Submission to the exactions of trusts, in the shape of telephone and gas companies, does not require them to submit to a trust of criminals and police officials. The element to which it is estimated $70,000,000 is annually paid in Chicago for its drink bill, must be so regulated, as that it shall cease to furnish the balance of power in elections, to exercise a baneful influence over the police, to ruin the young, to encourage debauchery, and breed criminals. A municipal government that cannot, or will not, control these vicious agencies, will ultimately be condemned by a public-spirited people, if they can be, as they sooner or later will be, persuaded to devote a few hours, taken from their business or pleasure, to a vigorous uprooting of a system under which such iniquities can be born and develop to such menacing proportions. There must be an awakening to the fact that
“They say this town is full of cozenage,
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such like liberties of sin.”
APPENDIX.
From the daily press a few accounts are culled, and added by way of appendix, as to the perpetration of crime and the habits of the police in connection with it.
The Baxter Committee unearthed the following account of the degree of protection afforded to citizens by police officers, and the easy-going indifference with which the Chief of Police regarded the affair when it was first called to his attention.
On the night of March 3d ult. a woman returning from a drug store was stopped by two detectives and charged with soliciting men upon the streets. She denied this offensive charge, told where she had been and where returning, and showed a bottle of medicine she carried as confirmatory of her statements. This happened about 8:45 o’clock. She was then within twenty feet of the entrance to the house in which she lived. Notwithstanding her denial, the officers went to the house with her. One of them then said, “I’m an officer; open this door!” Another woman with whom the arrested woman was boarding asked, “What is the matter?” One of the officers replied, “This woman was on the street soliciting,” to which the boarding house keeper replied, “You are mistaken.” “Well,” said the officer, “if you want to stop her give me $15,” and the reply was, “She has no money to give you or to any one.” The boarding house keeper, thinking the men were common thieves, then whispered to the accused woman, “Go with them and I will follow you.” The officers took their woman to a corner and into a saloon, where they compelled her to give up a pair of diamond earrings for ten dollars which were handed to her by the bartender. The boarding house woman followed, and prevented the detectives from obtaining the ten dollars, but finally they grabbed the bill from the accused woman’s hands. The women were then released and returned to their home. Taking a sealskin sack with them they returned to the saloon, and were handed the diamond earrings, but not without leaving the sack in their stead. The women saw the detectives return, and drink at the bar, paying for their tipple with the money they had snatched from the hand of the one.
While the parties were wrangling on the street a police sergeant and two officers in uniform passed. One of the women cried out, “Here are two men robbing this woman!” The sergeant replied, after observation, “I have got nothing to do with this.” One of the women asked, “What are you for?” Then the sergeant, having discovered the men were detectives, said to one of them, “They are all right. Get what you can.” The sergeant then left.