The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities
George Kibbe Turner
AUTHOR OF "GALVESTON. A BUSINESS CORPΟRΑΤΙΟΝ,' ETC.
ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS AND VIEWS
It is certain that there is an immense amount of remediable misery among us. Unless this is effectually dealt with, the hordes of vice and pauperism will destroy modern civilization as effectually as uncivilized tribes of another kind destroyed the great social organizations which preceded ours.— Huxley.
DURING the past year three great American cities, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburg, have been swept by "waves of crime," so-called, sudden and unexplained outbursts of criminal violence. Women have been beaten down, men murdered, even street-cars robbed by highwaymen on the thoroughfares, with all the nonchalance of the wild and vacant frontier. This thing is not new; in some cities it is constantly recurring,— so constantly that it is questionable whether these "waves of crime" are not ordinary conditions, emphasized by chance and the special attention of the daily press. Why do these conditions exist ? What forces are there, hidden in American cities, which are dragging them, according to the record of their own press, into a state of semi-barbarism?
Chicago, in the mind of the country, stands preeminently notorious for violent crime. It is the second city on the continent: it is, all things considered, perhaps the most typically American of our cities; it is intimately known by millions; and its press is especially active and alert in the discussion of local affairs. The reputation of Chicago for crime has consequently fastened itself upon the imagination of the United States as that of no other city has done. it is the current conventional belief that the criminal is loose upon its streets, that the thug and hold-up man go patroling them by night.
Take Chicago, then, not because it is worse than or different from other cities of America, but, on the contrary, because it is so typical, and because it is so well known. Why have the primary basic guarantees of civilization broken down in Chicago? Why has that city, year after year, such a flood of violent and adventurous crime ? The answer can be simple and straightforward : Because of the tremendous and elaborate organization — financial and political — for creating and attracting and protecting the criminal in Chicago.
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The Great Business of Dissipation
The criminal is a savage, nothing more nor less. Civilization builds up painfully our definite, orderly rules of life,— work, marriage, the constant restraint of the gross and violent impulses of appetite. The criminal simply discards these laws and slides back again along the way we came up — into license, idleness, thieving, and violence. He merely lapses back into savagery. To understand the matter of crime in great cities, the first step is to measure the positive forces working continually to produce savagery there. These forces are to-day, as they always have been, greater than can easily be imagined.
The City—from scarlet Babylon to smoky Chicago—has always been the great marketplace of dissipation. In the jungle you would call this thing savagery. in the city there is a new side to it. The dweller of the city, true to the instincts of city life,— has made it a financial transaction. He has found it a great source of gain, of easy money. There has grown up, therefore, a double motive in promoting it,— the demand for the thing itself, and the stimulus of the great profit in providing it. You may call the sale of dissipation in the city, savagery by retail. Ethically considered, this thing is hideous beyond belief ; socially considered, it is suicidal. But to be understood and followed through intelligently, it must first be considered neither ethically nor socially. Its methods and motives are the methods and motives Of pure business and must be considered as such. There is no other way. That is what I must recognise in describing conditions in Chicago. 1 must talk cold business, as the saying goes. No emotion, no squeamishness, not even sympathy; simply a statement of fact.
$100,000,000 a Year for Alcoholic Liquor
The sale of dissipation is not only a great business ; it is among the few greatest businesses in Chicago. The leading branch of it — as you would naturally expect of the savage European stock from which we sprang —is the sale of alcoholic liquor. In the year 1906 the receipts in the retail liquor trade in Chicago were over $100,000,000 ; they were probably about $1 15,000,000. There was one retail interest greater than this. The sellers of food,—grocers and meat men,—had gross receipts of, perhaps, double these figures.
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At the same time, the liquor interests are vastly more extended in Chicago than any other. There are 7300 licensed liquor sellers in Chicago, and in addition about a thousand places where liquor is sold illegally. The only business which approaches this in number of establishments, according to the Chicago directory, is the grocery trade, which has about 5,200. The city spends at least half as much for what it drinks as for what it eats not counting the cost of the cooking and serving of food.
The great central power in the liquor business in America is the brewery. In the past thirty-five years, the per capita consumption of spirituous liquor in the United States has increased not at all. The per capita consumption of malt liquor has trebled. This increase has come, partly because of the demand fora milder drink, but largely also because of another fact :because the breweries own or control the great majority of the saloons of American cities. They have a distinct policy —If there
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supply them. This is what has been done in Chicago. Fully ninety per cent of the Chicago saloons are under some obligation to the brewery ; with at least eighty per cent, this obligation is a serious one.
The business of the brewery is to sell beer. There are excellent men in the brewing trade, but that fact has never interfered with the carrying out of the development of the industry to its utmost limit. It could not be allowed to do so. The brewery, under present conditions in Chicago, must sell beer at all cost, or promptly die. This is because the brewing business has been over-capitalized and overbuilt there for at least ten years. There has been furious competition — "beer-wars," which have left financial scars that are not yet and probably never will be entirely obliterated. And at the present time a full third of the capital invested in the forty companies and fifty plants is not earning dividends. Under these circumstances, the breweries of Chicago can have but one aim— to fill Chicago beer to the
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The Saturation of a Liquor Market
Each brewer disposes of his product by contracting with special saloon-keepers to sell his beer and no other. The more saloons he has, the better. Up to a year ago, there was absolutely no legal hindrance to the multiplication of saloons. The brewers employ special agents to watch continually every nook and cranny in Chicago where it may be possible to pour in a little more beer. If a rival brewery's saloon-keeper is doing well, his best bartender is ravished from him and set up in business alongside. If a new colony of foreigners appears, some compatriot is set at once to selling them liquor. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Poles, — all the rough and hairy tribes which have been drawn into Chicago,— have their trade exploited to the utmost. Up to last year, no man with two hundred dollars, who was not subject to arrest on sight, need go without a saloon in Chicago; nor, for that matter, need he now. The machinery is constantly waiting for him. With that two hundred dollars as a margin, the brewery sorts him out a set from its stock of saloon fixtures, pays his rent, pays his license, and supplies him with beer. He pays for everything in an extra price on each barrel of beer. The other supplies of his saloon,— liquor and cigars,— are bought out of his two hundred dollars cash capital.
