r present partnership is at once
poverty's worst hardship and our worst blunder.

CHAPTER III

THE DEVIL'S MONEY

That was what the women called it, and the name stuck and killed the
looters. The young men of the East Side began it, and the women finished
it. It was a campaign of decency against Tammany, that one of 1901 of
which I am going to make the record brief as may be, for we all remember
it; and also, thank God, that decency won the fight.

If ever inhuman robbery deserved the name, that which caused the
downfall of Tammany surely did. Drunk with the power and plunder of four
long unchallenged years, during which the honest name of democracy was
pilloried in the sight of all men as the active partner of blackmail and
the brothel, the monstrous malignity reached a point at last where it
was no longer to be borne. Then came the crash. The pillory lied.
Tammany is no more a political organization than it is the benevolent
concern it is innocently supposed to be by some people who never learn.
It neither knows nor cares for principles. "Koch?" said its President of
the Health Department when mention was made in his hearing of the
authority of the great German doctor, "who is that man Koch you are
talking about?" And he was typical of the rest. His function was to
collect the political revenue of the department, and the city was
overrun with smallpox for the first time in thirty years. The police
force, of whom Roosevelt had made heroes, became the tools of robbers.
Robbery is the business of Tammany. For that, and for that only, is it
organized. Politics are merely the convenient pretence. I do not mean
that every Tammany man is a thief. Probably the great majority of its
adherents honestly believe that it stands for something worth fighting
for,--for personal freedom, for the people's cause,--and their delusion
is the opportunity of scoundrels. They have never understood its
organization or read its history.

For a hundred years that has been an almost unbroken record of fraud and
peculation. Its very founder, William Mooney, was charged with being a
deserter from the patriot army to the British forces. He was later on
removed from office as superintendent of the almshouse for swindling the
city. Aaron Burr plotted treason within its councils. The briefest
survey of the administration of the metropolis from his day down to that
of Tweed shows a score of its conspicuous leaders removed, indicted, or
tr