clerks of these courts.
Instead of printing the usual number of blank certificates based on
the annual average of 9,000, they ordered, between September 16 and
October 23, more than seven times as many, or 69,000, of which 39,000
went to the Supreme Court. As this court had just gone into the
naturalisation business the order seemed suspiciously large. At the
time of the investigation 27,068 of these certificates were
unaccounted for, and the court refused an examination of its records.
However, by showing that the vote cast in 1868, estimated upon the
average rate of the increase of voters, should have been 131,000
instead of 156,000, the committee practically accounted for them. The
_Nation_ unwittingly strengthened this measured extent of the fraud,
declaring on the day the courts finished their work, that of "the
35,000 voters naturalised in this city alone, 10,000 are perhaps
rightly admitted, 10,000 have passed through the machine without
having been here five years, and the other 15,000 have never been near
the courtroom."[1209] A table also published by the committee showed
the ratio of votes to the population at each of the five preceding
presidential elections to have been 1 to 8, while in 1868 it was 1 to
4.65. "The only fair conclusion from these facts would be," said the
_Nation_, "that enormous frauds were perpetrated."[1210]

[Footnote 1209: The _Nation_, October 29, 1868.]

[Footnote 1210: _Ibid._, March 4, 1869.]

On the other hand, the Democratic minority of the committee, after
examining Hoffman and Tweed, who disclaimed any knowledge of the
transactions and affected to disbelieve the truth of the charges,
pronounced the facts cited "stale slanders," and most of the witnesses
"notorious swindlers, liars, and thieves," declaring that the
fraudulent vote did not exceed 2,000, divided equally between the two
parties. Moreover, it pronounced the investigation a shameful effort
to convict the Democracy of crimes that were really the result of the
long-continued misgovernment of the Republicans. If that party
controlled the city, declared one critic, it would become as adept in
"repeating" as it was in "gerrymandering" the State, whose Legislature
could not be carried by the Democrats when their popular majority
exceeded 48,000 as in 1867. This sarcastic thrust emphasised the
notorious gerrymander which, in spite of the Tammany frauds, gave the
Republicans a legislative majority of twenty-four on joint-