Under this system of forcing, Chicago has four times as many saloons as it should have, from any standpoint whatever, except, of course, the brewers' and the wholesalers'. A new license law, passed last year, now limits the number to one in every five hundred people; but it will be years before that law will have any appreciable effect. There is now one retail liquor dealer to every two hundred and eighty-five people, disregarding, of course, the one thousand unlicensed dealers. In the laboring wards the licensed saloons run as many as one to every one hundred and fifty. Take the stock-yards. Around that long and dismal stockade, at every hole from which a human being can emerge, a shop or group of shops sits waiting. At the main entrance they lie massed in batteries. At the rear,—on Ashland Avenue, “Whisky Row!" To the north, the vileness of Bubbly Creek; to the east, the bare, gaunt, high-shouldered buildings of the yard; to the west and south, scattering, shabby dwellings. Just forty-eight saloons — and two that have recently died — housed in opposing rows of staggering wooden buildings, down a distance across which a strong man could throw a stone; located nowhere in particular in space, except due east of that ugly little hole in the stockade from which the men run out to drink in their brief half-hour's nooning.
The Chicago market is thoroughly saturated with beer, and incidentally with other liquor. Reckoning it out by population, every man, woman, and child in Chicago drank, in 1906, two and one-quarter barrels of beer,— that is, seventy gallons,— three and one-half times the average consumption
(579) in the United States. Each also drank about four gallons of spirituous liquor,— two and two-thirds times the average. The main object of the brewing business is well-fulfilled; the consumers of Chicago expended not less than $55,000,000 for beer in 1906.
Now, if the competition is red-handed among the breweries, it is simply ravenous among the saloon-keepers. There is a popular fallacy that there is great profit in the retail saloon business. The saloon - keepers themselves believe this when they go into it. The hope of easy money and easy life is the motive which brings men into this trade. Now, this is in reality the kind of business it is; — In the lean years between 1897 and 1901, one-third of the license-holders in Chicago gave up their licenses every year and were replaced by other licensees. In other words, one-third of the saloons of Chicago failed every year. In the Seventeenth Ward — a territory of working folk — a special study of the liquor business was made a year ago. in one block and a half, it was shown, eighteen saloons had been started and had died in the course of eighteen months. Of the saloon-keepers of Chicago, less than ten per cent have resources enough to entitle them to any rating by a commercial agency. The pressure of the brewery to sell beer almost crushes 'the retailer out of existence.
All this means one thing — a premium on the irregular and criminal saloon-keeper. The patronage of a saloon is a very fickle and elusive thing. A place is popular, or it is nothing. Consequently, the need of drawing and holding a good trade is imperative. There are two general business methods of attracting it: By giving unusually large measures and big bonuses of free lunch ; or by carrying illegitimate and illegal side lines. The first, generally speaking, does not leave large margins of profit; the second does. A year ago the license fee w as raised in Chicago from five hundred to one thousand dollars, it was hoped that this would wipe out the criminal saloon. It did, of course, nothing of the sort. The poor, miserable little dives in the working-man's ward, each snatching a starvation living from the lips of the dwellers of the dozen smoke-befouled frame tenements about it, staggered down—a few hundred of them — and died. The man with the. side-line of prostitution and gambling naturally survived and had the benefit of the others' failure.
So much for the great legalized branch of the sale of dissipation in Chicago. The net results of that free and undisciplined struggle have been two: The thorough saturation of Chicago —especially of the tenement districts—with alcoholic liquor; and a high and successful premium on the criminal saloon.
The effect of the latter can be told when the sale of other forms of dissipation is considered. The effect of the former is felt immediately and directly. A great part of the crime in Chicago is committed by men under the influence of drink. This is true
(580) in any city. But conditions in Chicago are peculiarly favorable to this class of crime.
A population of hundreds of thousands of rough and unrestrained male laborers, plied, with all possible energy and ingenuity, with alcoholic liquor, can be counted on, with the certainty of a chemical experiment, for one reaction — violent and fatal crime. There would be crime of this kind from such a population under any circumstances. But the facilities of Chicago double and treble it. The European peasant, suddenly freed from the restraints of poverty and of rigid police authority, and the vicious negro from the countryside of the South, — especially the latter,—furnish an alarming volume of savage crime, first confined to their own races, and later,— as they appreciate the lack of adequate protection,—extended to society at large. None of these folk, perhaps, have progressed far along the way of civilization; but under the exploitation in Chicago they slip back into a form of city savagery compared to which their previous history shows a peaceful and well-ordered existence. Their children are as quickly and surely rotted as themselves by the influence of the saloon upon the neighborhood of their homes.
$20,000,000 a Year for Prostitution
And now a short sketch of the second great business of dissipation.—prostitution. The
(581) gross revenues from this business in Chicago, in 1906, were $20,000,000— and probably more. There are at least ten thousand professional prostitutes. Average annual receipts of two thousand dollars each are brought in by these women. They do not themselves, however, have the benefit of this revenue. Much of it is never received by them. They are, in fact, exploited by large business interests.
There are four large interests which are concerned in the exploitation of prostitution. The first of these is the criminal hotels, the second is the houses of ill-fame, the third the cheap dance-halls and saloons, and the fourth the men — largely Russian Jews — who deal in women for the trade. There are large indirect interests,— such as, for instance, the leasing or subletting of tenements to the business, an operation which yields enormous percentages of profit,—but these are the four principal direct interests in the trade.
The hotels constitute probably the largest of these. There are two hundred and ninety-two of these houses known and recorded in Chicago,—with a capacity of ten thousand rooms. Twenty-one of them contain each one hundred rooms or over; the largest has two hundred and fifty. The gross receipts of these enterprises cannot be less than four million dollars a year; they are probably five million. The total amount expended there cannot be less than eight million dollars; it is probably ten million. These places have been extremely profitable, because their expenses are low, and their patronage is large. At present they are not so good an investment as formerly, because the city authorities — urged to action by a desperate woman's throwing herself out of an upper story window — have passed a hotel license ordinance, which is intended to do away with this business. The largest of the hotels, some of which have for some time pooled their legal and political interests in the hands of a manager, are now fighting this ordinance as unconstitutional.
Under ordinary conditions, — that is, when there is no particular agitation against them — there are at least three hundred and fifty good-sized houses of prostitution in Chicago. There are in all more than four thousand women in these. The annual gross receipts are not less than eight million dollars; they are more likely over ten million. These houses are disposed throughout the city according to the demand, which is affected to some extent by public opinion.
