The police occupy positions of great importance. They not merely preserve order, the first essential of both liberty and civilisation, but to a large portion of our population they stand as the embodiment as well as the representative of the law of the land. To the average dweller in a tenement-house district, especially if born abroad, the policeman is in his own person all that there is of government: he is judge, executive and legislature, constitution and town meeting. The other witness is Mr. Godkin, the editor of the _Evening Post_, who, writing in the _North American Review_ seven years back, says of the newly landed immigrant:-- No sooner has he established himself in a tenement-house or a boarding-house than he finds himself face to face with three functionaries who represent to him the government of his new country--the police justice of the district, the police captain of his precinct, and the political “district leader.” These are, to him, the Federal, State and municipal governments rolled into one.... These three men are to him America. Everything else in the national institutions in which Americans pride themselves he only sees through a glass darkly, if he sees it at all. These dwellers in tenement-houses in New York, to whom the police--of whom there were then 4,000--are judge, executive, and legislature, constitution and town meeting, comprise two-thirds of the population of the city. To the foreign denizen of these districts--say one-half of the whole--the policeman and his masters of the political machine are all of America that he can see or understand. Now let us see what kind of an America the New York police presented to the eyes of the majority of the population of the city. The Lexow Committee in its final Report, after commenting on the difficulty of obtaining evidence owing to the terrorism practised by the police, said of a typical case:-- This situation was characteristic. A consuming desire to put an end to an outrageous servitude on the one hand, and a dread lest failure might result in a still more galling thraldom on the other! It seemed, in fact, as though every interest, every occupation, almost every citizen, was dominated by an all-controlling and overshadowing dread of the police department.