And all this was a regular profession, a custom of the country, which its devotees studied. “Two of them told me repeatedly that they travelled about the country looking up the business, and that a fellowship had grown up among boodling aldermen of the leading cities in the United States. Committees from Chicago would come to St. Louis to find out what ‘new games’ the St. Louis boodlers had, and they gave the St. Louisans hints as to how they ‘did the business’ in Chicago. So the Chicago and St. Louis boodlers used to visit Cleveland and Pittsburg and all the other cities, or, if the distance was too great, they got their ideas by those mysterious channels which run all through the ‘World of Graft.’ The meeting place in St. Louis was Decker’s stable, and ideas unfolded there were developed into plans which the boodlers say to-day, are only in abeyance. In Decker’s stable was born the plan to sell the Union Market; and though the deal did not go through, the boodlers, when they saw it failing, made the market-men pay ten thousand dollars for killing it. This scheme is laid aside for the future. Another that failed was to sell the court-house, and this was well under way when it was discovered that the ground on which this public building stands was given to the city on condition that it was to be used for a court-house and nothing else.... The grandest idea of all came from Philadelphia. In that city the gas-works were sold out to a private concern, and the water-works were to be sold next. The St. Louis fellows have been trying ever since to find a purchaser for their water-works. The plant is worth at least forty million dollars. But the boodlers thought they could let it go at fifteen million dollars, and get one million dollars or so themselves for the bargain. ‘The scheme was to do it and skip,’ said one of the boodlers who told me about it, ‘and if you could mix it all up with some filtering scheme it could be done. Only some of us thought we could make more than one million dollars out of it—a fortune apiece. It will be done some day.’... “Such, then, is the boodling system as we see it in St. Louis. Everything the city owned was for sale by the officers elected by the people. The purchasers might be willing or unwilling takers; they might be citizens or outsiders; it was all one to the city government. So long as the members of the combines got the proceeds they would sell out the town. Would? They did and they will. If a city treasurer runs away with fifty thousand dollars there is a great halloo about it. In St. Louis the regularly organised thieves who rule have sold fifty million dollars’ worth of franchises and other valuable municipal assets. This is the estimate made for me by a banker, who said that the boodlers got not one-tenth of the value of the things they sold.”