RULER OF NEW YORK

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1523, 28 February 1901, Page 59

RULER OF NEW YORK

BOSS CROKER DENOUNCED. .... ,'URE INDICTMENT BY BISHOv POTTER. TACTICS OF TAM-n ANY REVEALED. A curious turn has ~een given to the beginning of the campaign against protected vice in this city (writes the New York ‘correspondent of the Melbourne “Argus”) by the action of Boss Choker, who has suddenly assumed the role of a defender of purity, and then betaken himself to foreign parts. Power and wealth have swollen this coarse dictator’s head and sapped away his cunning. During the recent national political campaign he was accustomed to give the reporters an interview almost every day upon political topics, and his oracular utterances about the currency and other leading questions were highly entertaining. An ignorant “Boss'* should keep his mouth shut. This garrulity was regarded as a sign of weakness and decay. Croker promised Bryan a majority *rf 85,000 in the city, but was able to deliver only 27,000. Thereupon good citizens began to plan for his overthrow next year. A part of the movement which is- designed to rescue the great city from his foul hands is the protest of Bishop Potter, the eminent head of the Episcopal diocese of New York, against the protection and encouragement of vice by the police, especially in the thickly-settled parts of the tenement districts. There the conditions have recently become intolerable, and the children of the poor are continually exposed to pollution. When cwo clergymen connected with a philanthropic institution maintained by the church in the tenement districts complained to the police captain there of the shameless protection of vice all round them, they were driven away with derision and coarse insult.

The Bishop appealed to the mayor, one of Croker’s tools, in an extraordinary and scorching letter, denouncing the police, and declaring that “the situation which confronts us here in the metropolis oh-America is one of common and open notoriety, and of such a nature as may well make us a by-word and a hissing among the nations of the world.” Surely, so remarkable a letter was never "before addressed by a great prelate to the chief magistrate of the leading city in a civilised nation. The following passage fairly expresses the Bishop’s righteous indignation : “I affirm that such a virtual safeguarding vice in the city of New York is a burning shame to any decent and civilised dommumty, and an intolerable outrage upon those whom it especially and pre-eminently concerns. I am not demanding that vice shall be ‘stamped out’ by the police or any other civil authority. That is a task which would demand for its achievement a race of angels, and not of men. But I approach you, sir, to protest with all my power against a condition of things in which vice is not only tol era ted, but shielded and encouraged by those whose sworn duty it is to repress and discourage it, and in the name of unsullied youth and innocence, of young girls and their mothers who, though living under conditions of privation and the hard struggle for a livelihood, have in them every instinct of virtue and purity,j.that are the ornaments of any so-called gentlewoman in the land. “I know those of whom I speak—their homes and their lives, their toil and their aspirations. Their sensibility to insult or outrage is as keen as theirs who are in your household or mine, and, before Gcd, and in the face of the citizens of New York, I protest, as my people have charged me to do, against the habitual insult, the persistent menace, the unutterably defiling contact to which, day by day, because of the base complicity of the police of New York with the lowest forms of vice and crime, they are subjected. And, in tße name of

these little ones —these weak and defenceless ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues, but of homes in which God is feared and His law reverenced, and virtue and decency are Honoured and exemplified, i call upon you, sir, to save these people, who are in a very real way committed to your charge, from a living hell, .defiling, deadly, damning, to which the criminal supineness of the constituted authorities, set for the defence of decency and good order, threaten to doom them." The mayor saw that he could not stand up against this, and he prepared to make satisfactory reply; but first he must give Croker time to set up some defence against the storm. Therefore he held the letter for two days, and in the meantime the “Boss” sought to break the force cf the coming publication of it. On the very day when it was received he hastily called a public meeting of the Tammany executive committee, introduced a Hebrew philanthropist, who complained, as the Bishop had done, and appointed a committee of investigation and relief composed of five of his leading officeholders. Having asserted that he was an licnest man, he took ship for Europe, to remain abroad for six months. The committee having begun its harmless sessions, the bishop's letter was given to the public, with an apparently virtuous response, and good instructions to the chief of police, who is notoriously unfit to hold office. The truth is that the present Government, created and controlled by Croker, has fattened upon all kinds of blackmail and vice licenses, and upon extravagance that has swollen the annual budget to nearly 100,000,000c?ol. A majority of the prominent officers are vulgar and corrupt, the city is notoriously “wide open” (to use the term of the gamblers and the purveyors of vice), and the police are even more, demoralised than before the reform rising a few years ago. The protection of vice for pay has led to the protection of crime, and notoriously to a failure to detect and arrest the guilty in scores of cases of deliberate murder or of assault causing the death of the victim. During the last two years there has been in the city more than 60 unexplained murders, and three times as many murderous assaults, committed by persons whom the police, even with the aid cf the testimony of the surviving sufferers, have failed to convict or to find. Choker’s organisation lias drawn to it about 40,000 voters in the tenement districts, mainly by assisting them in various ways. It will be difficult to draw them away at the next election by a mere promise of reform and honest government. Therefore some say that the reformers should promise municipal action for the betterment of their .social conditions, and also municipal ownership of public utilities. This programme is opposed by a majority of the philanthropic financiers and wealthy reformers, who are represented by the Reform Committee of Fifteen appointed U ■■t week by the Chamber of Commerce, many of them being largely interested in the gas and street railway monopolies, and hostile to any pha.se of State socialism. This difference of opinion creates a situation interesting to all who study municipal problems. It may prolong the term of Croker’s rule over the second city of the world.