The evidence establishes, furthermore, that not only the proprietors of disorderly houses paid for their illegal privileges, but the outcasts of society paid patrolmen on post for permission to solicit on the public highways, dividing their gains with them, and, often, as appears by proof, when brought before the police magistrates and committed to the penitentiary for disorderly conduct in default of bail, they compounded their sentence, and secured bail by paying ten dollars or fifteen dollars to the clerk of the court, or his agents, and were then released again to ply their calling and to become victimised as before. The evidence furthermore shows that in some of the houses of the character described, visitors were systematically robbed, and when they made complaint at the station-house the man detailed to examine into the charge failed to arrest the perpetrator, and frightened the victim off by threats, and then returned and received his compensation, an equal division of the plunder between the thief and the officer. The testimony taken as a whole conclusively establishes that the social evil was, and probably still is, fostered and protected by the police of the city, even to the extent of inducing its votaries to continue their illegal practices, maintaining substantially a partnership with them in the traffic, absorbing the largest part of the resulting profit.--Vol. i., pp. 33-36. The most startling statement in the whole Report is that which is contained in the paragraph just quoted. From this it appears that the police were not merely toll-keepers on the way to hell, but if by any chance the Strange Woman wished to forsake her chamber of death, they thrust her back into it. What was it to them that she might wish to save her soul alive out of the pit? Her duty was to stay there and earn dollars for the police. Were they not the Farmers-General of the Wages of Sin? Mrs. Blood, a keeper of houses of ill-fame, was compelled by a Police Captain to purchase the house of Madame Perot at some 10,000 dollars above its value, to carry it on as a house of prostitution (vol. v., p. 5,414). Another Captain smashed in the face of a man named Galingo because he had taken a house in which the Captain wished to instal a brothel-keeper from whom he expected to get £200 opening fee and £10 a month afterwards (vol. iv., p. 4,487). In other cases, witnesses who had intended to leave the business were compelled to go on running by threat of being raided and ruined if they dared to think of ceasing to earn fees for the police. The police had come to believe that they had a vested interest in every brothel; and when a keeper proposed to quit the business, he felt like an Irish tenant who is being evicted without compensation for disturbance. [Illustration: MADAM HERMANN.] [Illustration: GANSEVOORT MARKET, NEW YORK.] CHAPTER X.