He established a printing company, whose main business was the printing of blank forms and vouchers, for which in one year two million eight hundred thousand dollars was charged. Another item was a stationer’s company, which furnished all the stationery used in the public institutions and departments, and this company alone received some three millions a year. On an order for six reams of cap paper, the same amount of letter paper, two reams of notepaper, two dozen pen-holders, four small ink-bottles, and a few other articles, all worth not more than fifty dollars, a bill of ten thousand dollars was rendered and paid. The frauds upon which the conviction of Tweed was obtained consisted in the payment of enormously increased bills to mechanics, architects, furniture-makers, and, in some instances, to unknown persons, for supplies and services. It was the expectation that an honest bill would be raised all the way from sixty to ninety per cent. In the first months of the ring’s stealing the increase was about sixty per cent. Some of the bills were increased by as much as ninety per cent., but the average increase was such as to make it possible to give sixty-seven per cent. to the ring, the confederates being allowed to keep thirty-three per cent.; and of that thirty-three per cent. probably at least one-half was a fraudulent increase. After a time the outrageous nature of his stealings provoked a revolt in Tammany itself. It is to this which Mr. Croker looks back with such proud complacency as marking the advent of reformed Tammany. Tweed was beaten at the elections, and his opponents secured a majority on the Board of Aldermen. Thereupon the resourceful rascal promptly went down to Albany, bought up a sufficient number of Congressmen and senators to give him control of the Legislature, and so secured a new Charter for New York, which legislated his opponents out of office. By this Charter a board of audit was created which consisted of Tweed, Connolly and Mayor Hall. What followed is thus described by the _Nation_:--