ity, and of late years he has been regarded as one of the leading
members of the Ring. It is said openly in New York that he owes his
election to the Mayoralty entirely to William M. Tweed. As Mayor of the
city, he has been officially connected with many of the transactions by
which the city has been defrauded of large sums of money. Some of the
most prominent newspapers of the city have denounced him as a thief and a
sharer of the stolen money. His friends, on the other hand, have
declared their belief that his worst fault was his official approval of
the fraudulent warrants. They state that he has never in his manner of
living, or in any other way, given evidence of possessing large sums of
money, and his legal partner made oath before the Grand Jury that Mr.
Hall was not worth over $60,000 or $70,000. It is certain that when the
proprietor of the _New York Times_, which journal had been loud in
denouncing Hall as a thief, was called on by the Grand Jury to furnish
them with the evidence upon which this charge was based, he was unable to
do so, and the Grand Jury was unable to obtain any evidence criminating
Mr. Hall personally. His friends declare that his signing the fraudulent
warrants was a purely ministerial act, and that having many thousands of
them to sign in a year, he was compelled to rely upon the endorsements of
the Comptroller and auditing officers.

In the present state of affairs, there is no evidence showing that Mr.
Hall derived any personal pecuniary benefit from the frauds upon the
treasury. Public sentiment is divided respecting him; many persons
believing that he is a sharer in the plunder of the Ring, and others
holding the opposite opinion. The most serious charges that have been
made against him, have been brought by Mr. John Foley, and Mr. Samuel J.
Tilden. The former is the President of the Nineteenth Ward Citizens'
Association, and the latter the leader of the Reform Democracy. Mr.
Tilden, in his speech at the Cooper Institute, November 2d, 1871, thus
spoke of Mayor Hall:

"These three Auditors met but once. They then passed a resolution which
now stands on the records of the city in the handwriting of Mayor Hall.
It was passed on his motion, and what was its effect? Did it audit
anything? Did it perform the functions? Did it fulfil the trust
committed to the Board? Not a bit of it. It provided that all claims
certified by Mr. Tweed and Mr. Young, Secretary of the old Board