In the same work it is stated, in the article on “Bribery,” that “The crime of accepting bribes has at one time or another been proved against members of city councils in a large proportion of American cities.” This from Ida Tarbell, the well-known writer:

In a report of a commissioner on the Boston city charter, November 6, 1884, it is stated that “the lack of harmony between the different departments, the frequent and notorious charges of inefficiency and corruption made by members of the government against each other, and the alarming increase in the burden of taxation are matters within the knowledge of all who have taxes to pay or who read the proceedings of the City Council.” That report showed that during the previous thirty years the population had increased 190 per cent; property valuations 200 per cent; expenditures 450 per cent. The appropriations were equal to $27.30 per inhabitant, those of New York $16.76 per inhabitant. The Boston politicians seem to have worked more stealthily and more successfully than the Tweed Ring.

The corruption in Philadelphia city politics has been notorious for a long time. The operations of the infamous Gas Ring caused the debt of the city, which stood at $20,000,000 in 1860, to reach $70,000,000 in 1881. “Taxation rose in proportion, till in 1881 it amounted to between one-fourth and one-third of the net income from the property on which it was assessed, although that property was rated at nearly its full value. Yet withal, the city was badly paved, badly cleansed, badly supplied with gas (for which a high price was charged) and with water.” (American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 410.) In a memorandum presented to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1883 by a number of the leading citizens of Philadelphia, they stated that the city’s affairs were in a most deplorable condition. It is there stated to be the worst paved and worst cleaned city in the civilized world; sewage so bad as to endanger health; public buildings badly constructed and then allowed to decay; slovenly management and high taxation. The Gas Ring system was that already described. The political boss originally gained a following of the floating and controllable voters, by which means he got in addition political control of the city’s gas workmen, and through them of the primaries, and thus complete power over city affairs. Elections were controlled by repeating, personations, violence, ballot box tampering and other frauds. It was not until 1887 that the final defeat of this ring was obtained, after tremendous efforts. In that year the loose city charter of 1854 was replaced by the tight-string Bullitt charter, and the old gas ring was succeeded by a new combination of rascals. Under this rÉgime the city has been governed by oligarchies of city contractors. One of the sources of corruption and scandal has been the garbage and street cleaning contracts. There have been scandalous dealings with street franchises. The elections have been fraudulently conducted. Citizens have regarded it as hopeless to vote; out of 416,860 qualified citizens in the spring of 1919 only 241,090 registered as voters. Probably only one-half of the voters actually went to the polls, and those who voted were presumably the most unfit. Why should an intelligent man trouble himself to go through such an empty form as that of voting a mere protest against an overpowering gang of organized freebooters? In 1918 the levying of political assessments on city employees was still in force in Philadelphia, and collections were made from ninety-four per cent of the city employees; the total being $250,000 to $500,000 per year to the Republican party alone. A new city charter has now (1919) been enacted and great reforms are promised, but charter tinkering will never cure the evils created by a politically rotten constituency. Judging the future by the past, there will soon be a new Philadelphia plunder machine which will function till about 1950 when there will be a new revolution and a new ring, and so on.

Bryce states that similar complaints to those made by the Philadelphians were constantly made by the citizens of the other principal cities of the United States.

He gives a table of the increase of population, valuation, taxation and debt in fifteen of the largest cities of the United States from 1860 to 1875, as follows:

Increase in population	70.5	per cent.
Increase in taxable valuation	156.9	““
Increase in debt	270.9	““
Increase in taxation	363.2	““

Bryce described city government in California in 1877 as very bad and continuing bad up to his present writing (1894). He says: “The municipal government of San Francisco was far from pure. The officials enriched themselves, while the paving, the draining, the lighting, were scandalously neglected; corruption and political jobbery had found their way even into school management, and liquor was sold everywhere, the publicans being leagued with the heads of the police to prevent the enforcement of the laws.”

And again:

It is well known that the great loss of life and property in San Francisco following the earthquake shock of 1906 was chargeable to civic misgovernment. The damage done by the earthquake itself was comparatively light, but the city aqueduct had been so badly built that it was shaken down and the city was left without water, so that it was impossible to put out the numerous fires resulting from the earthquake shock, which, small in their beginnings, were allowed to ravage the city.

