arty officials out of the campaign funds, lobbyists and corporation
lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by means of jobs, labor
union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors and editors by
advertisements. The rank and file, however, were either foisted upon the
city, or else lived off the population directly. There was the police
department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance
of the civil list, from the meanest office boy to the head of a city
department; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was
the world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle
and plunder and prey. The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had
delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an
alliance between them necessary. The law forbade prostitution; and this
had brought the "madames" into the combination. It was the same with the
gambling-house keeper and the poolroom man, and the same with any other
man or woman who had a means of getting "graft," and was willing to
pay over a share of it: the green-goods man and the highwayman, the
pickpocket and the sneak thief, and the receiver of stolen goods,
the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased meat, the
proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake doctor and the usurer, the
beggar and the "pushcart man," the prize fighter and the professional
slugger, the race-track "tout," the procurer, the white-slave agent, and
the expert seducer of young girls. All of these agencies of corruption
were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the
politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the
same person,--the police captain would own the brothel he pretended
to raid, the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon.
"Hinkydink" or "Bathhouse John," or others of that ilk, were proprietors
of the most notorious dives in Chicago, and also the "gray wolves"
of the city council, who gave away the streets of the city to the
business men; and those who patronized their places were the gamblers and
prize fighters who set the law at defiance, and the burglars and holdup
men who kept the whole city in terror. On election day all these powers
of vice and crime were one power; they could tell within one per cent
what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an
hour's notice.

A month ago Jurgis had all but perished of starvation upon the street