Experienced New Yorkers need not be told that there has existed among us for years a class of individuals whose only source of revenue is black-mail. Ever on the _qui vive_ for real scandal or its counterfeit presentment, these cormorants levy tribute upon both sexes. The high and haughty dame, with a too appreciative and wandering eye; the wealthy banker, with a proclivity for "little French milliners;" the Christian husband, with a feminine peccadillo; the pew-owner at church, with a disposition to apply St. Paul's "holy kiss" a little too literally; and the saintly pastor with a skeleton in his closet, are all alike fish in the tribute net of this insatiable toiler of the turbid sea of scandal. No uninitiated person can form an idea of the large number of such cases that are yearly silenced by the payment of hush-money in this city. Sometimes the victim and the victimizer meet, the money demanded is paid over, and there the matter ends. More frequently the negotiation is conducted by means of a "go between" with the same pecuniary result. In some cases, again, the trouble receives settlement in the office of a lawyer, when a receipt and full release of past and future claims is taken by the legal gentleman, who thus secures his client immunity from further demands. It is a well-accepted axiom that under like circumstances the same cause produces the same effect. And so the causes which lead to black-mailing in this city are precisely similar to the influences operating in Paris or London to produce the same ignoble crime. A married lady may become too familiar with some gentleman who has not the pleasure of being known to her husband; she may have been tenderly sentimental and gushingly confidential with him, and may even have confided her arduous imaginings to paper, when a rupture occurs--and be sure that a rupture always does occur in such cases--the cavalier may not only threaten to talk and "tell," but refuse to return the amatory correspondence, unless under substantial pecuniary inducements. This is the return she gets for what may be termed her privateering experiences, and there are numbers of creatures, whom it were sacrilege to call men, who make a regular business of becoming acquainted with married women for this special purpose. Instances are on record where a certain stipulated sum of money has been paid for years to a professional black-mailer, who held letters written to him by a lady whose acquaintance was made at a matinee. We were cognizant of a case in which the bird of prey, not content with his own extortions, handed over the lady's letters, on his death-bed, to a confederate, who continued successfully to maintain the payment of hush-money until death removed the weak and persecuted victim.