The evidence as to smaller cities is similar. “In Minneapolis, for instance,” says Steffens, “the people who were left to govern the city hated above all things strict laws. They were the saloon keepers, gamblers, criminals and the shiftless poor of all nationalities.” (Shame of Cities, p. 65.)

The failure of manhood suffrage is also well illustrated by the history of the City of New York, where there is a large class of unpropertied voters and of which J. B. Miller, writing in 1887, said that the interests of the City were represented almost exclusively by liquor dealers both in the municipal and the state legislatures. In 1840 the New York City debt was $10,000,000, about $33 per capita. In 1870 it was $73,000,000, about $90 per capita. In 1918 (for the new and larger city) it was $1,335,000,000, about $242 per capita. In 1816 the New York tax levy was $344,802, being less than half of one per cent of the taxable property. In 1918 the tax levy was $198,232,811, being 2.30 per cent of the taxable property. In 1898 the New York City budget was $70,000,000; by 1909 it amounted to $156,000,000. The increase in population was only 39.4 per cent in that time, while the city’s expenses increased 123 per cent.

Further evidence may be found in the report of a Commission appointed by Governor Tilden of New York in 1875, to consider the evils of the municipal government of New York City and the necessity of adopting a new and permanent plan for city government. Tilden was a man of recognized ability. He appointed a commission of ten New Yorkers, including judges, lawyers and publicists, men past middle age and of the highest integrity, business experience and reputation. The chairman was William M. Evarts, a distinguished statesman, leader of the New York Bar, who at times held the offices of Attorney General and Secretary of State of the United States. Their report, which was carefully prepared and unanimous, described the steady deterioration in the government of the city of New York which had then been progressing for a generation past, and which they had seen in progress with their own eyes for that period of time. The following extracts from the report are pertinent:

The report refers to the period from 1850 to 1860. It says:

Again:

This waste and theft of public money the report refers to had its direct cause in the incapacity and rascality of public officials all or most of whom as we know were chosen either directly or indirectly by manhood suffrage. The report further says on this point:

Also:

Further:

The New York City tax levy for 1877, the year of the report, was $28,400,000, one-half of which was caused by official robbery. Therefore, according to the report of these able and experienced citizens made after an examination of the city’s finances, the city had been robbed of a sum which represented fourteen millions a year, and which capitalized at five per cent amounts to $280,000,000, a fair estimate of the amount of politicians’ loot up to that time. In other words, every family in New York had on an average, been plundered to the tune of $1400 by state and city politicians. If this $280,000,000 was not loot what was it? And if not chargeable to manhood suffrage to what is it chargeable?

The committee showed its opinion of the cause by its choice of the remedy. It recommended the creation of a Board of Finance to control municipal expenditures, and to be elected by tax and rent payers only. This expedient, so objectionable to greedy and grafting politicians, was never adopted or even offered to the people for adoption. The report fell flat in a legislature elected by the controllable vote, and of course thoroughly corrupt and unpatriotic.

Looking back still further and for the benefit of those who would like additional evidence upon the political degeneracy of New York City, a few facts will be given taken from Myers’ History of Tammany Hall and by him taken mostly from public documents, commencing about 1826 shortly after “the great advance” which the twaddling sentimentalist writers tell us was made by the introduction of manhood suffrage.

