not so many years ago that a leading morning newspaper furnished the public with some information on this subject, upon the occasion of the passage of an ordinance granting valuable privileges to a railway corporation. Four members of the council, not the “Big Four” of olden times, but the modern “Big Four” leaders of “de gang,” were said to have received for their manipulation of the ordinance, and the organization of their followers for its support, the quite comfortable sum of $25,000 each. Their supporters were to receive $8,000 each for their votes, while the “go between” received $100,000 and a few city lots. The standard price per vote for valuable franchises is $5,000, yet in a pinch of private necessity, a few votes can be commanded at lower figures. The contingency of a possible veto is provided for, so that in that event one-fourth must be added for the second vote to pass the measure over the veto. Thus it has gone on not only with respect to street railway grants, but also for electric lighting, telephone conduits, gas pipes, private telephone wires and that long list of uses devised by business men for the advertisement of their personal interests. The peanut stand privilege, the fruit stand privilege, the bootblack privilege, the banner privilege, all pay cash to some “gang” alderman, as do the policy rooms, pool rooms and saloons with wine room privileges.

It is an amusing, as well as an instructive sight, to witness a meeting of the council upon an occasion when some well announced “boodle” ordinance is called up for passage. The plan of campaign has all been arranged beforehand, and the floor leader selected to command the movement. Let it be an ordinance for granting the right to a street railway company to lay down its tracks, and operate its line, in a given street. The preliminaries have all been gone through with, the signatures of property owners verified, and the price to be paid for favorable votes agreed upon. When the ordinance is taken up its opponents are generally in a disorganized condition. There is among them, as a general rule, no coherence of opposition. The main object to be attained, viz., the defeat of the ordinance as it is presented, is lost sight of in the effort “to make records” by the introduction of amendments, reflecting some individual idea of the member who offers it, without having submitted it to his associate opponents for their judgment. Consequently they disagree among themselves and fall to fighting each other, thereby weakening their opposition. Meanwhile the “gang” sits smilingly by, under instructions to vote down all amendments. When one is offered, of comparative unimportance, the quick-witted lobbyists of the corporations, Jew and Gentile, convey a tip to the leader of the “gang” that the amendment “is all right,” “quite agreeable,” “will be accepted,” etc., whereupon the gang’s leader obligingly informs the chair that it is his profound belief the amendment is a very proper one, and it is graciously accepted. The opposition having some little encouragement, present other amendments, which are, of course, defeated. Sometimes debate is permitted. If the speeches could be reported verbatim and the words spelled out as pronounced, it would make Mr. Dooley reflect on the style of modern oratory, as presented by the “mimber from Archey Road.” The question coming to a vote upon the passage of the ordinance, the roll call begins. From the “Bath House” on the right comes, on the first call, the familiar “Aye.” That response is repeated by every member of the gang without explanation, and in a stolid way, indicating contempt for public opinion. The measure is now out of the way. Preparations are made for the next. Settlements have to be made and everybody satisfied before new matters involving “boodle” can be presented. Occasionally there is a loud “kick” by some slow-witted member who fails to secure his full share of the “swag,” but he is usually placated in some manner best known to the combination, and business goes on in the old way. The division and distribution of the “boodle” are matters of great secrecy and adroit management. It is forced into the pockets of some, or finds its way into them in mysterious ways. It is discovered under a plate at a restaurant, or under a pillow at bedtime; but it seldom passes into the open hand, held rearwards, as the caricaturist pictures the “boodler.”

A newspaper thus spoke of the members of the council belonging to the party it represents. “The average —— representative in the city council is a tramp, if not worse. He represents or claims to represent a political party having respectable principles and leaders of known good character and ability. He comes from twenty-five or thirty different wards, some of them widely separated, and when he reaches the City Hall, whether from the west, the south or the north division, he is nine cases out of ten a bummer and a disreputable who can be bought and sold as hogs are bought and sold at the stockyards. Do these vicious vagabonds stand for the decency and intelligence of the party in Chicago?”

This is a picture drawn a few years ago, but it correctly sketches a number of the hold over members of the present council, and a few of the old timers re-elected.

The new members of the council, one-half in number, are committed, by their ante-election pledges, to the policy of refusing the grant of privileges to individuals or corporations without compensation to the public. Whatever of benefit the public may derive from this policy, it is not quite clear that it will operate as a preventive of “boodling.” The ingenuity of the “boodler” combines the cunning of the sneak thief, with the boldness of the highway robber in devising the ways and means to find and secure his “stuff.” It is a matter of congratulation that the boodling species is dwindling away from the public view. How long it will remain in concealment depends upon how long the independent voter wishes to keep it concealed.

The department of the city government to which is committed the control of its public improvements consists of a number of bureaus. The Commissioner of Public Works controls, as part of his executive department, the City Engineer, Superintendent of Streets, of Street and Alley Cleaning, of Water, of Sewerage, of Special Assessments and of Maps. When it is considered that this means the care and management of 1,111 miles of improved and 1,464 miles of unimproved streets, 112 miles of improved and 1,235 miles of unimproved alleys, making a total of 3,924 miles of streets and alleys, the letting of contracts for their repair, improvement and cleaning, and all the details of engineering, sewerage and water pipe extension bureaus, involving the expenditure of millions of dollars, the vastness of the public interests entrusted to the Commissioner may be realized. Under every administration the department is assailed for frauds, stuffed pay rolls, favoritism and boodling. The administration now in power (and which has been in power for two years) has not escaped criticism. Powerful as that criticism was, and founded in truth as it was, it apparently did not affect the minds of a majority of the voters. Contracts were let by this administration, in direct violation of the law which provides for a letting to the lowest bidder, after advertising for bids, where the amount is in excess of $500. Yet a political favorite, who was himself at one time spoken of as a probable appointee to the office of Commissioner, but who stepped aside, as it is charged, as the result of a deal, obtained thereby a contract for street repairs amounting to $230,000, which was never advertised for, but let to him privately in such a manner so that the vouchers in payment were drawn in sums less than $500 each. So grossly evasive of the law was this transaction, that it involved the stoppage of payment of the warrants by the Comptroller of the city. A re-measurement of the work was ordered by him. This developed the astonishing fact that, even if the contract had been properly let, there was nevertheless an overcharge, swindling in its nature, to the extent of $60,000. The Comptroller was, therefore, compelled to withhold his sanction to the payment of the vouchers. In some manner, however, they were paid after some slight reductions were made. This was a blow at the sterling integrity of the Comptroller, whose public services in thoroughly reorganizing his office, and placing it on a business basis, and whose devotion to public interests cost him his life, are the only conspicuous acts, free from shame, egotism, or corruption, of an administration to which he loaned the strength of his good name, and upon which he shed the splendor of his ability and personal honor. He will be long remembered as the one oasis in a desert of maladministration. Both in private and in public walks Robert A. Waller lived an honorable life. He died mourned by all who knew him.

“His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: This was a man!”

