The power of the semi-criminal organisation known as Tammany Hall not only remains unshaken, but grows stronger from year to year. Every year its management descends, with perfect impunity, into the hands of a more and more degraded class. But it is ever the darkest hour before the dawn. Although on the very eve of the November election of 1894 it was declared that “Mr. Croker held almost as despotic a sway over New York as an Oriental potentate over his kingdom,” one month after that statement had been made he was hurled from power by a great outburst of popular indignation. How that was brought about I will now proceed to tell. [Illustration: MR. E. L. GODKIN, EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST,” NEW YORK. The sworn foe of Tammany.] CHAPTER IV. THE LEXOW SEARCHLIGHT. Mr. Lowell good-humouredly chaffed John Bull when he declared that He detests the same faults in himself he neglected, When he sees them again in his child’s glass reflected, and we only need to glance at current English criticisms upon American affairs to justify the poet’s remark. Especially is this the case with a vice which of all others is regarded as distinctively English. John Bull has plenty of faults, but of those which render him odious to his neighbours there is none which is quite so loathsome as his “unctuous rectitude.” That phrase, coined by Mr. Rhodes to express the contempt which he and every one who knew the facts felt on contemplating the hypocrisy and Pharisaism displayed in connection with the Jameson Raid, is likely to live long after Mr. Rhodes has vanished from this mortal scene. This tendency to Pharisaism and self-righteous complacency, which thanks God that it is not as other men are, is one of those vices which John Bull’s children seem to have inherited in full measure. We are pretty good at Pharisaism in the Old Country, but we are “not a circumstance,” to use the familiar slang, when we compare ourselves to some of the Pharisees reared across the Atlantic. This has nowhere been brought into such strong relief as when on the very eve of the exposure and discomfiture of Tammany their spokesmen took the stump and talked like very Pecksniffs concerning the immaculate purity of Tammany Hall.