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Upon the tables were immense sheets, yards in diameter, with lists of names. Back of the tables were immense piles of caps, badges and canes. As fast as the owners of the names on the list appeared their names were checked and their invitation cards, which they threw down cheerily upon the table in company with a five-dollar bill, were marked paid and passed back for further use. At the other tables these cards were then good for a cap, a cane, and two badges, all of which the members were expected to wear.

Energetic as were the half-dozen deputy commissioners, police sergeants, detective sergeants, ex-assemblymen and the like, who labored at this clerical task without coats or vests, they were no match for the throng of energetic Tammanyites who filed in and out, carrying their hats and canes away with them. Hundreds of clerks, precinct captains, wardmen, street-cleaners, two-thousand-dollar-a-year clerks, swarmed the spacious lobby and greeted one another in that perfunctory way so common to most political organizations. The “Hellos,” “Well, old mans,” “Well, how are things?” and “There goes” were as thick and all-pervading as the tobacco smoke which filled the rooms. Tammanyites in comfortable positions of all degrees moved about in new clothes and squeaky shoes. Distinct racial types illustrated how common is the trait of self-interest and how quick are the young Germans, Irish and Jews to espouse some cause or profession where self-interest and the simultaneous advancement of the power of some particular individual or organization are not incompatible. Smilingly they greeted one another, with that assumption of abandon and good fellowship which was as evidently assumed for the occasion as could be. In the case of many it was all too plain that it was an effort to be as bright and genial as they appeared to be. However, they had mastered the externals and could keep a straight face. How hard those straight mouths could become, how defiant those narrow protruding jaws, only time and a little failure on some one’s part would tell.