III. On December 16, 1907, a letter in reference to saloon 823 Druid Hill Avenue, managed by one Oscar E. Goode, being kept open on Sundays, was sent to His Honor Mayor Mahool. IV. This church has never had occasion to call upon the police to quell, or settle, any disturbance. V. It teaches to its members the doctrine that the laws of the State and City must be observed. Because of the foregoing, we deny the statement above referred to, declare it to be untrue and unworthy of any consideration in the settlement of the question at issue, and are ready, through our representative, to submit further evidences which your Honorable Body may wish to receive. Respectfully submitted, THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, Metropolitan M. E. Church. One of the points brought out in the discussion was that the presence of so many saloons in this neighborhood had depreciated the value of property, in some cases as much as one hundred per cent. The class of saloon patrons are in the main of such low type that they drive the decent people out of the neighborhood and make the main streets through the section objectionable and even dangerous as public highways. Respectable people in large numbers take the side streets rather than walk through lower Pennsylvania or Druid Hill Avenue. The disposition was to charge this depreciation to the presence of colored people, on the ground that colored people always lowered the value of property. This was disproved by the fact that in the upper end of Druid Hill Avenue, into which the better classes of colored people are moving, property was actually selling at higher prices than it had reached when it was a white neighborhood. One of the first colored men to buy in the upper Druid Hill Avenue district bought in a row in which prices have advanced over sixty per cent. Houses in this neighborhood now rent and sell at from twenty to fifty per cent. advance on prices prevailing when the neighborhood was white.