The attempt to let the contract for the use of a tug for service to the cribs, or water intakes, in the lake, was another breach of the law so flagrant, as to attract public attention for a time. Its consummation was prevented by the threat of court proceedings, which, at once, led to the insertion of an advertisement for bids. But here again fraud was attempted. The specifications were so drawn as to call for boats of certain dimensions, exact compliance with which was almost impossible, except to one towing company to which originally the contract was about to be let without a bid. This company’s bid was $13,000; the lowest bid was $3,500. Still the city authorities hesitated to award the contract to the lowest bidder, but public opinion, and the known ability of the bidder to fulfill his contract regardless of his boats’ dimensions, compelled the letting to him, thereby saving to the city the sum of $9,000. Vouchers about which there was a doubt as to their legality, have been paid to a contractor, who was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers, but who resigned the appointment immediately, it is said, for business reasons, or because he could not be assigned to a pleasing command. These vouchers amounted to $50,000, and their payment, it is rather uncharitably said, induced the gallant contractor to become an independent voter. There is no difference between the manufacture of an independent voter in this manner, and his manufacture by putting him on the pay-roll without work. This method seems to have been adopted by the public works department of the city government, following, perhaps, an old precedent.

The purchase of water meters, under specifications with which only one company could comply, and the laying of water pipes without letting contracts in a lawful manner, are notorious instances of unblushing frauds committed by this department. It is almost incredible that a dynamo should be bought in parts, so that it could be purchased from a friend, and paid for in sums less than $500; yet this was done. Thus a piece of machinery having a fixed price as a whole, was not only purchased illegally, but paid for in such a manner that its price, as a whole, was doubled when bought in pieces. So it was with other electrical apparatus; so it was with the protection to fire hydrants. Instead of advertising for bids for the work of shielding the fire hydrants from the severity of the winter’s cold, they were divided up into companies like those of a regiment of soldiers, each having its contract commander, who received his pay on vouchers each calling for less than $500. The present commissioner is an old politician, who has held several official positions. It is but just to say of him, that, with the general public, he bears a good reputation. His political enemies are not by any means complimentary in their allusions to him, those particularly in the ranks of his own party. He is energetic, self confident, amiable, and a particularly able bluffer when occasion demands it. Without being profound he is efficient, and without being remarkably efficient, he is not at all valueless.

The Civil Service Commission has reached its present age, nearly five years, after suffering all the diseases incident to poor nursing. It is not by any means a vigorous child as yet, but as it gains in strength it will perhaps grow in wisdom. When it recognizes the fact that the people permitted it to be born, it will also recognize the further fact that its parents require of it obedience to their wishes. They demand the enforcement of the Civil Service Law as it is written, for the public good and not for partisan advantage. They would impress upon the commission the conviction of their belief that without a properly administered civil service law, municipal government is a menace to republican institutions; that without it the experiment of municipal ownership of “public utilities” is hazardous, and that the increasing intelligence of the people and their wider knowledge of the science of government have taught them that the political maxim, “to the victors belong the spoils,” is a relic of the barbaric days of politics, in which wide open primaries, stuffed ballot boxes, captured polling places, and thugs were the governing elements of elections.

The civil service law was placed upon the statute book at the instance of those who had made the study of municipal government a duty, and who from that study realized that the growth of great cities, in population, material wealth and industrial development, demands commensurate changes in the manner of governing such communities. The basic principle of the law is the elimination of the spoils system, and the substitution of the merit system. The banishment of the professional politician, that individual who lives upon the spoils of office, is a result certain of accomplishment under the proper administration of this beneficent statute. Foreseeing this result, the professionals in all parties united against it and have sought, and are still seeking, to undermine its provisions and destroy its utility.

The law was put into operation by a board of commissioners not one of whom had ever been an active party man. No body of men ever met for the performance of a public duty, who were less tainted with partisanship than were these gentlemen. They studied the law carefully, and acquainted themselves with its text and its spirit. Their selection was satisfactory to the public, and was a guarantee of honest endeavor to place the affairs of the city under the control of the law’s terms, in all the departments to which those terms applied, and which could be brought within the classified service. They formulated adequate rules, after consultation with able men familiar with the workings of the federal civil service law. Open to criticism as some of these rules were as being more theoretical than practical, nevertheless they were built upon the basis of selection by merit alone, regardless of politics, and were adapted solely to that end. For two years it adhered to the law, enforcing against the party to which the majority of the commissioners belonged a rule which required that no person holding an office which fell within the classified service could take an examination for that position without resigning the position. The law continued to work during 1895 and 1896 as smoothly as new machinery can. In the Spring of 1897 a new city administration came into power of a different political complexion from that under which the law was placed in force. It was then found, to the amazement of the public, which, however, in the hurly-burly of life soon subsided, that these commissioners were incompetent. One placed his resignation in the hands of the Mayor and was almost immediately appointed to the office of comptroller by that officer. The efficiency of his service in his new office, and the quality of his character, have already been referred to in these pages.

Suddenly the same Mayor addressed the late associates of the Comptroller as follows, viz.: “You will please take notice that I have elected to, and I do hereby remove you from the position of Civil Service Commissioner in and for the City of Chicago for the following causes. First: You are and have been in your performance of the duties of said office incompetent. Secondly: In the performance of said duties you have been guilty of neglect of duty.” A new commission was appointed, which proceeded to reverse the rule above referred to, whereupon nearly all the employes of the city were discharged. No examinations having been held for these positions there was no eligible list from which to select their successors. Consequently, in such a case, appointments were made under a section of the statute to fill the vacancies for sixty days, during which time examinations were held to obtain an eligible list. These appointments were, of course, all made from the Mayor’s party. He could not do otherwise in view of the public utterances he had made during his campaign, when he said if he retained any employes appointed under a prior administration of a different political belief, “it will only be for menagerie purposes.”

When the examinations were held and a list certified, it was found that in every instance the sixty day men passed at its head. Such a uniformity of results was in itself evidence of a disregard of the law. From the highest position for which examinations were held, down through all grades, to the lowest, such as barn men, the sixty day man was always marked up to the head of the list.

During the years 1897 and 1898, no less than seven different persons were selected as civil service commissioners, until a board was found willing to act upon the Mayor’s interpretation of the statute. One instance of the abuse of the law will suffice to show the methods resorted to, for the purpose of selecting a party man to fill a vacancy in office. An examination was held of applicants for the position of “foreman of street lamps repairs.” The man who passed at the head was a sixty day man. At thirteen years of age he became a sheet metal worker’s apprentice, and with the exception of a short period when he was engaged in keeping a saloon and made a failure of it, he continued to follow that occupation. He is a heeler for one of the most notorious of the aldermanic gang. It will be observed in contrasting the questions asked him, and those asked his superior, an applicant for the office of Superintendent of Street Lamp Repairs, that a lower degree of educational qualifications is required of the Superintendent, that of his subordinate, the foreman of the gang of repairers. These questions were propounded to the foreman, viz.:

“If the hypothenuse of a right angle triangle is 35 feet and the base 21 feet, what is the altitude?

At 30 cents a square yard what is the cost of lining with metal a cubical room 13 feet long?

If it takes eight men five and one half days to make 100 lamps, how long will it take six men to make 350 lamps?

A building is 302 feet high; the walk and court measure 90 feet; what is the length of a straight line running from the top of the building to the opposite curb?

At 25 cents a square yard what is the cost of a sheet of iron sufficient for the construction of a cylinder pipe closed at both ends 28 feet long, the diameter of whose base is 28 inches?