The profits of these houses are, of course, very large and quick. Much of the money made here is dissipated, yet there are at least half a dozen persons now interested in this business who are credited with fortunes running into the hundreds of thousands. Their profits are not only from their shares in the women's wages, but from excessive prices for liquor. They also secure large returns from furnishing clothing and other necessities of life to their employees, at prices ranging from one hundred to two hundred per cent higher than the usual retail price. By this system the wages of the women are largely secured by the proprietors of the establishments. The plan is not different in principle from the familiar "company store" system of the manufacturing and mining district. It is a first rule of the business, as generally conducted, to keep the employees continuously in debt, so that they are unable to leave the establishments unless the proprietors desire it.
The business of the small places, the flats, cannot be estimated, but it is very large and is growing constantly, especially since the official attacks which have frightened away custom from the criminal hotels. There are certainly not less than two thousand women in these flats, and annual expenditures are certainly not less than four million dollars. In some sections of the city there are scores of these small places. One building of over seventy apartments is said to contain nothing else.
The Dealers in Women
These places and the hotels cater to the demand for ruining young girls —especially the low-paid employees of department stores and factories, which furnish the majority of the English-speaking women in the profession in Chicago. The dance-halls and irregular saloons also take a part of the profit from this source. The direct business of supplying women to the trade, while not so large as these others, is also profitable. Some of the more enterprising of the keepers of the regular houses of ill-fame have private arrangements with men, who ruin young girls for their use. Most of the young women who come into the business in this way do so before reaching the age of nineteen.
The largest regular business in furnishing women, however, is done by a company of men, largely composed of Russian Jews, who
(582) supply women of that nationality to the trade. These men have a sort of loosely organized association extending through the large cities of the country, their chief centers being New York, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans. In Chicago they now furnish the great majority of the prostitutes in the cheaper district of the West Side Levee, their women having driven out the English-speaking women in the last ten years. From the best returns available, there are some ten or a dozen women offered for sale at the houses of prostitution in the Eighteenth Ward every week. The price paid is about fifty dollars a head. In some exceptional cases seventy-five dollars has been given. This money, paid over to the agent, is charged up to the debt of the woman to the house. She pays, that is, for her own sale. In addition, she gives over a large share of her earnings to the man who places her.
Cocaine: A Highly Profitable Drug
There is a minor business, financially speaking, which is closely connected with prostitution: this is the selling of cocaine. The average life of a woman in the business of prostitution ranges from five to ten years. She is, of course, continually drinking alcoholic stimulants. Later, however, these do not satisfy the women, and toward the end of their career they acquire some drug habit. Formerly they depended largely on morphine. During the past ten years, however, cocaine has come into general use. This drug is very attractive to persons who are unfortunate or despondent. It produces an extravagant feeling of buoyancy and well-being. Although taken by many persons throughout the country, especially by negroes, it is now recognized generally to be the special drug of the prostitute. The chief markets for it in Chicago follow very closely the markets of prostitution. In its effect this is much quicker than any other drug habit, through its action upon the brain cells. After a time the taker is subject to various acute hallucinations — the most characteristic of which is the belief that worms are crawling just underneath the skin. The cocaine-taker in this condition often slashes his skin with a knife in the attempt to get them out. Death is likely to come within two or three years from the unrestricted use of the drug, although some individuals survive for a long time. It is largely a question of temperament.
The profit on the retail sale of cocaine is very large, running as high as three or four hundred per cent, as the drug is usually heavily adulterated with acetanilid. There have always been, consequently, a number of drug stores and some saloons at which it could be obtained by its users. Various estimates of the number of the takers of this drug in Chicago have been made, — many of them extravagant. The number of confirmed users in the city probably does not exceed seven thousand. It is more likely about five thousand. A great proportion of these are prostitutes. At the same time, the drug is exceedingly convenient to take, the crushed crystal or flake — according to the common custom — being merely snuffed up from the back of the hand; and on this account its use spreads easily. Boys, especially messengers and newsboys, are apt to experiment with it, and many young men in the early twenties acquire the habit. Deprived of their drug, these men often resort to petty crime and sometimes to violent crime to secure means to get it. The drug fiends are usually ghastly in appearance; a grim sight is afforded by the procession of haggard women who appear in the gray light of the early morning to secure the drug from the big dealers on the West Side Levee.
The chastity of woman is at the foundation of Anglo-Saxon society. Our laws are based upon it, and the finest and most binding of our social relations. Nothing could be more menacing to a civilization than the sale of this as a commodity. To the average individual woman concerned, it means the expectation of death under ten years; to practically all the longer survivors a villainous and hideous after-life. There is a great profit in this business, however. Chicago has it organized—from the supplying of young girls to the drugging of the older and less salable women out of existence—with all the nicety of modern industry. As in the stock-yards, not one shred of flesh is wasted.
$15,000,000 a Year for Gambling
The third large business of dissipation in Chicago is gambling. In an average year —1906, for example, — its gross receipts cannot be less than fifteen million dollars. Policy shops, the race-track, and open pool-rooms and gambling-houses have been quite generally closed out in Chicago during the past
(583) few years. The largest gambling interest is now the making of "handbooks" on the horse races. The gross receipts from this must be above twelve million dollars a year. During the latter part of 1906, when the business was running with comparative freedom, there were at least five hundred agents of "handbook" systems in Chicago. These systems are in the hands of a few favored gamblers or groups of gamblers, who have their arrangements so nicely made that they can divide the territory of the city between them ; and no newcomer can enter the field without their consent. if he does, he is raided by the police. Besides these "handbook men" there is a floating pool-room—the steamer, "City of Traverse," owned by a large number of professional gamblers — which is supposed to leave South Chicago and run out of the city limits into Lake Michigan, although, as a matter of fact, it does not always do so.
In addition to the receipts from this betting on the horse races, there was in 1906 at least two million dollars net revenue from general gambling in Chicago. General open gambling is not in evidence, but there are large games, in a few specially favored places, and many smaller ones, open to those who have inside information, throughout the city. Altogether, the gambling interests in 1906 took at least seven million dollars in gross profits out of the Chicago public; doubtless the amount was considerably larger.
Dissipation and Food Supplies
The dealers in dissipation in Chicago, then, have a total revenue of at least one hundred and thirty-five million dollars a year,— that is, receipts at least two-thirds as large as those of the retail grocers and meat men. There are more than forty thousand persons directly employed by them. This is one of the few greatest businesses of the city, but beyond that it bears a relation to society and government which nothing else can bear. Every cent of that great sum of money is taken in, and every action of that great company of proprietors and employees takes place either under the strict regulation of law, or in direct defiance of it.
