The scandals of Mayor Van Wyck’s administration were conspicuous issues of the campaign of 1901. But there were two particularly noteworthy features pressed by the reformers in their indictment of Tammany. One of these issues, which made so deep an impression upon the public mind, especially in the densely populous East Side of New York City, was the flagrant immorality under which young girls of the tenderest age were often decoyed into lives of shame. The question thus presented was neither that of the “suppression of vice” nor that of how people could be made virtuous by mandate of law. The question, as put to voters, was whether a system under which a corrupt, money-making combination of vicious lawbreakers with police and other officials should be allowed to continue in abhorrent traffic. A widely-circulated pamphlet published by the City Club for the Women’s Municipal League presented a series of facts as attested by court records, the statements of City Magistrates, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and others, and as reported by the Committee of Fifteen, composed of reformers, probing into the question. The pamphlet declared that the facts justified the conclusion that the business of ruining young girls and forcing them into a life of shame, for the money there was in it for the dealers, had recently grown to considerable proportions; that its existence was known to the police; that the police made little or no effort to stop it; that the police, or those for whom they acted, probably derived profit from the traffic; and that a reasonably active and efficient Police Department could stop the traffic of a deliberate merchandizing of the virtue of women, usually young girls. Details were given of numerous cases which had been passed upon in the courts, and a long description of the traffic was included from a statement made on October 21, 1901, by District Attorney Eugene A. Philbin of New York County.[1] Justice William Travers Jerome, of the Court of Special Sessions, had already made a similar statement. He was quoted in the New York _Times_, of June 27, 1901, as saying: