The confessions summarised show the existence throughout the city of a system so well regulated and understood that upon the assignment of a new captain no conversation was necessary to instruct the precinct detectives or wardmen as to their line of conduct. Without a word they collected the illicit revenue, simplifying their duties as much as they could, either by granting monopolies of a special kind of crime to individuals, or imposing upon certain individuals who had knowledge of a particular class of crime the obligation of collecting for them, thus collecting monthly from all licensed vice and crime, and paying over their collections to the captain, deducting for their services twenty per cent. from the total. Or, rather, at first, paying the whole to the captain, and receiving twenty per cent. back from him, and thereafter making the deductions themselves. The captain, on his side, visited the inspector and paid over to him a substantial proportion of the amount collected.--Vol. i., pp. 45, 46. [Illustration: THE CITIES WHERE DWELL THE STRANGERS WITHIN THE GATES. View of Brooklyn Bridge from a roof in Broadway.] CHAPTER V. “THE STRANGER WITHIN THE GATES.” “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” The familiar passage needs to be interpreted in a different sense if it is to describe the treatment of the stranger by the police of New York. In the evidence of the men who practise the confidence trick, the curious fact came out that the police expressly abandoned strangers to the tender mercies of the Bunco Steerer and Green Goods dealer. These thieves were forbidden to practise their arts upon the resident population of New York. But the “guy” was fair game. The stranger from the country was abandoned to the plunderer, who indeed could count upon the active co-operation of the police--in return for a share of the loot. The stranger was taken in indeed. But not in the sense of the Bible text. The treatment of Americans who were strangers in the sense of not possessing a fixed abode within the city limits, was bad. The treatment of the stranger from over sea, the foreign immigrant, was infinitely worse. It has been the glory of Columbia, as one of the poets declared, that her latchkey was never drawn in to the poorest and weakest of Adam’s kin. The boast is no longer true. Restrictions upon the pauper immigrants from the Old World have been multiplied of late with ominous rapidity. But the foreigner had already established himself by the million within the Republic before the restrictive policy was begun.