The business can be divided into two general classes. in the first, the dealers — including the brewers, the wholesale liquor dealers, and the great majority of the saloon-keepers —have no direct interest in breaking the law, although they all may profit indirectly, and some of them do profit to a great extent, because of the breaking of the law by others. But the first interest of this class is to resist the constant attacks of its enemies looking toward the further restriction of its trade. It must, therefore, be continually in politics. Its political alliances are naturally with the other interests of dissipation. The members of the second class,— the dealers in prostitution and gambling, and the criminal saloonkeepers,— must violate the law to exist. They consequently have made careful business arrangements to break the law. To do this, they also must go into politics.
The gross receipts of this illegal class of business are some forty-five million dollars a year. About four-fifths of this— thirty-five million dollars — is concentrated in the chief markets of dissipation near the center of the city — for the sale of dissipation, in any city, merely follows the natural laws of trade and locates where the demand is, near the large centers of population. In two downtown wards of Chicago,— the First and the Eighteenth — are situated five-sixths of the criminal saloons and of the dealers in prostitution, and at least two-thirds of the gambling interests. The owners of these enterprises turn over the organization of their political business to the natural agent — the ward boss.
The business of the political boss has not always been clearly understood. The boss is simply a middle-man. He buys votes and sells privileges. He pays for his votes either in cash or in privileges; he sells his privileges either for cash or its equivalent, or for votes. The difference between his income and outgo of money is, of course, his personal profit. The direction of the political business of concerns with a gross annual income of thirty-five million dollars and the peculiar necessities of the sellers of vice, naturally offers unusual financial opportunities to the Ward Boss. It is not surprising, therefore, that the bosses of Wards One and Eighteen in Chicago are remarkable figures and wealthy men.
"Hinky-Dink"and "Bath-House John"
Considering both worlds,— the upper and the under,— the bosses of the First Ward in Chicago are the most widely known men in political life, which that city has ever produced. "Hinky-Dink" (Michael Kenna), the older, ex-bootblack and newsboy, is the keeper of the greatest tramps' saloon on the continent. He is a wise, silent, dapper little
(584) man of about fifty; straight as a die in his personal relations; a virtuoso in the English language. When he speaks in anger, his words leave scars. " Bath-house John" (John J. Coughlin) —a large, pompous, poetic temperament — rose from the work of a rubber in a Turkish bath-house to his present occupation as insurance broker and active ward boss. He dresses like a bartender's dream of Beau Brummel, a bottle-green dress suit being his highest sartorial achievement; he also hires a man to write poetry for him, to appear under his name. The rulers of the Eighteenth Ward have been less successful. John J. Brennan, the older,— a gruff, husky, generous old saloon-keeper, adored by his ward,— has, in fact, served a term in the House of Correction for the clumsy buying of votes. His health has failed since that experience. He has now the appearance of a broken-down prize-fighter. The junior boss, M. C. Conlon, was formerly a keeper of an unsavory saloon near the Union Station and is now interested as a silent partner in various enterprises for the sale of dissipation.
These four men have the absolute power of political dictators in Wards One and Eighteen; they are aldermen and ward heads of the Democratic party; they select the political machinery of the ward for their party and control it in the other. As political agents of the business interests of dissipation, they have unlimited funds. They operate throughout the year a finely organized business for the handling of votes. The main aims of this business are two: first, the control of the ward; second, and vastly more important, the production of a Democratic majority so large that they can secure from the city administration the right for the business interests they represent to break the law in their wards.
The Business of Ward Politics
The business organization for getting Votes is the same in principle in both wards. But it is more clean-cut in the First. The organization of this is, in fact, so admirable of its kind that it is worth describing as a fine illustration of the organization of the wards of dissipation, not only in Chicago, but throughout the country. There are thirty-four captains of voting precincts in this ward. Half of these are proprietors of questionable saloons, at least six are dealers in prostitution; the majority of the remainder are "job-holders" under the city administration. in addition, there are, of course, specialists to handle special votes. One or two captains are connected with tramps' lodging-houses. Two negro gamblers, who do not appear on the official list of precinct captains, take care of the negro vote. Italian saloon-keepers, one of them an ex-convict, handle the Italians. Two of the most important of the precinct captains are former professional criminals, who are known to professional thieves and burglars all over the country.
These are the official working representatives cf the Democratic party in the ward. Most of these are engaged in the business of dissipation. But every one in this business is vitally concerned in the politics of the ward,— every one down to the last man. For instance. There was a candidate running not long ago in one of these two downtown wards. One afternoon he was sent for by the proprietor of a well-known saloon. A delegation of sleek-looking foreigners met him in a rear room of this man's place. "How do you stand to our business ?" asked the spokesman. " We are eighty-five in this ward, and we control five votes apiece,— four hundred and twenty-five votes." "What is your business?" said. the young candidate. They were the professional dealers in women for prostitution.
The buying of voters begins, of course, with registration. But before that, lodging-houses must send in to the election board their lists of guests, to show who is eligible to vote. The lodging-houses, being practically all in the political machine, send in the fullest lists possible. The largest numbers are given by the tramps' hotels. Others are listed from empty buildings, saloons, and houses of prostitution. One precinct — the Fifteenth in Ward One, said to be the largest in voters and the smallest in area in the United States,— has listed as high as fifteen hundred. Last fall a precinct captain listed seventy-six voters from his large house of prostitution. Only one voter was finally found to live there.
From the standpoint of the buyers of votes there are two classes of voters in Wards One and Eighteen :— the common "town bum " and the "hobo, the members of the great body of the " lost nerves," — the poor, docile individuals, softened by dissipation, who are good for one or two votes apiece; and the aggressive and courageous repeater, who is willing to take what
(585) the under world knows as a " stir chance" (penitentiary chance). These latter are generally professional criminals of some kind. The handling of each of these two classes is along entirely distinct lines.
