Besides suffering, in aggravated form, from the difficulties which beset the course of the entire administration, the police board had to encounter--and honest and efficient police boards must always encounter--certain special and peculiar difficulties. It is not a pleasant thing to deal with criminals and purveyors of vice. It is very rough work, and it cannot always be done in a nice manner. The man with the night stick, the man in the blue coat with the helmet, can keep order and repress open violence on the streets; but most kinds of crime and vice are ordinarily carried on furtively and by stealth, perhaps at night, perhaps behind closed doors. It is possible to reach them only by the employment of the man in plain clothes, the detective. Now the function of the detective is primarily that of the spy, and it is always easy to arouse feeling against a spy. It is absolutely necessary to employ him. Ninety per cent. of the most dangerous criminals and purveyors of vice cannot be reached in any other way. But the average citizen who does not think deeply fails to realize the necessity for any such employment. In a vague way he desires vice and crime put down; but, also in a vague way, he objects to the only possible means by which they can be put down. It is easy to mislead him into denouncing what is necessarily done in order to carry out the very policy for which he is clamoring. The Tammany officials of New York, headed by the Comptroller, made a systematic effort to excite public hostility against the police for their warfare on vice. The law-breaking liquor seller, the keeper of disorderly houses, and the gambler, had been influential allies of Tammany, and head contributors to its campaign chest. Naturally Tammany fought for them; and the effective way in which to carry on such a fight was to portray with gross exaggeration and misstatement the methods necessarily employed by every police force which honestly endeavors to do its work. The methods are unpleasant, just as the methods employed in any surgical operation are unpleasant; and the Tammany champions were able to arouse more or less feeling against the police board for precisely the same reason that a century ago it was easy to arouse what were called “doctors’ mobs” against surgeons who cut up dead bodies. In neither case is the operation attractive, and it is one which readily lends itself to denunciation; but in both cases it is necessary if there is a real intention to get at the disease. Tammany of course found its best allies in the sensational newspapers. Of all the forces that tend for evil in a great city like New York, probably none are so potent as the sensational papers. Until one has had experience with them it is difficult to realize the reckless indifference to truth or decency displayed by papers such as the two that have the largest circulation in New York City. Scandal forms the breath of the nostrils