In the November election of 1827 was the greatest exhibition of fraud and violence ever seen in the city. “Now,” (says Myers) “were observable the effects brought forth by the suffrage changes of 1822 and 1826.” Repeating flourished and honest voters were beaten and arrested for trying to vote. Next year, in 1828, hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal votes were counted, including those of boys of nineteen and twenty years of age. This practice was continued in the ensuing decade. It was then just one year after the complete triumph of manhood suffrage in New York State that money was first used to influence voting in New York City elections. The city was carried in 1828 by Tammany Hall for Andrew Jackson. Four years later in 1832, and subsequent years, the price of votes in New York City was stated at $5.00 each. Paupers from the almshouse and convicts were voted at the polls. In 1838 Swartwout, a Jackson collector of the port, and an unsavory politician, became a defaulter for $1,200,000, an enormous sum for that time, and Price, the United States district attorney, defaulted for $75,000. Civic frauds were frequent and increasing. An aldermanic committee in 1842 reported that dishonest office holders had recently robbed the city of near $100,000, equivalent to a theft of $2,000,000 from New York City in our time. The wholesale naturalization mill was put in operation, turning out several thousand new voters a year. From 1841 to 1844 the total vote of the city was thus increased about twenty-five per cent in newly naturalized foreigners alone; most of them probably without interest in the country or real understanding of its institutions and history. At the election of 1844 it was estimated that twenty per cent of the votes were fraudulent. The primaries were organized by violence and reeked with fraud. The character of many of the noted city politicians was notoriously bad, including professional gamblers, pugilists and even thieves. About this time the city political gangs began to appear. The ward heelers with a following of repeaters were a new power in politics. In one period of ten months, 1839-1840, there were nineteen riots and twenty murders in a city of only 300,000 population. Mike Walsh’s was the principal gang. The gangs increased in number till in 1856 the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits had a pitched street battle in Jackson Street, where ten were killed and eighty wounded.

The sale of nominations to office first became notorious in 1846. Prices ranged from $1,000 to $20,000. This circumstance alone is almost convincing proof of universal corruption in public affairs since no one buys an office unless with the knowledge that money is to be made corruptly in its administration; and this is usually impossible or too dangerous to be undertaken unless the general administration is so corrupt as to be tolerant of fraud, bribery and extortion. The common council was notoriously for sale; it was believed that every city department was corrupt. In 1851 the Williamsburg Ferry scandal broke out and it was shown that $20,000 in bribes had been paid to New York City aldermen. The “Forty Thieves” was the name given to the New York City aldermen of 1852, to whom one Jacob Sharp first applied for a franchise to build a street railway on Broadway, New York. An injunction was obtained; but they passed the franchise in defiance of the injunction. Of the aldermen who thus voted, one was imprisoned for a fortnight and the others fined. A similar affair was the sale of the New York Third Avenue Street Railroad Franchise by the same board of aldermen; over $30,000 was said to have been paid in bribes for this franchise, a great sum for those days.

Occasionally when a quarrel broke out over the distribution of the spoils the most appalling disclosures were made; such as those on an investigation by the Grand Jury in 1853, when it appeared that the aldermen demanded a share in every city contract. On February 26th, 1853, the grand jury of New York County handed down a presentment with testimony to the effect that enormous sums of money had been expended for the procurement of street railroad franchises in New York City. It was ascertained that $50,000 had been paid in 1851 for the Eighth and Ninth Avenue Railroad franchises; that in 1852 $30,000 was paid in bribes for the Third Avenue Railroad franchise; that money was paid for aldermanic votes on franchises of the Catharine Street, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Grand Street and Wall Street ferries. Numerous other instances were given of bribery of members of the common council in connection with sale of city property and other contracts. Evidence as to police corruption was plentiful. The chief of police had received one hundred and sixty-three conveyances of property in one year. (Board of Aldermen Documents, Vol. XXI, part 2, No. 55, pp. 1333-35 and p. 1573; Myers’ History of Tammany Hall, 167.)

Out of sixty thousand votes polled in 1854, ten thousand were for sale. “In the city at this time were about ten thousand shiftless, unprincipled persons who lived by their wits and the labor of others. The trade of a part of these was turning primary elections, packing nominating conventions, repeating and breaking up meetings.” In 1856 Josiah Quincy saw $25.00 paid for a single vote for a member of Congress. The day “was enlivened with assaults, riots and stabbings.”

The frauds and scandals in city affairs continued and grew from 1854 to 1860; it was impossible to learn from the city’s books how much was being plundered. In three years the taxes nearly doubled. From 1850 to 1860 the expenses of the city government increased from $3,200,000 to $9,758,000.

