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Added wealth streams constantly into the city, from the cornucopias of lobbyists with no-limit expense accounts, tourists and representatives of foreign governments who let loose a few francs, shillings or lire before tapping our tills.

Here we have a city which, if mental cripples who believe in planned economies were correct, should be a happy place, free of crime and vice. Washington is rich and almost everyone in it is insured against want for life. Yet it has that apex rate of crime. The waterfront of Marseilles, the alleys of Singapore’s Chinatown, the sailor’s deadfalls of Port Said have nothing on it. Washington makes even Chicago look good. And that’s been going on since Abigail Adams hung the family wash in the backyard of the then unfinished White House—and shuddered lest the President’s drawers be stolen.

In the early years of the Republic, grifters and grafters, highwaymen and conmen, pimps and prostitutes flocked into the city. Instead of being a community where women greatly outnumbered men, as they do today, early Washington contained almost entirely males. The first Congressmen and early office-holders were easy pickings for the fancy girls and their fancy men, who arrived a jump ahead of the lobbyists. Lonesome men whiled their time at cards and dice, and ever since then Washington has been a gamblers’ garden.