Rounding Up the ` Lost Nerves"
The vagrant vote is secured by paying its board for some days before election and by giving it the market price for registering and voting. The greatest share of the purchased vote is now secured from this source, because there is very little danger in this kind of a transaction. Even if a precinct captain is seen paying over money, it is practically impossible to prove what that money is paid for. The one risk comes in your man being a spy or a traitor. Every precaution is taken to insure against this. As election comes on, the " lost nerves " begin to stir in the low saloons and to talk practical politics. In other words, they begin to determine whether the most important contest is to take place in the First or the Eighteenth Ward. When they decide this, they take up their residence in the ward where the most money is to be expended and get in touch with the political machine. They are then, for as long a time as they can arrange, placed in the tramps' lodging-houses at the expense of the ward management. Besides lodging, they receive an allowance of perhaps a quarter of a dollar a day for food. A numbered check, often, is pasted to the great bar of iron hitched to the room key of the lodging-house to insure its return to the hotel desk. This check is good for credit in cheap eating-houses. The prospective voter now becomes temporarily a part of the political organization and helps to protect its interests. The chief concern is to guard against the suspicious outsider. For this purpose "The Secret Order of Hoboes," an unofficial but roughly effective organization, takes form. There are secret hand-grips and, more important than these, the secret signs to the lodging-house clerk or the fellow-members,— a forefinger against the chin, a hand on the lapel of the coat. In the office of the tramps' lodging-house, where the dirty bundles that were men slump down in their chairs along the wall, wise eyes are watching continually the unknown man.
The Criminal and the Political Machine
The handling of this plain vagrant Vote is comparatively simple. But the handling of the repeater is more delicate and silent work. About election time there is a general drift toward Chicago in the professional criminal world. This naturally varies. Sometimes the visitors are few; sometimes, as in one memorable election in the First Ward a decade ago, they drift around town in "mobs." But generally speaking, it is known that this is an easy time for criminals in Chicago. Old friends gather in; the many criminal craftsmen Chicago has sent out into the world make it a time of home-coming. There are two particular saloons where they especially congregate, — places kept by two precinct captains, down on lower State Street in Ward One. The keeper of the one further south is himself an ex-safe-blower and a man of national reputation in his craft. The other precinct captain, Andy Craig, served his term in Joliet for stealing jewelry. For a decade, giving up that occupation, he has flourished, perennially young, as the keeper of a large department store in vice, on lower State Street, where he sells liquor, prostitution, and gambling under the special favor of those on high. A "capper" —a pale, lemon-blond young man, with rakish hat and cigar, — stands outside, after the fashion of the caller for the cheap museum, and confidentially tolls in the bands of roving males.
The value of the stout-hearted repeater is evident from pure mathematics. Twenty-five men going down twenty precincts means five hundred votes. All men of nerve can have their special uses. Pickpockets and confidence men, who present an especially good appearance, make excellent repeaters. "Strong-arm men " and husky tramps do well to hold back the voting line or pick a row to discourage soft-handed voters. The high-class burglar — the aristocrat of crime — naturally does not take chances with this work, but nearly all the ordinary run of criminals is available. Throughout the year, in their summer wanderings out into the country, many of these men keep in continued touch with the machine at home. When they get "in a jam" (arrested) they write to the political agent, or address their other friends in his care. The connection which the criminal forms in this manner with the machinery of government is invaluable to him.
The consummation of the year's work comes in the city elections in the spring. Election day is business in Ward One, and
(586) there is great pride in this fact. The precinct workers are lodged the night before in some hotel, at the organization's expense. They get up clear-headed and early. At dawn men go about the streets with giant fire-crackers, waking the sleepers in the lodging-houses. They are given a free morning drink—"a scrub of the brush." Then they go out into the gray morning, ready for their work — the early voting is what counts. These men are thrown into the polling-places at six o'clock; by the time the city is half awake, a good share of the voting has been done. The price of a vote is determined upon. This does not take long, for the market price is generally arrived at through the simple working of demand and supply. Then the voter is handed his name on a slip of paper, or sometimes a marked ballot for deposit. He goes into the booth, returns to the precinct worker, and is paid — formerly, in the less careful days, in cash; now often with slips of paper, to be cashed in later at some place agreed upon.
The exact cost of an election in the First and Eighteenth Wards would be difficult to estimate, even to those who have access to the most intimate bookkeeping of the organization. There are so many irregular items, like the boarding of individual voters for days and even for weeks. Perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars might be an average estimate for Ward One. Opinions vary widely. So many persons are concerned, not only in taking, but in handling the money. The demand at different elections varies so. Recently prices paid for votes have been getting very low. At the registration of last fall, ten Cents was all that was offered in the early day. Later a quarter was paid. There was much dissatisfaction expressed at these rates. For Votes, cash prices paid lately are quoted from fifty cents up to as high as three dollars a head.
The Machinery of Protection
By this careful organization and large expenditure of money, the traders in dissipation have been able to make, through the ward boss, excellent terms with the city administrations. You might think this would be difficult to do with decent mayors — such as Chicago has had continuously for the past ten years. You are wrong. The First and Eighteenth Wards have had, so far as the administration was concerned, about all the privilege that was necessary for the carrying on of their business during that time. I do not mean there is any distinct agreement by an administration to protect this business. Rarely, if ever, has there been this in recent years. All that is needed is a tacit acquiescence in local political custom. The thing is indeed a very simple matter of routine politics. The leaders of these wards have in their hands the absolute power of giving or withholding a majority of seventy-five hundred votes for the Democratic party. The city is naturally very nicely balanced politically between the two parties. Wards One and Eighteen are therefore the leaders in the Democratic organization. The ward rights sentiment is very strong in Chicago; in its government, in fact, it is really more a confederacy of wards than a city. Immediately after election each ward makes demand for its special patronage from the administration. Now, the First and Eighteenth Wards demand and get much. They have always insisted upon one thing — the choice of their police court judges and of their police officials. This they have always had.
Until the present time the local criminal courts in Chicago have been in charge of the police magistrate, one of the relics of the old town government, of which Chicago has been full. Sixty justices of the peace were nominated by the circuit-court judges in Cook County; were appointed by the governor, and confirmed by the senate of the State. It was this transaction, undoubtedly, which excited in the mind of George E. Cole, the abrupt and active Chicago reformer, the pessimism which led him to exclaim: " I wouldn't trust the judges to appoint a committee to lead my dog to the pound!" From these sixty justices of the peace, the mayor chose and assigned to the different districts in the city, sixteen police magistrates. The First and Eighteenth Wards secured exactly the police magistrates they desired. The relation between these officials and the leaders of the wards were so close and informal, that the leaders, in many instances, did not trouble to arrange in person for the justice to be meted out to their various unfortunate constituents. It was a common occurrence, in at least one court, for a ward leader's assistants to telephone before the morning session the disposition he desired to have made of the various cases which had been called to his attention.
The arrangement with the police force is an easy matter. The administration can be relied upon in one way or another to respect
(587) the wishes of the ward in regard to this service. And the police department furnishes a large supply of exactly the officials desired by the interests of these wards.