Politics in the old Sixth Ward of New York is briefly sketched by Frank Moss, at one time Police Commissioner, in his interesting work, The American Metropolis. No doubt civilization existed in that district from 1845 to 1865, the period referred to by Moss; there were churches and schools, family and business life as elsewhere. It was originally a fairly respectable neighborhood, but thanks to manhood suffrage, the political life of the community was thoroughly savage and its representatives savages, and it and they did much to degrade the whole ward. First we find “that hard-faced, heavy-handed old rapscallion Isaiah Rynders was the controlling spirit. There was nothing that Rynders could not or would not do, and there are many dark stories of his conduct during the draft riots of 1863.” He was the Boss of the district, his assistants were ruffians, his leaders and backers were office-holding politicians with the “Hon.” prefix to their notorious names. He was succeeded by Con Donoho, the head of the street cleaning department, whose gang finally trounced the Rynders gang into submission and who became thereafter “on close terms with the strongest political men of the city.” Moss finds thirty years later a similar alliance between crime and politics in the Eighth Ward of New York, among whose political rulers are, he says “pimps, gamblers, thugs, fighters and dive keepers.”

In 1860 the mayor was accused of selling appointments to offices. The Grand Jury in a presentment charged him with robbing the tax payers of $420,000. The New York Tribune in June 1860 publicly charged the municipal authorities with theft of public funds. Other newspaper criticism was silenced by orders for public advertising. The money voted for street cleaning was squandered, and the streets were so filthy that the death rate in 1863 was thirty-three per thousand. In a court proceeding in 1867 it incidentally transpired that $50,000 had been paid the common council for one gas franchise.

In 1857 the notorious William M. Tweed came into prominence and acquired political power which he retained for fourteen years, during which time he and his followers were steadily at work looting the city and squandering and amassing fortunes. The history of the Tweed rÉgime of plunder in New York City is well known. In 1867 he was at the height of his power. Prior to that date all public contractors in New York City had been required to add ten per cent to their bills and pay over that percentage to certain politicians. In 1867 this percentage was increased to thirty-five per cent of which twenty-five per cent went to Tweed. The County Clerk’s and Register’s office brought in $40,000 to $80,000 a year each; the Sheriff’s office $150,000 a year. A part of this income was of course available for election purposes. Tweed and all his associates became rich notwithstanding that they lavished millions in the purchase of voters and public officials. Out of his stolen millions Tweed in the winter of 1871 gave $50,000 to the poor of his own ward and perhaps as much more throughout the city. This made him popular with the thriftless or pauper classes. Many of his transactions were in the nature of purchases of the state legislature at Albany. He influenced the press by means of advertising contracts, presents to reporters, etc. One newspaper got a profit of nearly $200,000 on a printing contract; another got $80,000 a year for advertising; presents to newspaper men ranged from $200 to $2500 a year. In 1871 the New York Sun proposed to erect a statue to the great man. At his daughter’s wedding the gifts were worth $100,000. From $36,000,000 in 1868 the city debt rose to $136,000,000 in 1871. The new county court house cost the city $12,000,000, of which $9,000,000 was undoubtedly stolen; repairs on armories the value of which was $250,000 were charged at $3,000,000 and so on. The total thefts of the Tweed ring amounted to somewhere between $100,000,000 and $200,000,000; the precise figure has never been ascertained. Had Tweed been less greedy, had his gang taken $25,000,000 instead of six times that sum they might have escaped. They went too far and the Tweed ring was overthrown in 1871 by a powerful citizens’ movement.

The reader may wonder what the decent people of New York were thinking, saying and doing all these years while these operations of the managers of the controllable vote were in progress. Just exactly what they are now thinking, saying and doing all over the country;—complaining and deploring that it can not be helped. Sometimes on the heels of some unusually scandalous disclosure a reform movement would be started, aided perhaps by young men intensely patriotic, fresh from school and college where they had read about our fine political structure in books that fail to refer to the rotten foundation. They learned by sad experience as others before them that the stream will rise no higher than its source; that with a controllable electorate kindly provided by the manhood suffrage constitution and an organization of scallawags, loafers and criminals to control it the politicians had the best of the situation. Bryce, who was in New York in 1870 and saw the Tweed Ring in its glory, gives us a fine picture of the effect of manhood suffrage in prostrating public conscience and energy. He says that the respectable democratic leaders winked at the Ring’s misdeeds for the sake of the vote; that the press had been purchased or subsidized; that the bench was controlled; that three-quarters of the citizens “paid little or nothing in the way of direct taxes, and did not realize that the increase of civic burdens would fall upon them as well as upon the rich.” Here you have the case as plain as day; the electorate, whose business and function it was to secure good government and prevent these evils, failed in its duty; it was itself corrupt and inefficient; and why? Because three-quarters of it paid little or no direct taxes. In other words, they were not property holders. Just as the human soul is undiscoverable except as revealed by the human body, so civilization exhibits itself in property; and the rabble who are unfamiliar with property and are devoid of sympathy with its rights, feel no interest in good government or in any other incident of civilization.

