Tradespeople who sold supplies to the city, contractors who did
its work, saloon-keepers and dive-owners who wanted
protection--all paid. The city's debt increased at the rate of
$3,000,000 a year, without visible evidence of the application of
money to the city's growing needs.

In 1883 the citizens finally aroused themselves and petitioned
the legislature for a new charter. They confessed: "Philadelphia
is now recognized as the worst paved and worst cleaned city in
the civilized world. The water supply is so bad that during many
weeks of the last winter it was not only distasteful and
unwholesome for drinking, but offensive for bathing purposes. The
effort to clean the streets was abandoned for months and no
attempt was made to that end until some public-spirited citizens,
at their own expense, cleaned a number of the principal
thoroughfares . . . . The physical condition of the sewers" is
"dangerous to the health and most offensive to the comfort of our
people. Public work has been done so badly that structures have
to be renewed almost as soon as finished. Others have been in
part constructed at enormous expense and then permitted to fall
to decay without completion." This is a graphic and faithful
description of the result which follows government of the Ring,
for the Ring, with the people's money. The legislature in 1885
granted Philadelphia a new charter, called the Bullitt Law, which
went into effect in 1887, and which greatly simplified the
structure of the government and centered responsibility in the
mayor. It was then necessary for the Ring to control primaries
and win elections in order to keep the city within its clutches.
So began in Philadelphia the practice of fraudulent registering
and voting on a scale that has probably never been equaled