Two Cities of Savages
Under this system of protection from the law, there has been established in Chicago a condition unique in this country. The center of Chicago, all things considered, is the cheapest market of dissipation in Caucasian civilization. The prices in European cities, no doubt, are absolutely lower, but relative to the ease of obtaining means to spend, either by begging or stealing or casual labor, they are not to be compared with the great, rough, bountiful American city. A full quart of beer is sold in the saloon for five cents; prostitution is as low as ten cents. As for the expense of living, a lodging for the night costs five and ten cents, and meals, if you buy them, can be had as low as a nickel. With ten cents — five cents for a bed and five cents for a glass of beer, and access to the free lunch —a man may cover the space of twenty-four hours and pay his way. A "town bum" in Chicago said recently: "1 have not had my legs under a table for six years."
Chicago is the great inland center of the country; trains by hundreds drop in there every day. Around it is the best territory in the world for tramping and for casual labor; about it, in an unholy ring, stand penitentiaries by the dozen. And when the service and the tramping and the casual labor are done, the criminals and the half-criminals and the quarter-criminals come drifting back into Chicago. They come there by choice, of course: for one chief reason. There they can enjoy, with the least disturbance, at the lowest cost, cheap dissipation — the kind of life they wish to live. Nights, the ten-cent lodging-house. Days, and the long evenings, the "barrel house"— that curious dive so strangely like the thieves' den of the Middle Ages. `Town bums" are there, jerky, pompous cocaine fiends, "gay-cats," and "hoboes," blown in from the four corners of the earth; and in the evening, those great husky, hideous beggars who hitch and crawl about the Chicago streets by day; and now and then the real tramp-burglar — the "yeggman," with his bag of "soup" across the soft muscles of his belly, — nitroglycerine enough to blow the whole unlikely company back to limbo.
In the center of Chicago are now two small cities of savages — self-regulating and self-protecting. In one of these there are thirty-five thousand people; in the other, thirty thousand. It is a region of adults—one child in every eight or nine people, while there is one in three in the general population of the city. The inhabitants neither labor regularly nor marry. Half of the men are beggars, criminals, or floating laborers; a quarter are engaged in the sale of dissipation; and a third of the women are prostitutes. A great share of the men spend most of their waking hours thoroughly drugged with cheap alcohol. Society here has lapsed back into a condition more primitive than the jungle.
The Price of Protection
It would be difficult to estimate the cash payment which must be made every year by the interests of dissipation, for the privilege of breaking the law. So many people receive the money, so many give it out. There is such a variation from time to time. However, there cannot be less than five hundred thousand dollars a year paid out now. There is probably much more. Prostitution pays at least two hundred and fifty thousand; the remainder is largely paid by gambling.
The best and most businesslike collection for protection takes place, naturally, in the greatest and best organized center of dissipation,— Ward One. In the first place, there are the transactions with which every one is familiar. The Junior Alderman, "Bath-house John," as an insurance agent, sells his policies, not only to the saloon-keepers and houses of prostitution in the ward, but to the great business houses in the district. He also sells, through his business partner, a large quantity of whisky.
Once a year, in the early winter, comes the annual Ward One Democratic Club Ball. The proceeds of this go into the hands of the two aldermen who themselves constitute this club, supposedly for use in their reëlection. This enterprise is conducted with the excellent, orderly sense of business which marks all the operations of this ward. A manager is appointed to take charge of all details. Last December this was Sot Friedman, the partner of Coughlin. A certain number of fifty-cent tickets are then apportioned to those who must take them. Saloons are allotted from fifteen to twenty-five dollars' worth apiece; houses of ill-fame
(588) from one hundred to two hundred dollars' worth, and large gamblers five hundred dollars' worth or more. It is not desirable for the takers, having bought, to stay away. What is wished is to get all the tickets possible in the hands of "spenders." Then comes the ball — a short evening and a long early morning; outrageous carnival that swells and burgeons under the huge, hollow vault of the coliseum, to cyclopean outbursts of animal joy; a general blur of blue tobacco-smoke and red slippers and cosmetics; two thousand women of the town, dancing or filling the stalls at the edges of the floor. But underneath it all, the man with the pad and pencil watches, and the man with the cash register at the endless bar, checking up the required amount of dissipation,— the wine which every tributary concern must buy. The receipts from the last hall were thirty-three thousand five hundred dollars — twenty-five thousand dollars for the tickets and eight thousand five hundred for drink. The expenses are not large, and net profits of the night of December 10th must have been at least twenty-seven thousand five hundred dollars.
All this, of course, though open and significant, is a small matter. There remains the weekly or monthly routine collection from the enterprises in the ward. The big general Levee district, nearly all in the boundaries of Ward One, is visited by regular collectors. Their rates vary from time to time. In December they ranged from twenty-five to fifty dollars a month for the protection of houses of prostitution, according to the size of the business. This price was very low compared with the prices of previous years. The money was handed to the collecting-agent,— in bills, of course, and, of course, there were no receipts given. The payment settled both the claims of the ward authorities and the police. In return for this, the contributor was entitled to an advance notice from the police of any new regulations which were to be temporarily imposed on the district, and a further notice afterward as to when it was all right to return to former methods of business. To enter this business, it was necessary to get in touch with the ward officials and the police.
The " System " in the Police Department
The purchase of the police in Chicago is made simple by the fact that the upper half of the force,— that is, the half that furnishes the officials, — came into the service when the police force was freely and frankly for sale to the interests of dissipation. Of course, not all of the officials of the Chicago police force are for sale. It is clear, however, that the dealer in dissipation could not receive adequate protection unless there were a thorough organization in the police department, to see that this was given. Otherwise, there might be, at any time, some individual officer or official, who would blunder in and attempt to enforce the law. There is, as a matter of fact, just such an organization. 1 It is not a formal thing; naturally, it does not elect officers or pass by-laws ; but, in a large sense, it is just as efficient. It is spoken of as the System.