What is the capacity in gallons of a sphere 15 inches in diameter?

If 24 gallons of water flow through a 2 inch pipe each minute how many gallons will flow through a 3 inch pipe under the same conditions?

What is the length of the diameter of a circle whose area equals 1,386 square yards?

Name the materials used in the construction of a street lamp?

Name three essential qualifications requisite for a foreman?”

A street lamp could not be repaired, as a matter of fact, by a person unable to answer these questions! This truth must be apparent to any unbiased mind!

All the other applicants could answer the last two questions only, simply because they were honest; but the metal worker answered them all, and was marked 100, although he had not been at school since he was thirteen years of age, and does not appear to have been much of a student since that time.

The Superintendent’s examination ran as follows, viz.:

“What are the duties of Superintendent of Lamp Repairs?

What experience have you had to qualify you for this position?

How many lamps should a tinner complete in a day?

How many signs should an etcher complete in a day?

If a special assessment were levied and confirmed, what would your duty be to secure the erecting and lighting of the lamps?

On what part of the city property should those posts be set?

If posts were to be erected how would you determine what class of posts would be required?

What is the general duty of Superintendent of Lamp Repairs regarding repairs to lamps?”

The attacks on the civil service law come from all sources. A party convention in 1898, in its platform said, “We pronounce the Civil Service Law inefficient, mischievous and hostile to the regnant principles of popular government. We demand its repeal.”

The next convention of the same party resolved: “We pledge the ——— party to the strict enforcement of this, the Civil Service Law.”

The Mayor’s consistency and that of his party are identical. If the two removed commissioners were incompetent and neglectful, so must the third have been, and yet that equally incompetent and neglectful commissioner was appointed to an office, the very highest in the gift of the Mayor.

Acting upon the demand of his party for the repeal of this law, the Corporation Counsel began his attacks upon it by a multiplicity of opinions calculated to gradually remove it from the statute book. Ordinances were passed in accordance with these opinions, creating new heads of departments and exempting them from the civil service rules. Positions, filled by civil service appointees, were abolished. The same positions were re-created under a new name, filled by a sixty day man who was then examined, and certified to the head of the list. The police department, the city treasurer, and other branches of the local government which have attempted by judicial proceedings to emasculate the civil service law, have in every instance been foiled by the decisions of the Supreme Court.

The Special Assessment Bureau of the board of public works, has for many years, in conjunction with the alderman, had the origination and passage of ordinances for paving streets, laying sewers, sidewalks, drains, water supply and service pipes, etc. Under a law recently enacted, and now in force, all ordinances originate with a board, named the Board of Local Improvements. The right of petition on behalf of the property owners, is a feature of the new law which smiles at the property owner, while it “winks the other eye.” It holds out a hope, as do other provisions of the law, of reduced assessments, but, so far, the practical benefit to the owner of real estate has not been made apparent. Since the year 1861 and including the year 1897, the enormous sum of $90,402,790.44 has been levied upon real estate for the payment of public improvements. During the year ending December, 1891, the amount levied was over six millions of dollars, and during the following year ending December 31, 1892, just preceding the World’s Fair, the assessments reached the sum of over fourteen millions of dollars. Reference has already been made to frauds in the letting of contracts for street improvements. They are split up and let to favorites without advertising, so that each payment will fall under $500, although the improvement may be a mile in length. The asphalt ring is just as potent as ever. It fights every effort of other dealers in asphalt to procure a contract and it generally succeeds in foisting upon the people its quality of asphalt at a higher price than that offered at a lower price, by other bidders, perhaps equally as good in quality and which has been successfully used in other cities. Failing recently to stampede the board, the ring accepted contracts at a figure submitted by its competitors. This, however, is a familiar trick of trusts, and will last for a very short period of time, unless the board manifests a disposition to consider the merits of the material of competing contractors. The ring will not abandon its struggle so easily. It is powerful, uniting in its behalf the combined efforts of politicians of all parties, who are connected with the asphalt corporations as stockholders and officers. The Board of Local Improvements not long since made the announcement that it was preparing to levy special assessments during the coming year to the amount of $10,000,000. The people may weep and protest, while the contractor smiles and urges.

The one department of the city government, unsurpassed by any of its kind in the world, is the Fire Department. The officers and men are of the best material, of the highest courage, and serve under the strictest discipline. They are fire fighters, not politicians. Their chief is a man of independence of character, honest, taciturn, a strict disciplinarian—a general in command of a corps of which he is justly proud. He tolerates no political interference with his men. In this respect, particularly, he is, always was, and always will be sustained by the entire community. Any attempted management of the department which would tend to lessen its efficiency meets with the chief’s stern resistance. Aside from his own moral and physical courage, his admirable sense of duty, and the fact that the public honor him and support him, he has the powerful assistance of the board of underwriters in any case of damaging intermeddling with his command. Knowing his worth and the merits of his department that intermeddling would bring, instantly, a threat of the rise in insurance rates from this board, a threat which would touch the pockets of many property owners, and consequently one which would solidify them in support of the chief. He shares with his men the dangers of their calling. The gallant men, who during the past year lost their lives in saving the property and lives of others, testified by their sacrifice to the hazardous nature of that calling. A recital of the heroic deeds of those men would not be surpassed by the stories of gallantry in the field of battle with which the pages of American history are replete. While Dennis J. Swenie’s strength holds out he will command his famous batallions to his own honor, and to that of the city of which he is so faithful and loyal a citizen.

Even the possibility of his being supplanted in his command, which appeared recently in the failure to reappoint him at the first opportunity afforded the Mayor, aroused the people to a united protest, which, indications prove, was timely and effective. The omission to send his name to the council with the first of the Mayor’s appointees, may have been, as it was claimed “accidental,” but it is nevertheless the belief that that omission was in the nature of a test of public opinion. If so, the power of public opinion retained him in command, despite political purpose to the contrary.

With the exception of this department all the others of the city are merely run on political lines, as adjuncts of the political party in power, notwithstanding the civil service law. The abuses of that law may become fewer in number, not through any merit of the present board, but because it has about exhausted itself in filling all the offices with men of one political faith by means already explained.

The departments of the County government under a feeble civil service law, different from that applicable to the city, are conducted in the same manner as those of the city for the benefit of machine politicians and their regiments of ward and township workers. They are as corruptly managed as those of the city government.

The institutions at Dunning for the insane and the poor, are generally managed by ward politicians, whose appointments are in the nature of a reward for party services, or rather, services to some particular boss. Recent reports of grand juries note some improvement in their conduct. On the whole, however, they are regarded in the nature of spoils by the ring of party loafers, whose views of government consist, mainly, in doing the greatest good to the greatest number of the ring.

The traffic in dead bodies, or “cadavers” goes on, as it did when exposure came about a year ago through detected shipments to the State of Missouri for the use of a medical college in one of the towns of that state. These pauper dead “escape,” in the language of the employes, from the “killer” ward in which they are stored, a place selected to lay out a corpse suited for the dissecting table. It has been a matter of more than rumor and given currency by the press, that subjects for the dissecting table are selected before the breath has left their bodies. This statement finds more or less verification in the disclosures of the Missouri case before alluded to.

