is expository statements, lucid,
smooth, and equally free from monotony and abruptness, were models of
their kind. In dealing with election frauds in New York his
utterances, without growing more vehement or higher keyed, found
expression in the fire of his eye and the resistless strength of his
words. The proud, bold nature of the man seemed to flash out,
startling and thrilling the hearer by the power of his towering
personality.

Revelations of fraud had been strengthened by the publication of the
Eighth Census. In many election districts it appeared that the count
was three, four, five, and even six times as large as an honest vote
could be. Proofs existed, including in some instances a confession,
that in 1868 the same men registered more than one hundred times under
different names--one man one hundred and twenty-seven times. Instances
were known and admitted in which the same man on the same day voted
more than twenty times for John T. Hoffman. "To perpetuate this
infamy," declared Conkling, "Mayor Hall has invented since the
publication of the census new escapes for repeaters by changing the
numbers and the boundaries of most of the election districts, in some
cases bisecting blocks and buildings, so that rooms on the same
premises are in different districts, thus enabling colonised repeaters
to register and vote often, and to find doors of escape left open by
officials who have sworn to keep them closed." The registration for
1870, although twenty thousand less than in 1868, he declared,
contained seventeen thousand known fraudulent entries.[1268] The
newspapers strengthened his arguments. In one of Nast's cartoons Tweed
as "Falstaff" reviews his army of repeaters, with Hoffman as
sword-bearer, and Comptroller Sweeny, Mayor Hall, James Fisk, Jr., and
Jay Gould as spectators.[1269] Another pre-election cartoon, entitled
"The Power behind the Throne," presented Governor Hoffman crowned and
robed as king, with Tweed grasping the sword of power and Sweeny the
axe of an headsman.[1270]

[Footnote 1268: New York _Times_, November 7, 1870.]

[Footnote 1269: _Harper's Weekly_, November 5, 1870.]

[Footnote 1270: _Harper's Weekly_, October 29, 1870.]

Democrats resented these attacks. People, still indifferent to or
ignorant of Tweed's misdeeds, rested undisturbed. The Citizens'
Association of New York had memorialised the Legislature to pass the
Tweed charter, men of wealth and character petitioned for its
adopt