The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1906-12-08
The HarIot and the Policeman.

There is anxiety and trouble in the
underworld Of this town. And well may
there be.
Every great city will always have its
full quota of vice, vice ~preventable and
unpreventable, vice inseparable from the
universal and eternal weakness Of hu-
man nature; vice to be eradicated by
necessary and wise laws, and vice that
can never be eradicated any more than
the ordinary emotions of humanity can
be extinguished, but which can be
restrained within the conventions OF
decency and of order and not allowed to
transcend the limitations of scandal or
noxious example.
The moral nature and the moral COM
mon sense of this town are perhaps
none too sensitive. They are very much
the same as those of any other big and
overgrown community in any part Of the
world. In fact, we can stand almost
anything that any other town can stand.
But what we cannot stand and will not
put up with is the furtive and criminal
compact between vice and authority.
We can tolerate and we can be indiifer-
ent to an immense amount Of the various
evils that infest society land we ought,
no doubt, to be deeply ashamed of it),
but we never get really stirred to resent
ment, never get heated to real passion,
until we unearth depravity in the relation
Of vice with the law.
There is an ugly and a dangerous feel
ing, but a creditable feeling, aroused in
this community when it is disclosed that
it's unhappy harlots are the slaves of
the police, hat their miserable wage is
wrung from them by the very guardians
of the law itself, and that our whole
police system is perverted and depraved
into a vast engine of traffic in human
bodies and human souls. The laws are
made the property of the police. We
make the law and pawn it with the
gambler and with the harlot. The law
for the harlot and the law for the gam
bier are merciless in their terms, but
they are on the statute books to be sold
by the police. They are a remunerative,
a most profitable commodity, these
laws, and vice is cultivated and crime
promoted in this town that the harvest
by the sale of the law may be as great as
possible. Thus it has come about that
the effect of a statute is to ncourag and
to spread vice instead of to restrain and
suppress it.
We see police captains and other
officers possessed of great wealth, no
~toriously gained by the sale of the law
TO harlotry and gambling. The well
informed point to others in power than
the police themselves, to men OF weight
and influence in the political life of the
town, who have to have their share of
the usufruct Of sin. II is all understood
and accepted from one end Of the town
to the other. There is no mystery any
where; no shame anywhere; nothing
but that brazen defiance which is founded
in the belief that money, whatever it's
source, j%ustifies everything.
But there is trouble in this underworld.
The man at the head of the police is an
able and an honest man who knows no
fear. He is slowly penetrating the LADY,
rinth Of crime almost inscrutable IN its
~complexity and in its battling ingenuity.
Since we sounded the depths of moral
rottenness we have never had a man
like General BINGHAM to deal with our
great moral canker. II there is any
man who can uproot the evil and cast it
out it is he. And hand in hand with
BINGHAM is JEROME, and what he is it
needs no word from us to explain.