Contractors for county supplies pay a percentage of their prices to a county ring, and, consequently, a poorer quality of food, fuel and medicines, is furnished to these institutions than the contracts call for, which cost the contractor an additional sum by way of boodle to obtain them.

The sheriff’s office has had a standing shame for many years in the cost of dieting prisoners. The county board allows the sheriff for dieting, twenty-five cents a day for each prisoner confined in the county jail. The cost of a day’s dieting is estimated not to exceed ten cents, according to the greed of the sheriff. From this one source alone the sheriff’s office is regarded as one of the most lucrative offices in the county. The excess above the actual cost is clear profit to the sheriff.

Some of the bailiffs of the courts have been discovered within the past year as jury bribers, willing to take any side offering the most lucrative terms. The principal in this disreputable business fled, and now an unseemly quarrel is raging between the city’s detective department, and the sheriff’s and state attorney’s office as to which was to blame for that escape.

The judges of the Courts of Cook County are men of integrity. Some are able jurists, but of late years the standard for judicial qualifications has been, through party machine nominations, considerably lowered. These judges are charged by the law with some duties the nature of which is purely political. Thus, the selection of justices of the peace for the city, the poor man’s court, is confided to them. No scandals, so far, have attended the exercise of this duty, but their selections have not, as a general rule, earned the confidence of the people. “J. P.” means nowadays one who will give judgment for the plaintiff. The evil practices, the frauds and swindles, which have their origin in the system now prevailing for the conduct of justice courts, has given rise to strenuous efforts to reform them by state legislation. This will ultimately be accomplished. While the members from the rural districts, in each recurring state legislature, are difficult to manage, in the one session of their term in the lower house in matters affecting a large city, nevertheless, when fully informed, they have granted such remedial legislation to Chicago for which its civic bodies have made timely application.

A new revenue law has just gone into operation, designed to abolish the inequalities of taxation which grew up and were fraudulently fostered under the repealed law. What its effect will be it is difficult to predict. The personal property holders, those with long lines of stocks, bonds, valuable house furnishings, large bank accounts, and concealed wealth, are very likely to feel unkindly towards the stringent provisions of this law. They have been evading their just share of taxation for years. They are today the most ignorant of the many people calling at the assessor’s office to make out and verify under oath their respective schedules, simply because it is so many years since they were called upon to pay a personal property tax, that they have forgotten all about the form.

The holders of large real estate interests, who, for years, have been paying assessors to exempt them from assessment, or reduce their valuations, are, also, most probably confronted with the impossibility of escape from paying their proper share of general taxes. This iniquitous system has been denounced in the press for years. A year ago a town assessor was convicted of the offense, and heavily fined by the court. The tax evaders are as vicious a class in a community as are sneak thieves. Their payment to assessors to lower their valuations is the worst species of corruption. The payrolls of the town assessors present the most conspicuous instances of corruption to be found in any department of the county, or city, government. Many men are carried on their pay rolls and paid from five to ten dollars per day who never do one moment’s work in the making of the assessment. They are simply being nursed for political purposes. In one of the wealthiest towns a payroll fell under the writer’s observation, which showed a clear steal of $2,200 for a period of two weeks only. These officials designated a personal friend to whom all money was paid. One-fourth of these payments were handed over to the “solicitor” who brought in the “business,” one-fourth to the “friend,” and the remaining one-half went to the assessor. Men in high station in national and state councils, state and national committeemen, city and county officers, lawyers, politicians and sporting men were engaged in this business of boodling, throwing upon the owners of small real estate interests more than their fair share of the burdens of taxation. In an address delivered in this city by an ex-President of the United States, he said that as Lincoln had declared this country could not exist half slave and half free, so he declared “it could not exist half taxed and half free” from taxation, that the sin of tax evasion was a new danger to the integrity of the Republic and that its evil lay in the “evasion of just taxation by the rich, and the consequent thrusting of an extra burden on the poor.” The corporations engaged in the manufacture of gas, in the management of traction companies, of live stock exchanges, of packing companies, railroads, steel companies, sleeping car builders and merchants owning large landed properties, have had their agents regularly employed in procuring a reduction of their valuations for assessment, who were nothing more nor less than bribers. Whether these crimes will be as freely attempted under the new law remains to be developed, but some of the distributors of personal property schedules are again playing their old trick of taking money from the poor under promise of returning them as non-holders of taxable personal property. An arrest of one of these robbers, who had accepted one dollar from each of a number of women has been made. The men elected as assessors and as members of the board of review are men of good character and able judgment. The only indication of danger is that a political boss who has lived and thrived at the public crib and whose political methods have always been unscrupulous has been appointed chief clerk of the board of review. His salary is large enough to keep him out of temptation, if he has not forgotten the ways of the righteous. He was an expert “adjuster” in politics. In assessments the “adjuster’s” occupation should now be gone. The difficulty lies in teaching an old adjuster new tricks. The old system of assessment for general taxation was denounced by an official of the county as “nothing more nor less than a gigantic legalized swindle, reeking in corruption, a harbor for ‘grafters,’ ‘petty thieves,’ and ‘sharks,’ and an enormous, unnecessary and galling burden on the tax payers, the expense of which has no justification in reason and should have none in law.”

The new system abolishes but one of the evils of the old. In place of town assessors, a board of five assessors is established whose work is subject to review by another composed of three members. Their labors are, in turn, passed upon by the State Board of Equalization, before which for years railroads and other corporations have had their adjusters, agents or brokers, and before which they will continue to appear and accomplish, as they always have accomplished, the placing of the lowest possible valuations upon railroad properties, and a reduction of capital stock valuations. The board of assessors now values all the real estate in Cook county in place of the assessors in the separate towns within the county.

These towns, six of which are wholly within the city limits, are, through their officials, plunderers of the public, robbing the funds of the towns by increasing their salaries out of all proportion to the services they are required to render, and which could well be dispensed with to the greatest advantage of the people. In the year 1898 they cost the treasury $395,411.55. Absolutely nothing is apparent as the result of this looting of public funds. They occupy, in the business parts of the city, expensive offices, which are open for public use not to exceed four months in the year, and afford, for the remaining months, club accommodations for the hangers on of the political crooks who manage party affairs. Card playing and gambling are their principal occupations. In the division of the proceeds of the robbery, the justices of the peace participate. They are, by virtue of their offices, members of the town board. Their services are not worth ten dollars per annum, but they receive compensation ranging from $200 to $500 per annum.

As illustrating the tendency of these town boards, from which the assessment of property for taxation has now been taken away, the following are the valuations of real estate and personal property for the past three years as equalized by the state board. The foundation for the assessments was laid by the town assessors. It will be observed that, notwithstanding the increase in population, the value of real estate and personal property has been steadily declining. The decline is a measure of the boodling propensities of the assessors. Their percentage of award “no fellah can find out.”

VALUATIONS FOR ASSESSMENT.

		1896.		1897.		1898.
Real estate		$195,684,875		$184,632,905		$178,801,172
Personal property		34,959,299		33,594,167		29,601,393
Population, school census		1,616,635				1,851,588

The value of the taxable real estate in Chicago, according to these figures, decreased in two years $18,883,703, and the value of taxable personal property $5,357,906. During the same period the population increased 234,953. As wealth and population increase in Chicago, values of property decline. At ten per cent of its cash value, which is the basis adopted by assessors for years for taxation value, taxable real estate in Chicago is, in round numbers worth $1,788,000,000.

