In those days it used to be said that licences were granted by the Excise Board to anybody who had not served a term in a penitentiary. One indignant divine declared that it was perfectly safe to say that, if the Devil himself should apply to the Excise Board for a licence to set up a branch establishment on the children’s playground in the Central Park, it would be granted. As to the other establishments of even worse fame than the saloon, there was an unwritten contract by which, in return for tribute paid directly or indirectly, they were shielded by the strong arm of Tammany from the enforcement of the law. It was calculated that if all the saloons in New York were placed side by side, averaging them at only twenty feet frontage each, they would form a line of circumvallation twenty miles long. To put it in another way, there was on an average one saloon for every thirty voters. In addition to its control of the saloon, Tammany had two extremely important financial resources which have not yet been mentioned. The first was the control of the city contracts. A great city like New York, with an expenditure that exceeded that of the whole Federal Government of the United States fifty years ago, had an enormous means of influence at its disposal in the mere granting of contracts. But even this was a comparatively trivial element in the financial strength of Tammany. There existed in New York, as in almost every city, great corporations representing enormous capital, and dividing gigantic dividends, which, in the Tammany scheme of the universe, might have been created for the express purpose of furnishing an unfailing supply of revenue to the party chest. The corporations which enjoyed franchises from the city, giving them control of the streets, whether for the purpose of traction, of lighting, or of electrical communication, were Tammany’s milch cows. They all possess monopolies, granted to them in the first instance either by corruption or by negligence, which enable them to plunder the public. These monopolies can only be terminated or modified by the Legislature, and the Legislature can only act in obedience to the party machine. All that needs to be done when the campaign fund runs low is for the Boss to intimate to the various corporations that milking time has come, and that if they do not contribute liberally of their substance to the party treasury, Tammany will no longer be able to give them protection when the usual attack is made next session upon their monopoly or their franchise. Money is the sinews of war, and as the Tammany war chest was always full, Tammany snapped its fingers at all its enemies, and contemptuously declared that the reformers did not amount to a row of pins. [Illustration: THE CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND, CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK.]