At the same hearing, H. H. Vreeland, president of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, testified that the Metropolitan Street Railway Company contributed campaign funds, and that it did so to practically every one that ran for office; he remembered $20,000 or $25,000 given to the Republican organization and $17,000 or $18,000 to the Democratic organization; this was in about the year 1902 or 1903. Another method of subsidizing politicians individually, Mr. Vreeland testified, was by carrying stocks on the books of various brokerage houses for them; these individual stock transactions ran from $20,000 to more than $30,000. Much further testimony was brought out showing the enormous and continuous subsidizing of both old political parties and politicians by corporations wanting certain legislation enacted or smothered. On September 21, 1910, Mr. Vreeland admitted that the Metropolitan Street Railway Company had, prior to 1903, paid out fully $250,000 in “taking up” stocks that legislators and other politicians had been carrying with brokerage houses and which they desired converted into cash; this was one of the indirect methods of influencing political or legislative action in the interest of the company. G. Tracy Rogers testified that he had disbursed $82,475 in three years, and that most of it went to members of the railroad committees of the New York Legislature. In these hearings the names of a number of conspicuous legislators and the amounts received by them were brought out in the testimony. Testimony, also under oath, on October 19, 1910, purported to show that a legislative corruption fund of $500,000 was raised at a meeting in Delmonico’s to defeat anti-race track gambling legislation at Albany in 1908; that Charles H. Hyde,[2] Chamberlain of New York City under Mayor Gaynor, attended this meeting, and that State Senator Frank Gardner went to Albany with Hyde because Hyde did not know the ways of legislators and how to approach them “properly.”