It is impossible to average the per cent paid for reductions in valuations to the assessors. Of the eighteen millions in reduced valuations in 1898, as compared with 1896, it is safe to say five millions were purchased. As the rate of taxation was between nine and ten dollars on one hundred dollars the amount of taxes paid by those who should not have paid them was $500,000. The assessors were “not working for their health,” but for about fifty per cent of the taxes saved to their principals, with the aid of the friend and the agent who brought the business, or say about $250,000 of “graft.”

The coroner’s office is also one which not infrequently gives rise to scandals. There are open charges made that some of the juries, called by that official, have found exonerating, instead of incriminating, verdicts for a money consideration in the division of which the office participated. An unseemly quarrel between the coroner and the police revealed the fact that both have favorite undertakers to whom the bodies of those meeting sudden death from accident, or otherwise, are taken. In a dispute as to which should control a corpse a most painful truth became public that it was carted about from one undertaking establishment to another, and that even the law was invoked to obtain possession of it by means of a writ of replevin.

The office of the recorder of deeds is one of the most important in the county affairs. Generally speaking it is well conducted, although its records are not as presentable to the eye as are the books of a first-class mercantile firm. Female labor is employed mostly in recording, i. e., spreading an instrument at large upon the records, while male labor keeps up the tract books, indices, etc. The employes of both sexes are favorites of political bosses. The abstract branch of the business of this office is a sublime failure. For years it has cost the county a large sum of money to make good the deficiency—expenses largely exceeding earnings. Its abstracts cannot compete with those of private corporations, which employ experts in that business, and pay them in proportion to their ability, merit alone being their recommendation. The abstract makers employed by the county are shiftless and incompetent. The Torrens system, or the registration of titles, will, in time, but not for many years to come, supersede the abstract system, but not until the public shall have gained more confidence in its merits than it has yet acquired in recorder’s abstracts of title.

It was not the purpose of these pages to pursue inquiry into the corruption existing in both the municipal and county governments. The primary intent was to refer to the vices and crimes which prevail by reason principally of police partnership in their joint proceeds. Both governments are corrupt, and appear to be so because the people consent they shall be corrupt. The lessons the public learn from day to day, through the columns of the press, are forgotten. When election day approaches a revival of the facts through the press is then charged to political trickery, and its charges of maladministration are disregarded as being invented for party purposes. The press condemns while the evils are prominent, then it condones, and becomes the subservient and truculent supporter of the men who permitted vice and debauchery to attain its stalwart growth. The people believe there is a trust press, banded together to obtain favors through school leases, bank deposits of public funds and personal appointments in return for services to be rendered their municipal benefactors. The only non-member of the trust is the organ of the street car corporations and such exposes of villainy as it may present are set down as means to an end—the effort to obtain public privileges without compensation to the city. Newspapers, therefore, in municipal affairs no longer lead public opinion. They cannot again become its leaders until they free themselves from the suspicion of conserving their own interests by the sacrifice of those of the public. The greatest of them delivered but feeble blows during the recent mayoralty campaign, while the lighter weights, who were fighting for a candidate for renewed honors, had been for two years most unmercifully pounding him for his persistent assistance rendered to the vicious classes, in their indulgence in crime and debauchery.

The various civic societies formed for the improvement of municipal government, pay attention solely to matters removed from the insidious and ceaseless advances of crime, close their eyes to evidences of disease apparent on the body politic, and merely dream of higher ideals. They leave to one society the task of the suppression of vice. They give to it neither sympathy nor pecuniary assistance. It begs its way in meetings of its sympathizers, warns the community of the prevalence of crime and indecency, but the community rushes on in the business struggles of the day from year to year, trusting—as it always has trusted—in its public servants for the full performance of their sworn duties—a trust so constantly violated that municipal government has become merely the synonym of the rule of the criminal classes.

A special session of the Illinois Legislature was called by the Governor in 1897. Among the subjects included in the call was one suggesting the passage of an act “to establish boards providing for non-partisan police in all cities of the State containing over 100,000 inhabitants.” Pursuant to the recommendations of the executive’s message, a resolution was passed by the Senate for the appointment of a committee of seven members of that body, which recited the recommendation of the Governor; that a bill had been introduced providing for the establishment of non-partisan police boards in all cities containing the necessary population; that charges and scandals had arisen in regard to the management of the police force in Chicago, and that the committee be clothed “with full power to act” and to investigate “fully the subject” and report its findings as early as possible to the Senate at the special session.

The committee consisted of one people’s party, one democratic senator and five republican senators. From the moment of its selection it was branded as a partisan committee, appointed not so much to obtain information which would enable an unbiased judgment to be formed upon the merits of the proposed bill as to accumulate political capital for the use of the republican party. The committee proceeded with its investigation, and on February 10th, 1898, submitted its report, which was adopted February 15th, 1898, by a vote of thirty-three republicans and one democrat, eight democrats voting in the negative. The only democrat voting in the affirmative was a member of the reporting committee.

On the last day of the special session, no legislation having been enacted on the subject of the proposed bill, a resolution was introduced providing for a continuance of the committee, which recited that it had “unearthed a most deplorable state of affairs in the management and control of the police force of Chicago,” and that “the most flagrant violations of the civil service law have been brazenly practiced by those in authority in control of that police force.” Nothing resulted from the latter resolution continuing the committee.

The report covered the investigations of the committee into the operations of the civil service law, and the manner of its enforcement, finding that it was a plaything in the hands of the party then in power, and an object of constant and premeditated attack. It also found the grossest abuses in the management of the police pension fund and in the workings of the police force as an organization. That crime was protected and lewdness tolerated by it, and that in fact it was a powerful ally of the criminal classes, and practically made an unofficial livelihood off unfortunate women of the town, thieves and their fences, gambling resorts and their keepers, and the patrons and keepers of the all night saloons. It found the Chief of Police was cognizant of the facts, and yet took no steps to correct them. That Chief from whose testimony quotations appear in these pages, was re-appointed to command the police force for the next two years.

The findings of this committee made but little, if any, impression upon the public mind. There were no revelations as to the condition of criminal affairs, and the relations of the police therewith, which were new to the people, with the possible exception, perhaps, that it was not known how utterly inefficient and irresponsible the Chief of Police was. From that moment every newspaper has, if not demanded, at least suggested his removal from office. In this respect it but voices the sentiments of the entire community. It is a paradox why, in the face of this public feeling, a majority of the people supported for re-election the staunch friend of the dishonored head of the police force, unless upon the hypothesis that he would not continue to be a part of the new administration. If so, the hypothesis soon failed. The Mayor thought he would “hold him for a while.”

