uninitiated person can form an idea of the large number of such cases
that are yearly silenced by the payment of hush-money in this city.
Sometimes the victim and the victimizer meet, the money demanded is paid
over, and there the matter ends. More frequently the negotiation is
conducted by means of a "go between" with the same pecuniary result. In
some cases, again, the trouble receives settlement in the office of a
lawyer, when a receipt and full release of past and future claims is
taken by the legal gentleman, who thus secures his client immunity from
further demands. It is a well-accepted axiom that under like
circumstances the same cause produces the same effect. And so the causes
which lead to black-mailing in this city are precisely similar to the
influences operating in Paris or London to produce the same ignoble
crime. A married lady may become too familiar with some gentleman who
has not the pleasure of being known to her husband; she may have been
tenderly sentimental and gushingly confidential with him, and may even
have confided her arduous imaginings to paper, when a rupture
occurs--and be sure that a rupture always does occur in such cases--the
cavalier may not only threaten to talk and "tell," but refuse to return
the amatory correspondence, unless under substantial pecuniary
inducements. This is the return she gets for what may be termed her
privateering experiences, and there are numbers of creatures, whom it
were sacrilege to call men, who make a regular business of becoming
acquainted with married women for this special purpose. Instances are on
record where a certain stipulated sum of money has been paid for years
to a professional black-mailer, who held letters written to him by a
lady whose acquaintance was made at a matinee. We were cognizant of a
case in which the bird of prey, not content with his own extortions,
handed over the lady's letters, on his death-bed, to a confederate, who
continued successfully to maintain the payment of hush-money until death
removed the weak and persecuted victim.

Ladies have no idea what risks they run when making chance
acquaintances, nor how such intimacy may end. They may be successfully
fortified against all the arts and blandishments brought to attack their
honor, and yet be seriously compromised. The handsome and fashionably
dressed street-lounger is very frequently a resourceful rascal. He may
invite the lady to take a carriage-ride, and, as has sometime