Was it utterly absurd that the Tweed idolaters should have taken seriously the _Sun’s_ little joke? No, for so serious a writer as Gustavus Myers wrote in his “History of Tammany Hall” (1901) that “one of the signers of the circular has assured the author that it was a serious proposal. The attitude of the _Sun_ confirms this.” And another grave literary man, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, set this down in his “Essays on Application” (1908): William M. Tweed, of New York, who reigned over the city for seven years, stole six million dollars or more for himself and six million dollars or more for his followers; was indorsed at the heights of his corruption by six of the richest citizens of the metropolis; had a public statue offered to him by the New York _Sun_ as a “noble benefactor of the city,” etc. Of course Mr. Myers and Dr. Van Dyke had never read the statue articles from beginning to end, else they would not have stumbled over the brick that even Tweed, with all his conceit, was able to perceive. In July, 1871, when the New York _Times_ was fortunate enough to have put in its hands the proof of what everybody already suspected--that Senator Tweed, Comptroller Connolly, Park Commissioner Sweeny, and their associates were plundering the city--the _Sun_ was busy with its own pet news and political articles, the investigation of the Orange riots and the extravagance and nepotism of President Grant’s administration. The _Sun_ did not like the _Times_, which had been directed, since the death of Henry J. Raymond, in 1869, by Raymond’s partner, George Jones, and Raymond’s chief editorial writer, Louis J. Jennings; but the _Sun_ liked the Tweed gang still less. It had been pounding at it for two years, using the head-lines “Boss Tweed’s Legislature,” or “Mr. Sweeny’s Legislature,” every day of the sessions at the State capital; but neither the _Sun_ nor any other newspaper had been able to obtain the figures that proved the robbery until the county bookkeeper, Matthew J. O’Rourke, dug them out and took them to the _Times_. The books showed that the city had been gouged out of five million dollars in one item alone--the price paid in two years to a Tweed contracting firm, Ingersoll & Co., for furniture and carpets for the county court-house. Enough carpets had been bought--or at least paid for--to cover the eight acres of City Hall Park three layers deep. And that five million dollars was only a fraction of the loot. In September, 1871, after the mass-meeting of citizens in Cooper Union, the _Sun_ began printing the revelations of Tweedism under the standing head, “The Doom of the Ring.”