The lesson to be learned from the failure of this committee’s report to attract public attention to the prevalence of criminality and obscenity in Chicago as fostered by the police force is this, that an investigation concerning the methods of government of a city administration controlled by the Democratic party, without a kindred investigation of the methods of a county administration controlled by the Republican party is too partisan to suit the sense of fair play and of justice entertained by every American citizen. It matters not that the order for the investigation had reference only to the passage of legislation for the regulation of the police force in cities of a certain population, and that, therefore, the scope of the inquiry was limited by the terms of the order. Perhaps it was as broad as it could have been made, under the governor’s call, which, by the provisions of the constitution fixed the subjects upon which only legislation could be enacted in special session. Either the call should have been broader, or this particular subject matter should have been omitted from it, and left for the regular session’s consideration. Then all matters pertaining to the manner of conducting both city and county affairs could have been investigated free from the delimitations of an executive call. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the report of the Berry Committee, as it was called, is a stinging indictment against the police force of Chicago, which sooner or later must be tried at the bar of public opinion. It will, in a measure, have blazed the way for a new committee of inquiry, whose sittings have just commenced, in so far as the police department is concerned.

The Baxter Committee was formed under a resolution of the Senate. It consists of five republican and two democratic senators. The resolution refers “to the management and control of the police affairs” of Chicago, and “the conduct of the municipal government thereof, in reference to the expenditure of public money and the enforcement of the law in its several departments.” This language would limit the scope of the committee’s inquiry to city affairs only. The resolution, however, closes with words granting authority to the committee for a “full, complete and perfect investigation of any and all the said subject matters herein named, and such other subjects as they may deem wise and prudent to investigate in the interests of good government.”

If this committee is wise it will not confine its efforts to ascertaining how the city government is managed. It will command public approval if it will extend its inquiries into the affairs of the county government as well. This the community will demand; with less it will not be satisfied. The great mass of both parties is concerned with what will be of the most advantage to good government, not with what will be to the greatest advantage of either party. Hence, if this inquiry has in view a partisan purpose its sessions will merely reproduce tales of the street familiar to the ears of the people, and with which the legislature has been familiar for a decade. To associate these crimes and debaucheries with one administration will in one respect be unfair, because they have progressed under other administrations as well, but it can emphasize the one great and astonishing truth, that never in the history of the city has a police force been permitted to become the bed-fellow of these monstrous evils, to protect them and contribute to their overwhelming power, in such a shameless, openhanded and defiant manner as it has in the past two years, as it is still permitted to do, and as it will probably be permitted to do, for the next two years.

That committee will find nothing in these pages unknown to the observing citizen. The great mass of the people read and forget. These evils are hinted at herein, and gathered together. They may impress those who are unaccustomed to taking notes of passing events. That the growth of crime in Chicago, and the prevalence of bestiality is not generally believed by the majority of its people is a self-evident proposition. It would be an insult to their intelligence and virtue to assert they knew the facts. It is not a criticism of their intelligence to say they do not know the facts. It is rather to their credit that in the pursuit of their business, the care of their homes, and the cultivation of their morals, they judge the great community in which they live by their own standard, and firmly believe that as they know themselves to be good citizens, they believe their fellow men are likewise good citizens. While they rest in this conviction vice is eternally at work, immorality undermining and crime attacking the power of government, capturing one and then the other of its strongholds, until today the criminal classes constitute the balance of power in every city election, and can handle it as they may choose, by the mere concentration of the voting strength of the keepers of eight thousand saloons and their hangers on.

The appointment of a comptroller and corporation counsel acceptable to the public, both being men of sterling integrity, and known ability, is merely a partial promise of reform. The new comptroller is a worthy successor to the deceased Waller, while the new corporation counsel takes his office, with a reputation for probity and legal acumen which are guaranties that neither will be used in an attack upon the people’s laws. But the police department and the public works department are still under the same direction. They give no promise of departing from the protection of criminals on the one hand, nor the illegal letting of contracts on the other. Both of these are inviting fields for the Baxter committee to explore, and when they shall have thoroughly done so, if they shall turn their attention to county affairs, they will probably find pastures just as prolific of the rankest of weeds.

The Baxter committee began its hearings on the 18th day of May, 1899. Its opening witness confirmed the truth of many of the facts set forth in these pages. He paid protection money for keeping a gambling house, until the demands for a contribution to a campaign fund became too exacting, when he was “told he had better quit.” “As an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” said the witness: “I quit.”

He testified that gambling was going on everywhere a few days before the committee began its work, named a number of the resorts, and related some of his losses in a few of the games in which, although a professional gambler, he was “skinned.”

Officers were found in them, and protection to the games openly boasted of. The club organization, it develops, is the gambling idea of evading the laws, the theory being that none can gamble unless they are members. The practice seems, however, to be that every man is a member who will not squeal. Houses of disrepute were visited, and the indecencies alluded to in foregoing pages witnessed by the sergeant-at-arms of the committee. His testimony in this respect was too realistic for publication.

A member of a recent grand jury submitted a list of all night saloons he had visited, and found doing business, between the hours of one and five o’clock in the morning. The list contained the names of forty-six saloons, located on eleven different streets. His information was not as startling as was the fact that his joint feat of pedestrianism and absorption of drink is, perhaps, unequalled in sporting or drinking records. He drank in each of the places visited—total drinks, forty-six in four hours. Length of route covered four miles; width, about one-half mile; square miles traversed—two! Can any sprinter, carrying the same weights, surpass this achievement?

The witnesses so far called before the committee are mostly from the detective force, and from among lodging house keepers. Their replies are evasive, and when not so, their memories are clouded. All they had ever known of the subjects upon which they are interrogated had fled from their recollection. “I don’t remember,” avoided many a pitfall.

The methods of the committee do not impress an observer as having been the result of much consultation or careful preparation for their work. There is an apparent indifference on the part of some of its members to reaching results, or to remaining steadily in the pursuit of the purposes for which it was organized. Political influences are undoubtedly at work to shorten the lines of its inquiry, and the length of the days it shall devote to their development. This investigation is not wanted by local politicians of either party. It rests with the committee alone to determine whether its work shall be well done or not. To maintain the dignity of the State is their first duty, let their investigation reveal what it may and strike whom it will.

A people who voluntarily submit to taxation for the construction of such a stupendous improvement as the drainage canal costing $28,000,000, who apply their surplus water fund to the building of a complete system of intercepting sewers, who compel the abolition of the murderous grade crossings, through the elevation of railway tracks, all for the improvement of the sanitary condition and safety of their homes and lives, are entitled to the best protection the state can give them against the domination of criminals and debauchees, even if the management of its police force should thereby be placed in the hands of state agencies, or under some other supervision which will compel it to dissolve its relations with vice, and prevent it from utilization for political ends.

Submission to the exactions of trusts, in the shape of telephone and gas companies, does not require them to submit to a trust of criminals and police officials. The element to which it is estimated $70,000,000 is annually paid in Chicago for its drink bill, must be so regulated, as that it shall cease to furnish the balance of power in elections, to exercise a baneful influence over the police, to ruin the young, to encourage debauchery, and breed criminals. A municipal government that cannot, or will not, control these vicious agencies, will ultimately be condemned by a public-spirited people, if they can be, as they sooner or later will be, persuaded to devote a few hours, taken from their business or pleasure, to a vigorous uprooting of a system under which such iniquities can be born and develop to such menacing proportions. There must be an awakening to the fact that

“They say this town is full of cozenage,
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such like liberties of sin.”

 

 

---

From the daily press a few accounts are culled, and added by way of appendix, as to the perpetration of crime and the habits of the police in connection with it.

