The records show that a succession of prominent Tammany leaders were involved in some theft or swindle, public or private. These peculations or frauds ranged, in point of time, from 1799 and 1805-6 to the later decades; in the matter of persons, from the founder of the Tammany Society to some of the subsequent “bosses,” and in gradation of amount, from the petty thousands taken by Mooney, Stagg and Page, in the first decade of the century, to the $1,220,000 taken by Swartwout in 1830-38 and the undetermined millions taken by Wood and Tweed in the fifties, sixties and first two years of the seventies. From nearly the beginning of its active political career, Tammany leaders, with generally brief interruptions, thus continued to abstract money from the city, the State and the nation--the interruptions to the practice generally coinciding with the periods when Tammany in those years was deprived of political power. My search has shown me the absurdity of the pretense that any vital distinction exists between the Tammany Society and the Tammany Hall political organization. Tammany members industriously propagate this pretense, but it has neither a historic nor an actual basis. From 1805, the date of the apparent separation of the organization from the society, the Sachems of the latter have ruled the policies of the former. Repeatedly, as in 1828, 1838, 1853, and 1857, they have determined the “regularity” of contending factions in the organization, and have shut the hall to members of the faction against which they have decided. The Sachems have at all times been the leaders in the political body, and the control of the society in every year that Tammany has held control of the city, has determined the division of plunder for the ensuing year. The Tammany Society and the Tammany political organization constitute a dual power--but, unlike Ormuzd and Ahrimanes, a duality working by identical means for an identical end.