Bryce further says:

Notwithstanding the Tweed disclosures there was no serious attempt to apply the only practical remedy by reforming the electorate. Here and there a voice was heard crying in the wilderness, but no one regarded it. In October 1876, a writer in the North American Review was clear-eyed enough to read the lesson of the Tweed Ring. He wrote:

And as a remedy he proposed “A recurrence to the ancient ways; a strong executive, a non-political judiciary,” and that “property must be entitled to representation as well as persons.”

Of course, the article had no perceptible effect.

Once more the impossible task of creating a good government by means of the votes of a purchasable constituency was attempted. Such of the ablest men of the city as were willing to dip into the mire of manhood suffrage politics devoted themselves to the task but in vain. The hopelessness of the undertaking ought to have been apparent from such facts as this, that Tweed’s own district re-elected him senator by a large majority in November 1871 after he had been thoroughly exposed and while he was being prosecuted for his crimes. The so-called reformers who supplanted the Tweed clique in public office were only political adventurers of a different type; more scrupulous, refined or timid than their predecessors, but politicians after all, since none other could be induced to enter the political arena. The coarse robberies of Tweed’s time were discontinued, but the government of New York City by a political clique organized on the basis of the use of the city spoils to secure the controllable vote was continued. It was only for a few months that the tempest cleared the air. The good citizens soon forgot their sudden zeal, or became discouraged at the odds against them in a manhood suffrage community. Neglecting the primaries where they had obtained but slim results they allowed nominations to fall back into the hands of spoilsmen, and the most important city offices to be fought for by factions differing only in their name and party badges, because all were clearly bent upon selfish gain. Roosevelt, writing in 1886, tells something of the political conditions of this reformed “after-Tweed” period:

Ostrogorski thus describes the period following Tweed’s overthrow:

In other words, the much vaunted reform uprising which overthrew Tweed was without radical or permanent results, because it left the city still at the mercy of the controllable vote.

A few later incidents may be added to Mr. Myers’ interesting collection. In 1874 one McKenna was shot dead in an election fight in New York and Richard Croker was accused of the crime and tried; the jury disagreed. Croker afterwards became Tweed’s successor and political boss of New York, retiring about 1899 to his native Ireland, with millions made out of politics. About this time the Harlem court house was built. The amount possible to steal was small, but the politicians displayed a spirit worthy of past days; for $66,000 worth of construction they collected from the city $268,000, or at the rate of four to one. In 1884 twenty-one members out of twenty-three of the Board of Aldermen of New York voted to give the franchise for a surface railway on Broadway to the Broadway Surface Railroad Company. The rival road, the Broadway Railroad Company, tried to bribe the Aldermen with $750,000, half cash and half bonds. The Aldermen feared the bonds might be traced, and considered it wiser to accept the $500,000 cash offered by the Surface Company. Each alderman was to receive $22,000. Three aldermen were convicted, six fled to Canada and three turned State’s evidence. Ten others were indicted but never brought to trial. After 1884 more scientific methods replaced the rough old ways, and New York City settled down to a steady stream of boss and machine rule, supported by small graft, blackmail, voluntary contributions and assessments on office holders. During the Croker rÉgime, which commenced about this time, it was understood that men of means, or corporations who wanted “protection” in their property rights or in their various transactions, lawful or otherwise, were expected to send their checks for proportional sums to Croker without word or comment. For these contributions he could not be required to account as he held no public office. It was believed that Croker was fair to his contributors and that if trouble came they would be looked after. This surely was better than paying blackmail to all sorts of government officials. The machine therefore ran smoother than in Tweed’s time; and probably the same kindness towards political bosses is still practised by business men and corporations. There can be no legal objection to such methods, they are safe in every way. In 1889 the Fassett investigating committee appointed by the state senate took about 3500 pages of testimony in regard to city affairs showing that blackmail was systematically levied on gambling houses, liquor saloons, and other places. In 1892 there arose the “Huckleberry” street railway franchise scandal connected with the grant of a valuable franchise in the Bronx, New York City. In 1894 the Lexow Committee made a new state senate investigation into New York City politics, disclosing fraudulent voting under police protection; sale of police appointments at prices from $300 to $15,000; blackmail levied systematically on liquor sellers, gamblers, swindlers, and loose women. The revenue from these sources was estimated at $7,000,000 annually. This did not include contributions from corporations. In 1900 the so-called Mazet Senate Committee conducted a third investigation which brought out evidence tending to show that the mayor (Van Wyck) had been a party to a conspiracy to create a monopoly of ice in the City of New York. The essential meanness of a scheme to fatten on the needs of the poor during the sultry months was apparent even to the most stupid voter; the mayor became unpopular and at the end of his term retired to Paris with great wealth as it was said. The Mazet committee unearthed the fact that the city contracts went to politicians, not to business men.