The Baxter Committee unearthed the following account of the degree of protection afforded to citizens by police officers, and the easy-going indifference with which the Chief of Police regarded the affair when it was first called to his attention.

On the night of March 3d ult. a woman returning from a drug store was stopped by two detectives and charged with soliciting men upon the streets. She denied this offensive charge, told where she had been and where returning, and showed a bottle of medicine she carried as confirmatory of her statements. This happened about 8:45 o’clock. She was then within twenty feet of the entrance to the house in which she lived. Notwithstanding her denial, the officers went to the house with her. One of them then said, “I’m an officer; open this door!” Another woman with whom the arrested woman was boarding asked, “What is the matter?” One of the officers replied, “This woman was on the street soliciting,” to which the boarding house keeper replied, “You are mistaken.” “Well,” said the officer, “if you want to stop her give me $15,” and the reply was, “She has no money to give you or to any one.” The boarding house keeper, thinking the men were common thieves, then whispered to the accused woman, “Go with them and I will follow you.” The officers took their woman to a corner and into a saloon, where they compelled her to give up a pair of diamond earrings for ten dollars which were handed to her by the bartender. The boarding house woman followed, and prevented the detectives from obtaining the ten dollars, but finally they grabbed the bill from the accused woman’s hands. The women were then released and returned to their home. Taking a sealskin sack with them they returned to the saloon, and were handed the diamond earrings, but not without leaving the sack in their stead. The women saw the detectives return, and drink at the bar, paying for their tipple with the money they had snatched from the hand of the one.

While the parties were wrangling on the street a police sergeant and two officers in uniform passed. One of the women cried out, “Here are two men robbing this woman!” The sergeant replied, after observation, “I have got nothing to do with this.” One of the women asked, “What are you for?” Then the sergeant, having discovered the men were detectives, said to one of them, “They are all right. Get what you can.” The sergeant then left.

The women now demanded that the detectives show their badges of authority. They were shown. Demand was then made that a patrol wagon should be called. This was denied, but accidentally one came along the street returning to its station. When the accused woman caught sight of it she fainted. The boarding house keeper raised such commotion that one of the detectives said, “For God’s sake, shut that woman’s mouth up or she will make us trouble!” They then ran away.

The next day the boarding house woman called on the Chief of Police and told the whole story. He referred her to the Lieutenant at the station of the precinct in which the indignity occurred. To him the entire facts were given, and written down by the desk sergeant. The men were there identified.

On the following day one of the detectives went to the women’s house, accompanied by a brother-in-law, whose wife was a personal friend of the boarding house woman. The detective had a copy of the woman’s statement as she had made it at the police station. He begged for mercy, crying, “he had nothing to say for himself.” He piteously pleaded he had a mother in the hospital, a mother-in-law who was dying, and three small children to support. Suggestions were made, and the woman’s feelings worked upon so that she was induced to leave the city.

Meanwhile the boarding house keeper made a statement at another police station, in which she suppressed the facts as to the diamonds and the money. She was asked to appear before the police trial board, and refused. Thereupon the charges against the detectives were dismissed.

It developed before the Baxter Committee that the Chief of Police had been told all the facts. The papers got hold of an account of the affair, and the Chief called upon the boarding house keeper. In the course of his conversation, this woman trying to protect the officers through her aroused sympathy, was asked by the Chief, “What about those diamond earrings and sealskin sack?” The woman answered, “If you don’t know, I don’t.” He then asked, “Didn’t you tell that to me?” She answered, “If you can’t remember, I can’t.” She was then questioned by the Chief whether these officers were begging her to quash the matter, whether they were offering her money for that purpose, etc.

The Chief stated the reporters were hounding him to death, when the woman asked him “why he did not show her statement?” He replied it was locked up, “if they want any information they can get it from you.”

One of the men is still a member of the detective force. The other resigned and went into the saloon business, and appeared before the committee entering a partial denial of the woman’s story. The knowledge of the Chief of all the facts was fully shown before the committee. Notwithstanding this, he does not appear to have taken any steps to keep the matter before the trial board, or to institute any other proceedings to bring these detectives to punishment.

This is not at all surprising in the face of the fact that this officer is, as is shown in court proceedings, a veritable czar in his own estimation.

The following account is taken from the Chicago Democrat of May 27th ult. A similar report of the case is contained in the other dailies.

“Judge Brentano held, this morning, that Chief of Police K. did not have the power to have a man restrained of his liberty at his (K.’s) request. The decision was brought about on the hearing of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed by Attorney F. A. D. for the release of Edward H., who was arrested last Monday morning at Twenty-ninth and State streets on account of the shooting of Officer James S., which resulted from an attempt of a number of officers to enforce the disarmament-of-colored-people policy of the Chief of Police.

“The man had been confined in the county jail, and the return of the sheriff, when the prisoner was brought into court, read: ‘Edward H. has been detained in my custody at the request of J. K., Chief of Police for the city of Chicago.’ Judge Brentano evinced great displeasure when he read the return of the illegal detainment of the prisoner. ‘A man,’ said the court, ‘cannot be held at the simple request of K. or any other person. K.’s word is not sufficient to keep any man in custody. I won’t tolerate any such actions, for if the man was guilty of shooting an officer, or committing any other crime, Mr. K. has had sufficient time and knows how to take the proper steps to punish the prisoner.’

“‘The court certainly would not allow this man his liberty when he is under arrest and has not been booked or complained against before a justice of the peace owing to the neglect perhaps of such a high official as Mr. K.,’ remarked the assistant city prosecuting attorney.

“‘I certainly would, regardless of whose neglect it is,’ said the court. ‘The prisoner is discharged.’

“No witnesses were heard, the prisoner being discharged on the ground that it was shown in the return of the sheriff that H. was simply being detained to please Chief K.

“Attorney D. had witnesses in court to show that the prisoner had been beaten and injured by the police who arrested him, both before his arrival at the Twenty-second street station and after he was installed in a cell at that place.

“Prisoners who were in the station at the time H. was taken there were in court to testify that the officers who had charge of the prisoner beat and struck him in such a manner that they thought H. would be killed.

“The prisoner’s face and condition in court were the best evidences of the treatment he had received.

“Both of his eyes are closed, swollen and discolored to such a degree that they stand out in bold contrast to his own color, which is a dark copper. Two gashes, each six inches long, on the top and front of his head bear testimony to the means said to have been used by the officers in carrying out their chief’s new disarmament policy.

“It is also alleged that the prisoner was confined in a dungeon cell while he was in the custody of the Twenty-second street police.

“After his discharge the injured man had to be helped to the elevator by two of his friends because of his injuries. The names of the officers who assaulted the prisoner were not obtainable, for the reason that the prisoner had not been booked and the officer making the arrest had not signed any complaint.”

Two observations will arrest the attention of the average reader. They must naturally occur to his mind. First, What sort of a Sheriff is he who will keep a man in jail, without a proper commitment? Second, What kind of a lawyer must he be who will suggest to a court the propriety of depriving a man of his liberty, without due process of law, at the mere request of such “a high official” as the Chief of Police?

The return of the Sheriff in this case to the writ of habeas corpus should have been treated as a contempt of court.

