When Mr. Coffin began this work, Boston had a population of 412,000 souls. From the "Boston bedrooms," that is, the suburban towns in five counties, one hundred thousand or more were emptied every day, making over half a million people. In this city there was an array of forces all massed against any legislation restricting their power, while eager and organized to extend it. These included 2,850 licensed liquor sellers, and 1,300 unlicensed places, besides 222 druggists; all of which, and whom, helped to make men drunk. To supply the thirsty there were within the city limits three distilleries and seventeen breweries. To show the nature of the oligarchy, we have only to state that there were twenty-five men who had their names as bondsmen on no fewer than 1,030 licenses, and that eight men signed the bonds of 610 licenses. These "bondsmen" of one sort controlled the votes of from 15,000 to 20,000 bondsmen of a lower sort. The liquor business was then, as it is now, the great incentive to lawlessness, helping to make Boston a place of shame. Ten thousand persons and $75,000,000 capital were employed in work mostly useless and wicked. "Boston's devil-fish was dragging her down." The Sunday laws were set at defiance. The clinking of glasses could not only be distinctly heard as one went by, but the streams of young men openly filed in. The laws, requiring a certain distance between the schoolhouse and the saloon, were persistently violated. Of two hundred saloons visited by Carleton, one hundred and twenty-eight had set the law at defiance. While six policemen were needed in one Salvation Army room, to keep the saints and sinners quiet, often there would be not one star or club in the saloons. Carleton began by arming himself with the facts. He visited hundreds of the tapster's quarters in various parts of the city. In some cases he actually measured, with his own hands and a surveyor's chain, the distance between the schoolhouse and the home-destroyer. He talked with scores of policemen. He then prepared his bill and reported it in the Judiciary Committee, the members of which, about that time, received a petition in favor of a non-partisan metropolitan board of police commissioners, in order to secure a much better enforcement of law. On this petition were scores of names, which the world will not willingly let die. Yet, after reading the petition, seven of the eleven members of the Committee were opposed to the bill, and so declared themselves. Carleton was therefore obliged to transfer the field of battle to the open House. When he counted noses in the Legislature, he found that in the double body there were but four men who were heartily in favor of the apparently unpopular reform. The bill lay dormant for many weeks. Almost as a matter of course, the Sunday newspapers were bitterly hostile to it. They informed their readers, more than once, that the reform was dead. By hostile politicians the bill was denounced as "infamous."