It was to Tammany Hall also that the liquor dealers appealed for protection from the intolerable exactions of the police. “There was no other place to go to.” The legal authorities were paralysed by the extreme distrust felt by Americans in all elective assemblies. Tammany Hall naturally and inevitably became the one living centre of popular authority in the city. Its moral authority in New York was something like that of the Land League over Ireland under Mr. Parnell. The Lexow Committee report with a certain jealous awe concerning the “supreme head of authority,” Mr. Richard Croker, who, although a private citizen, unconnected with the Police Department, but leader of Tammany Hall, “was able to do what all the other legally constituted authorities failed to accomplish.” They say:-- The same private citizen whose authority was so potent to accomplish all this, was able, by a word of command, at once to shut up all the pool-rooms then in full operation, and which, according to the testimony up to that time, neither the whole force of police, of detectives, of superintendent, or of the Commissioners themselves could effectively close.--Vol. i., pp. 18-19. “Taken as a whole,” says the Lexow Report, “the records disclose the fact that the Police Department, from the highest down to the lowest, was thoroughly impregnated with the political influence of Tammany Hall”; and they add, what naturally follows, “that the suppression and repression of crime depended not so much upon the ability of the police to enforce the law, but rather upon the will of that organisation or faction to have the law enforced” (vol. i., p. 19). The leaders of Tammany, no doubt, were not “agin the law” in the abstract. But they owed their first allegiance to their party, and their first thought was not of the duty they owed to the city, but of the duty they owed to Tammany. The claims of that great brotherhood had precedence over such trifles as the laws of the State, which after all were passed by “Hayseed” legislators, or, in plain English, by the rustic vote of the rural districts of the State of New York. One redoubtable worthy, Judge and ex-Senator Roesch, who figures conspicuously in this American Tartarus as one of the minor Plutonian deities, gave very interesting evidence on this point. He was a Judge, an ex-Senator, and a leader of Tammany Hall. His aid in the latter capacity seems to have been generally invoked by the various law-breakers of the neighbourhood. He was asked by Senator O’Connor whether it was not one of the duties of the district leader, “if the members of his party were labouring under any kind of difficulty at all, for the purpose of conducting his organisation and making that solid with the parties, to do what he could to give them aid?”