“We are giving the people pure organization government,” he said. He referred to the thoroughness of discipline in the Wigwam, and stated that the only way to succeed was to keep the whip in hand over his henchmen. It took “a lot of time,” and he “had to work very hard at it.” Tammany was built up, he said, not only upon the political principles it held, but upon the way its members sustained one another in business. “We want the whole business, if we can get it”; “to the party belong the spoils”; “we win, and we expect every one to stand by us”; “I am working for my pocket all the time,” were some of Mr. Croker’s answers, most of them told in anything but grammatical English. The general opinion obtained that the committee’s work would have been far more effective and free from charges of partizan bias if Thomas C. Platt, the Republican “boss,” had been summoned concerning his alleged political connection with the great corporations and financial interests, as Mr. Croker had been. Apparently the disclosures made no deep impression on the city administration, for matters went along pretty much as before. On March 9, 1900, the New York _Times_ published a detailed statement, which it later reiterated, that the sum of $3,095,000 a year was being paid by the gambling-house keepers of the city to the “gambling-house commission,” which, it said, was composed of two State Senators, a representative of the poolroom proprietors, and the head of one of the city departments. This commission, the account stated, received and passed upon applications, established the tariff to be paid by the applicants, and supervised the collections. Later, in the same month, the Grand Jury handed down a presentment arraigning the city officials for the sway enjoyed by the criminal and vicious classes.[9] Neither the Grand Jury’s presentment nor the _Times’s_ detailed statements had the slightest effect on the conduct of the city administration. In November, however, a marked change occurred. For several years certain reform societies and ecclesiastical bodies, particularly the Episcopal Church, had sought to mitigate the open flaunting of immorality in the tenement houses of a particular police district on the East Side. The attempts had been resisted, not only by those living upon the proceeds of this immorality, but by the police themselves; and two ministers who had complained to certain police officials had been grossly insulted.