Pool rooms are operating as of yore. The Daily News of May 27 ult. contains the following, viz.:

“The saloon of J. H. D. at E. and N. C. streets was converted into a pool room yesterday afternoon at the time the ticker began to record the winning horses in the races at the various tracks throughout the country. A dozen men assembled in the barroom where the ticker was located and placed bets, while a number of women sat in the back rooms and also chanced their money.

“The women’s wants were looked after by a young man who answered to the name of ‘Dude.’ After each race he carried them the slip printed from the ticker showing the winners and handed their money to those who had been lucky. During the interval between the races the schedule of the next race was discussed by all who intended to place money, and ‘Dude’ would come from the rear room with a handful of bills to place on some race by the women.

“On the inside money was passed over the bar indiscriminately and a clerk was busy keeping track of those who placed bets. From the conversation which passed between those in the barroom one might judge that he was in a genuine poolroom, where the interference of police was not to be feared.

“All the men present merely gave their initials when they risked their money, and these were carefully preserved on paper until the ticker decided whether the money was lost or won. The man who passed as ‘Dude’ had charge of the pools apparently, and all the money which was placed went through his hands. After taking it he would call the initials of the man placing the bet and then hand the money to the man behind the bar.”

The ticker was presided over by a large, smooth-faced, well-dressed man and anything which came over the machine which was not a report on a horse race was of no interest. The reports of the score at the various ball games were soon shown the waste basket, while the lists of the horses which earned places were preserved and hung on hooks after they had been carefully inspected by those present.

A number of stylishly dressed women were seen to enter the place, and, according to information furnished the Daily News, women have been in the habit of visiting the D. saloon for some time for the purpose of placing bets on the races. Two young women came from the direction of L. S. avenue about 4 o’clock and entered the place apparently as though it was nothing new to them.

“The ‘ladies’ entrance’ is on the E. street side. The rooms for women are arranged in the east half of the double-flat building on E. street, while the saloon faces on C. street.

“J. H. D., who conducts the place, came in yesterday afternoon while the betting was at its height, and, bedecked in diamonds, walked leisurely behind the bar and, picking up a Racing Form, turned to the ‘boys’ and asked how ‘things were going.’ He was told the winners in the races which had been reported during his absence and seemed pleased with what was told him.

“The saloon is known as ‘D.’s O. P. C.,’ and has been conducted at this place for the past five or six years. The license for the place is in the name of Mrs. J. H. D. It is said that D. was formerly in the saloon business here, but sold out and went to New York, where he put on a vaudeville show and sunk several thousand dollars trying to make it pay. He finally failed, it is said, and came back to Chicago and reopened his saloon.

“At the Chicago avenue police station nothing was known apparently of the gambling at the D. saloon on the races. Capt. R. said that he told a couple of his men some time ago to watch the place, but he said they had reported nothing irregular. The captain seemed surprised when he heard of how affairs were, and Inspector H. was apparently very indignant at the thought that anything of the sort was going on in his district. He at once gave the captain orders to send a couple of men to the place and if anything was found to be going on there to stop it.”

The result of the visit of the Inspector’s officers is thus stated in the Tribune of May 28th ult. Its headline is suggestive, in view of the particulars given in the Daily News of the occurrences by its reporter.

“REPORT NO GAMBLING.”

“A report that a poolroom was being conducted in the saloon of J. H. D., E. and N. C. Streets, was investigated yesterday by Detectives B. and R., who visited the place at 3 p. m., and reported no gambling existed there. It was said that during Friday afternoon bets on the races were accepted in the saloon and that men as well as women frequented the place.”

The newspapers contribute evidences of the absence of crime in Chicago, and of police operations as follows, viz.:

From the Daily News May 27th ult.

“Officers from the Attrill street police station are scouring the west side in an effort to apprehend burglars who created havoc in the vicinity of Humboldt Park boulevard and Western avenue during the early morning hours of yesterday. Among the residences visited by the night prowlers were those of: (Here follows a list of eleven burglaries.)

“In addition burglaries at the following places in the immediate neighborhood have been committed within the last few days: (Here follows a list of four burglaries.)

“One of the burglars rode from house to house on a bicycle. Two revolvers dropped by the visitors were found in the yard of the E. residence. The territory suffering the nightly raids is embraced in the suburb of Maplewood, and citizens have armed themselves in their own defense, asserting that police uniforms have not been seen on the streets concerned for weeks.”

From the Democrat May 27th ult.:

“Burglars forced an entrance into the store of the Guarantee Clothing Company, State street, last night and stole nearly $1,000 worth of goods.

“Apparently the thieves took their time, and the police say they must have used a wagon in removing the goods. Persons living in the flats above heard nothing unusual during the night, and the police are unable to comprehend how the thieves could remove the great amount of property without attracting attention.

“This morning a clerk opened the front door of the store. It looked as though a small cyclone had passed through the establishment.”

This burglary took place between two police stations, from neither of which it was far distant. It is probable that if one officer had gone over his beat just once that night, its perpetrators would have been caught in the act. Some neighboring saloon was, perhaps, more needful of police protection!

Some tremendous effort is being made, however, to suppress policy shops and clean out all night saloons! Witness the following, viz.:

From papers of May 27th ult.:

“Detectives D. and D. of Chief K.’s office raided a policy shop in the basement of the building at 6 Washington street last night and destroyed the fixtures of the place and confiscated the sheets, records and other paraphernalia.

“The shop was in a small room under the sidewalk and was reached through a barber shop. S. H., the police say, was the agent in charge of the place, and represented the O. R. & G. company of Fort Erie, Canada. No arrests were made, but Chief K. says the place will remain closed.”

“Two hours after midnight Sergt. M. and Officers M., O’B., H. and F., from the Harrison street police station, raided the C. L. saloon at State street, arresting sixty inmates. The majority of these were boys. There was one man with gray hair and wrinkled face.

“Shortly before the police court convened at 9 o’clock the entire crowd was marched into Inspector H.’s office and from there to the courtroom, where the cases were disposed of by Justice M. Every sort of a plea generally used in court was brought into play by the defendants. Some cases were dismissed, while other prisoners were fined $25 and $50. The police claim about half of those arrested were criminals.

“The arrests were made because of the large number of complaints against the saloon.”

The raid on the policy shop belongs to the spasmodic line of operations of the police. Fifty of them could be made if some mysterious reason did not exist why they are not made.

The saloon referred to belongs to the all night class, and is one of the most notorious of the kind. It has been protected in the past, and still would be if it were not for the fact that “a large number of complaints” have been made against it. These are not new to the police. They have been made before, but something must be done for appearance sake while the Baxter Committee continues its probing! That this place was a resort for criminals is not a recent discovery by the police. They always knew it.

To cull the press for proofs of the truth of the charges made in the foregoing pages, would result, in a few days, in the reproduction of a mass of evidence on the total inefficiency of the police force. Such as are here given are examples of the many the scissors could find.

The reader can multiply them, in his mind, ten fold in a week’s time, and then reach a result far short of the facts.

 

 

The whole story of the alliance between the police, the saloons and the justices is told in the following cartoon taken from the Daily News of June 23, 1899.

CAUGHT COMING AND GOING.

THE DIVEKEEPER (to Harrison street police officer)—“I’ve got my dollar a head out of them. Now you can drive them into court and give the justice his chance.”