The System comes about very simply. The influence of the ward bosses in the districts of dissipation secures from the administration the police officials they desire. These officials see that the men under them carry out the business agreements which they themselves make with the leaders of the ward. If a new policeman does not enter into relations with the System or acquiesce in its working, he is "jobbed." That is, by various technical charges against him by his superior officer, he is kept under continual suspicion and finally either shipped off to some outlying district of the city or even discharged from the department on trumped-up charges. The Chicago department is now under civil service and has been for ten years, but this effective and simple method makes it possible to beat the civil service rules and to organize the force so that the required protection can be guaranteed to the interests of dissipation
Inside the department there is either an astonishing fear of this System or a loyalty to it that is simply amazing. Occasionally, however, a revolt discloses its methods of operation. An interesting example of this came in the case of the discharge of Lieutenant Roger Mulcahy, last year. Mulcahy did two things which two police officers could not stomach. A labor leader met in a saloon a negro, took offense at something he said, and wantonly shot him in the leg; the man's leg was afterwards amputated. About the same time a well-known negro was arrested and shown to have had a wholesale career in a vile crime which was terrifying the whole vicinity. Both men had strong political influence. Mulcahy, the police-lieutenant, because of this influence, brought them up on
(589) minor charges before the court and arranged the machinery for their discharge. The two policemen went into rebellion. "There are some things I won't stand for," said one, with a great oath. They themselves took the matter to the Grand Jury, and both of the criminals were severely punished. In the meanwhile, Mulcahy had started out after the two rebels in the usual fashion of the System. In the two months before the Grand Jury acted, Mulcahy had one man up five times on minor charges before the police trial board. In May he recommended the discharge of the other man from the department for drunkenness. He was going through, in fact, the usual forms of "jobbing." This time, however, the process had disastrous results. The men were retained with honor, and developments at their trial brought about the discharge of the lieutenant himself.
The Price of the Police
There must be, at a conservative estimate, two hundred thousand dollars a year paid over to the police, for protection to the business of dissipation. Just where that money goes into the department is, of course, almost impossible to tell. It is a matter of fact, for instance, that the gambling squad — eight or ten men under the personal command of the Chief of Police — sit and watch the operations of "handbook" makers and even bet themselves. It is also a fact that when personal information has been given to the Chief of Police concerning a betting-place, that place has been perfunctorily raided and has been in operation again a half hour after this was done. But it would be impossible to demonstrate from this evidence that the present Chief of Police was paid to protect gambling in Chicago. It is true that criminal saloons and houses of prostitution have an understanding with the police that they may violate the law until some one protests, and that then they will be notified by the police and kept in touch with the situation until it is advisable for them to resume the practices which are objected to. But who gets the pay for this and what the pay is, has not yet been determined with legal exactitude. It is worth while, perhaps, as showing the possibilities in the case, to recall that one ex-chief of police said, in a burst of confidence, that he had put away one hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars during his few years of office.
The Break-Down of the Police Force
The result of all this is not difficult to imagine. The City Council of Chicago, in the paroxysm of excitement over the reign of crime of a year ago, voted for one thousand new policemen, most of whom have now been added to the force. It was asserted then that there were not men enough to protect that great and wide-lying city. This was certainly true, but it was an understatement of the case. The exact condition was stated by Captain Alexander R. Piper, an expert who, with Roundsman William F. Maher of New York, made a special investigation of the Chicago police in 1904. He said in summing up: "t is not necessary for me to tell you that you have practically no protection on your streets. You all know it, and you know how seldom you see an officer at night. Your patrolmen pull the box on the hour or half-hour and then lounge in their holes or some saloon." These conditions exist to-day.
The reason for all this is clear. The business of dissipation, working through ward politics, has bought the protection of the Chicago police force. This fact necessarily deprives the police force of its usefulness to the public. The officials who are actually receiving pay for granting protection are in a combination to break the law. This combination extends below them to a certain extent into the department; and it encourages, of course, every patrolman who is at all dishonest to break or help to break the laws. Various members of the force have, in the past, formed alliances with criminals; and the relation was so close with them that patrolmen' have actually arranged burglaries through professional craftsmen. The force itself contains also quite a number of criminals: men who have been convicted from time to time of crimes ranging from shoplifting to burglary. Indeed, it is a fact that criminals, attracted by the possible chances of profits, are continually trying to get into the department. In a recent call for four hundred and fifty men, thirty-five applicants were found to have criminal records. Of course, there can be no discipline under these conditions. There is, as Rounds-man Maher said, practically no patroling. There is continual loafing on the beat, with petty grafting down at the bottom of the department. The condition of the department is summed up in the statement, that in
(590) two years, 1904 and 1905, over half the force was before the police trial board for one cause or another.
Organization for Exploiting Savagery
The addition of the police force completes the great organization for the exploitation of savagery in the City of Chicago. The dealer in dissipation, the ward boss, and the police official are its chief members. I have tried to show clearly the simple and inevitable process by which this organization was built up. A business interest absolutely against the law must make positive arrangements to break the law in order to exist. It buys the right to do this out of its huge income — first, politically, through its business agent, the ward boss; and, second, by the purchase of the authorities which society employs to protect itself,—particularly the police. In doing this it consolidates every influence hostile to well-organized society, from the robber and prostitute to the corrupt police official, in a great body whose continual influence is to impair or break down civilization.
The one clue to the workings of this organization is the money of dissipation which finances it. Every dollar of this, it might be said, is subtracted from the sum total of the assets of the civilization of Chicago. The making of savages is not likely to be interfered with greatly so long as it merely costs some hundreds or thousands of individual lives a year. Society does not busy itself sufficiently with the affairs of its members for this. But, unfortunately, the savages, once created and located in a city, begin to reach out and prey upon the civilized and orderly population about them. They must find their own living according to their own methods. There is continual tribute levied; and, now and then, when the season is ripe, or some other particular conditions exist, there break out those "waves of crime" which terrify and anger the population which is preyed upon.
Hold-Ups— The Raids of Criminals
The great specialty of Chicago crime is, of course, the hold-up: that is, the robbery on the open street. This is either the work of the savages who congregate in the First and Eighteenth Wards, or of the young foreigners who are taught by the example of these men and stimulated by their early education in dissipation and their personal knowledge of the opportunities offered by the absence of proper police regulation. They are looking for easy money, and they know of no simpler method to secure it than this. Nothing more absolutely fish-blooded and inhuman has been produced by modern civilization than the type of the "car-barn bandits," who shot down human beings with exactly the same dispassionate accuracy that they employed against the rocking images in the State Street shooting galleries of Ward One, where they created, night after night, their astonishing skill with fire-arms. The most disturbing thing about all these hold-ups is, naturally, the cold certainty of their producing just so many murders and just so many violent assaults year after year.
