Any testimony you give now, under oath, before this Committee with reference to bribery or corruption, cannot be used against you in any form, shape, or way. The fact of your confession here before this Committee will be a complete bar against any prosecution against you for that offence. In other words, if you sit here and tell the truth, and confess that you have committed any crime of that description, you will be absolutely relieved from any punishment for the commission of that crime. On the other hand, if you swear to anything that is false, then, not only could you be punished for the crime that you committed, if you did commit the crime of bribery, but for the crime of false swearing, or perjury, besides; you understand that?—Vol. iv., p. 3,615.
Notwithstanding this, the amount of perjury committed, especially by policemen, was appalling. One of them, of the name of Interman, admitted frankly that it was the common understanding among the members of the force that it was their duty to swear falsely to conceal the facts about bribery and corruption. If they spoke the truth they would be bounced or persecuted, whereas if they came forward and perjured themselves they would stand high with their superiors. The wrath of a captain who can make it hot for you next day evidently weighed much more with the police than the wrath of an offended God, whose mills grind so slowly that retribution may not begin till the day of judgment.
The answers to questions put to brothel-keepers and others as to their belief in the binding character of an oath and the reality of a future state were hardly edifying. One woman, Julia Mahoney, broke the record for the unhesitating candour with which she answered counsel’s questions.
“Do you not know,” said Mr. Goff, “that you would meet your punishment in the world hereafter?”
“I hope not,” Julia replied simply.
“And you know that you would be liable to go to the State’s prison?” persisted Mr. Goff. But Mrs. Mahoney was proof against that threat.
“If I was in prison I would be out in twenty-four hours,” she remarked. “She has got a pull,” sagely observed Senator Bradley.
It must be admitted that it was a task of uncommon difficulty to extract the truth from witnesses such as these, who fear not God neither regard man. Why should they? They have got a pull, and the pull ends all things.
Two competent American observers have recently told us what a policeman is in an American city. Both confirm to the letter what was stated by a leading citizen of Chicago five years ago. “Never mind what is said about this or that system of city government. In Chicago and all the West the police govern the city, and that is all there is to it.” In New York it would appear to have been much the same. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, who was head of the New York police in the first two years of the Reform Administration, writing in the Century Magazine for October, says:—
The police occupy positions of great importance. They not merely preserve order, the first essential of both liberty and civilisation, but to a large portion of our population they stand as the embodiment as well as the representative of the law of the land. To the average dweller in a tenement-house district, especially if born abroad, the policeman is in his own person all that there is of government: he is judge, executive and legislature, constitution and town meeting.