Andrew C. Fields, long engaged by the Mutual Life Insurance Company to manipulate legislation at Albany, lived there in a sumptuously furnished house jocosely styled the “House of Mirth.” The expenditures were charged to “legal expenses.” The Mutual thus expended more than $2,000,000 in “legal expenses” from 1898 to 1904.[2] And from 1895 to 1904, the total payments made by the New York Life Insurance Company to Andrew Hamilton, its chief lobbyist at Albany, amounted to $1,312,197.16, all of which sum was soberly entered as “legal expenses.”[3] A present of nearly $50,000 was contributed in 1894 by the New York Life Insurance Company to the campaign fund of the Republican National Committee, and similar amounts in 1896 and 1900 to the same recipient.[4] All of the large insurance companies regularly contributed funds not only for national political campaigns, but for those in the States; the Equitable, for example, gave $50,000 in 1904 to the Republican National Committee, and had also, for many years, been giving $30,000 annually to the New York State Republican Committee.[5] The legislative investigating committee found it impossible to trace all of the directions of this continuous great corruption. “Enormous sums,” the committee stated, “have been expended in a surreptitious manner.” Under the pressure of public opinion, District Attorney Jerome finally caused the Grand Jury to proceed against a few of the figureheads involved; the great magnates who had profited so enormously from the huge frauds, were, so events proved, left untouched. Although it had been clearly proved by the testimony that the frauds and corruptions consummated were gigantic, not a single one of those of great wealth implicated was ever sent to jail or even incommoded by the formality of a trial. In the face of such disclosures, the opponents of Tammany could not well point to Tammany corruption as an exclusive product. It was a time, too, when what was termed “muckraking” was almost at its height; magazines and newspapers, were filled with articles exposing in detail the corruptions and colossal manipulations and spoliation done by great corporations and other vested interests, and the close connection between these and the “bosses” and machines of both old political parties. Public attention was concentrated more upon these nationwide scandals than upon local graft--petty, indeed, in some respects, compared to the great extortions of trusts and other industrial, transportation and financial corporations.