When men and women stopped killing, Cummings would turn to politics. Tweed was the great man then; under suspicion, even before 1870, but a great man, particularly among his own. The _Sun_ printed pages about Tweed and his satellites and the great balls of the Americus Club, their politico-social organisation. It described the jewels worn by the leaders of Tammany Hall, including the two-thousand-dollar club badge--the head of a tiger with eyes of ruby and three large diamonds shining above them. Everybody who wanted the political news read the _Sun_. As Jim Fisk remarked one evening as he stood proudly with Jay Gould in the lobby of the Grand Opera House--proud of his notoriety in connection with the Erie Railroad jobbery, proud of the infamy he enjoyed from the fact that he owned two houses in the same block in West Twenty-third Street, housing his wife in one and Josie Mansfield in the other; proud of his guilty partnership in Tweedism-- “The _Sun’s_ a lively paper. I can never wait for daylight for a copy. I have my man down there with a horse every morning, and just as soon as he gets a _Sun_ hot from the press he jumps on the back of that horse and puts for me as if all hell was after him. “Gould’s the same way; he has to see it before daylight, too. My man has to bring him up a copy. You always get the news ahead of everybody else. Why, the first news I got that Gould and me were blackballed in the Blossom Club we got from the _Sun_. I’m damned if I’d believe it at first, and Gould says, ‘What is this Blossom Club?’ Just then Sweeny came in. I asked Sweeny if it was true, and Sweeny said yes, that Tweed was the man that done it all. There it was in the _Sun_, straight’s a die.” The _Sun_ reporter who chronicled this--it may have been Cummings himself--had gone to ask Fisk whether he and his friends had hired a thug to black-jack the respectable Mr. Dorman B. Eaton, a foe of the Erie outfit; but he took down and printed Fisk’s tribute to the _Sun’s_ enterprise. As there was scarcely a morning in those days when the _Sun_ did not turn up some new trick played by the Tweed gang and the Erie group, their anxiety to get an early copy was natural. Tweed and his philanthropic pretences did not deceive the _Sun_. On February 24, 1870--a year and a half before the exposure which sent the boss to prison--the _Sun_ printed an editorial article announcing that Tweed was willing to surrender his ownership of the city upon the following terms: [Illustration: (_From a Photograph by Paul Dana_) MR. DANA AT SEVENTY ] To give up all interest in the court-house swindle. To receive no more revenue from the department of survey and inspection of buildings; and he hopes the people of New York will remember his generosity in giving up this place, inasmuch as his share amounts to over one hundred thousand dollars a year.