The age-herald., 1900-11-26
lnsolence of Police Captain.

In substance it is briefly this: that when one of them complained to police captain of condition of things in his immediate neighborhood, whose pre-eminent infamy Is a matter of common notoriety, condition of things easily verified by any intelligent citizen who passes through the streets in which it exists, he was told that he lied; and that when, disheartened by such an experience, he carried his complaint to a higher authority in the police force he was met with insolent derision.
 I affirm that such virtual safeguarding of vice in the city of New York is a burn ing shame to any decent and civilized com munity, and an intolerabe outrage upon those whom it especially and pre-eminent- ly concerns. I am not, I beg to say, un- mindful of the fact that the existence of vice in a great city is, practically, an inc vitable condition of the life of such community. l am not demanding that vice shall be stamped out by the police any other civil authority. That Is task which would demand for its achievement a race of angels and not of men.
 But I approach you, sir, to protest with all my power against a condition of things in which vice Is not only tolerated, but shielded and encouraged by those whose sworn duty it is to repress and discourage it, and, in the name of unsullied youth and innocence, of young girls and their moth-' CTS who, though living under conditions often of prvation and the hard struggle
 
 of virtue and purity that are the ornaments of any so-caled gentlewomen in the land. I know those of whom l speak; their homes, their lives, their toll, and their as- pirations. Their sensibility to insult or out rage is keen as theirs who are in your household or mine; and before God and in the face of the citizens of New York 1 pro- test, as my people have charged me to do, against the habitual insult, the persistent menace the unutterably defiling contacts, to which, day by day, because of the base complicity of the police of New York with the lowest forms of vice and crime they are subjected. And, in the name of these little ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues, but of homes in which God is feared, and His law reverenced, and virtue and decency honore6 and exempli- fed call upon you, sir, to save these peo- pie who are in, a very real way committed to your charge. from living hell, leprous, deadly, damning, to which the criminal supineness of the constituted authorities, set for the defence of decency and good or der threatens to doom them.
 Methods Left to Mayor.
 have no methods to suggest, no indfv,d- uals to single out for especial rebuke and chastisement. These are for you to deter mine and to deal with. The situa..za which confronts us in this metropolis as America is one of common and open noto- riety, and of such nature as may well make us a byword and hssing among ths nations of the world. For nowhere else ey3 earth, I verily believe, certainly not .f any civilized or Christian community, does there exist such situation as def1les and dishonors New York today Vice exists -n many cities; but there is at least some persistent repression of its external mani- festations, and the agents of the law are not, as here, widely believed to be batten- ing upon the fruits of its most loathsome and unnamable forms.
 I come to you, sir, with this protest in accordance with the instructions lately laid upon me by the convention of the Episcopal Church of the Diocese of New York. The events which provoked its ac- ton occurred some months ago. There has been no haste on my part or on theirs in behalf of whom I speak in reaching conclusions as to the situation to which refer Months have passed since the incl dents occurred to which I have alluded :n this communication. But in all these months, the condition of things in whole neighborhoods has not improved, but rather | grown worse. Vice not only fiaunts in the most open and ribald forms but hard | working fathers and mothers find it hard CT than ever, today, to-defend their house. holds from a rapacious hcentiousness