It is this one particular thing — the murderous street robbery—which more than all others has given Chicago its reputation for crime. This is not the only point, however, at which the savages overrun the city. Burglaries are much too frequent,— not high-class jobs, but mostly the cheap and violent work which must be expected from the irruption of the low-class criminal from the territory of cheap dissipation. Morning after morning the vigorous beggars move out over the boundaries of savagery and limp and crawl and wriggle down the Chicago streets. When the weather is right to gather them in, and they feel the courage of numbers and the sharp necessities of the season,— as they have during the past winter,— the beggar and the "hobo" easily become the hold-up man.
The Murders of Dissipation
The murders of Chicago are generally personal matters between the savages. The great exception, of course, is when the savage, in his attacks on members outside his class, finds it necessary or advisable to kill his prey. There is a strong belief that murder in America is increasing because of our failure to enforce the death penalty. This, no doubt, has its influence. But the murders in Chicago are principally murders of dissipation and passion, committed by individuals who never calculated in their life the chances of the death penalty, and certainly never could consider it, in their mental condition at the time the murder was committed. The only authority which could possibly touch their imagination would be the visible symbol of an honest and efficient police force—which they do not have. Of one hundred
(591) and eighty-seven homicides in Chicago, from December 1, 1904, to December 1, 1905, one hundred and seventy-five were by shooting, stabbing, or blows; and only three by poison. Of the one hundred and seventy-six in the year closing last December 1st, one hundred and sixty-seven were by shooting or other violent means, and only eight by poisoning. These murders were hasty, savage acts of a crude population, and not in the least the calculating crimes of a calmer and more intellectual civilization. But the loss of life among the savages themselves is alarming. The death-rate from murder in Chicago is six or eight times greater than in the cities of Great Britain, and twenty or twenty-five times greater than in the cities of Germany. In Europe it is only approached and surpassed in the black murder belt of Lower taly.
The Real Organizer of Vicious Politics
There are two chief exploiters of the cities of America, — the public service corporation and the business of dissipation. Attention has been directed during the past few years almost entirely to the former. It has become the orthodox belief that the public service corporation was the original corrupter of American cities. This is not true, especially in large cities. Long before the public service corporation existed, the corrupt ward politics of cities was organized by the business of dissipation. When the corporation arrived for the first time in that murky region, it found the herd already there,—feeding, feeding, feeding on the rich filth of the sale of savagery. The corporation merely dumped its contribution in and left it in the general pile. The leaders of the herd may find their provender in the largess of the corporation, but the herd itself, the organization of the ward, has always been and will continue to be nourished by the vastly greater interests of dissipation. As a matter of fact, it does not receive mere gifts from these interests as it does from the corporation. The members of the political organization take the profits themselves. They are not in ward politics; they are ward politics. And this business divides millions of dollars, while the corporation divides hundreds of thousands, in American city politics.
The City of Chicago is just completing a splendid victory over corrupt public service corporations. It is now turning its attention to this second great business interest which is debauching it. This will be far more difficult to fight than the other one. The difference can be stated by mere statistics. The gross receipts of the surface street railways, which the City of Chicago has at last brought into reasonable subjection, are sixteen million dollars a year—that is, only four-fifths of the receipts for prostitution. If you add to that sum the receipts of the elevated roads, you have twenty-three million dollars as the entire receipts of the traction interests in Chicago. This amount is less than two-thirds of the annual receipts for prostitution and gambling in the City of Chicago. But this is only a partial statement. The profits and the political necessities of the business of dissipation are incomparably greater than those of the public service corporation. The time is coming very soon when the American city is to make a scientific study of the sale of dissipation. A start, indeed, has already been made. A reasonable regulation of the saloons, for example, as against the present hideous struggle for business, must be undertaken. But these matters will require long and patient consideration. In the meanwhile, there is one obvious thing which must be done. The money of dissipation must be taken out of city politics. American civilization is making progress, although slow, in excluding the money of corporations from its political life. It must take up this other problem at once.
A Stultified Civilization
There is only one way to do this — to change the machinery of government where it has been found lacking. Chicago has already made a start in this direction. It has just replaced the corrupt and archaic police magistrates' courts by a more modern institution. It has raised the cost of liquor licenses and taken a step in the right direction by restricting the number of saloons. It has increased the police force. It is securing new laws against the sale of cocaine. It is attempting to enforce more careful election laws. And now it is trying to get a new charter. It is to be hoped that provisions in this will improve conditions in Chicago, but from the present outlook this issue seems doubtful.
There are two main causes for the excessive crime in Chicago. The first is the saturation of the poorer classes with alcoholic liquor, by the agents of a business under a terrible economic pressure to produce
(592) revenue. The time is coming in America and Europe when the important and delicate function of the distribution of intoxicants to city populations will be taken from these purely selfish interests which now hold it; when the reasonable safeguarding of the public, and not the necessities of private enterprises, operated under the stress of a wolfish competition, will be the main compelling motive in the conduct of this trade.
The second great cause of crime is the purchase of the right to break the law by the dealers in illegal dissipation,— that is, by the sellers of savagery. This is the chief reason for waves of crime in great cities. It is more immediately alarming than the unregulated sale of liquor: not only because every act committed under it impairs or breaks down our civilization; but because, indirectly, the purchase of authority — particularly of the police — rots society at its foundations and atrophies the power of dealing with crime of all descriptions.
It is the custom to call the tribute of illegal establishments to the police of great cities blackmail. This term is neither comprehensive nor accurate. The operation is merely one phase in the working out of the business of a great financial and political organization. Inroads have been made and will be made upon the influence of this organization by attacks on particular powers — as has been done in Chicago. Such attacks will probably not achieve final results.
The fact is, that under present conditions the financial interests of dissipation have more direct representation in the administration of the city government than the will of the people. In Chicago the dealer in vice reaches directly through the ward and county organizations into the police department. The citizen at large must act through a mayor politically indebted to the ward organization, who hands over bodily the function of enforcing the law — concerning which he himself is and must be to a large extent ignorant — to a political appointee at the head of the police department. With the simplification of the processes of city government; with the abolishing of the ward and the ward boss and the ward delegate in the nominating conventions; with the substitution of nominations and elections by the people,— not of the mayor, nor of the present machinery for the representation of special interests in city government, but of men to act as department heads, nominated directly, elected directly, and held directly responsible to the people,— the organization for the sale of dissipation in cities will lose its present control in city administration, and the people will gain it. At that time the will of the people — whatever it may be — will express itself in city government. There will be an end to the present grotesque and alarming spectacle of a civilization which is stultifying itself; of a society which enacts and desires to administer laws, but is unable to do so because of the control of its machinery by the huge financial interests which owe their very existence to the sate of savagery.