Particulars of other scandals, such as the Ramapo Water Scheme; the system of judicial assessments for office, the silent partnerships of political leaders in city contracts, and police corruption must be omitted here for want of space. About 1900 the New York, Westchester and Boston Railroad Company, an adjunct of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, was seeking a franchise to enter New York City; it obtained it in 1904 from the New York municipal authorities. Ten years afterwards in 1914 it was ascertained in an investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission that in order to get the franchise the Railroad Company had been required to distribute $1,500,000 in cash to politicians and to give a $6,000,000 contract to a business corporation controlled by politicians. This same corporation obtained other contracts from other quarters, about $15,000,000 in all, through political influence.

The foregoing instances of New York municipal scandals are more than sufficient for the purposes of this chapter. For an extended account of some of the evils and problems of American municipalities the reader is referred to Eaton on Government of Municipalities, published in 1899, and to other works herein referred to. But you cannot (says Steffens) put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book; and it is probable that a mere sketch of all the actual discovered and known American municipal frauds and malpractices committed or culpably permitted in the past eighty years would fill many large volumes. The statements of the writers hereinbefore quoted in proof of the deplorable failure of American municipal government, though necessarily general in terms are sufficient and convincing; and the specific instances herein mentioned were given not so much to sustain this undisputed general testimony as to illustrate it; and as a local map or sketch may aid a traveller to call to mind the ground traversed in past years, so here to assist the memory of the reader as to the details and quality of frauds and rascalities notorious in their time, and with the story of which he is or has been more or less familiar.

Nor will the limits of this volume permit an attempt to set forth an account however slight of the various futile efforts made from time to time to reduce the stream of municipal corruption. They have all failed because they did not reach the source of the flow. In some American cities an attempt at a qualified dictatorship has been made; instead of the election of all civic functionaries, as required by the logical application of the manhood suffrage doctrine, the plan has been adopted of electing only a mayor, for four years, and giving him the unqualified power of appointment of all other city officials. Instead of the annual election of say ten heads of bureaus, or departments, a year, making forty appeals to popular wisdom, we have thus in four years only one such call for the vox populi. This is on its face a complete admission of the failure of manhood suffrage; and in reality, this one-man system has always been adopted after some disgusting exposure of rottenness in city government had demonstrated that failure. Bryce furnishes a chapter, written by Mayor Low, a reform mayor of Brooklyn, advocating this sort of dictatorship, which was in use during his incumbency. Low says that the local city legislative bodies have almost everywhere abused their powers. This fact is notorious. Local self-government of cities by boards of aldermen, or city councils, elected by the people under the manhood suffrage system, has been productive of so many grotesque blunders, shameful wastes and robberies, beside neglect and mismanagement of city affairs, that it has been frequently thrown into the discard, and replaced by boards, commissions, superintendents and other appointive officials, as proposed by Low. But according to the manhood suffrage theory this is all wrong and the municipal legislatures chosen by the people, boards of aldermen, common councils (it used to be a joke among the young men to call them “common scoundrels”) or what not should have power to lay, collect and expend all city taxes. But every one knows that if that were done, a perfect riot of extravagance and plunder would forthwith ensue followed by insolvency, disorder, and finally anarchy. Take the City of New York for instance, where the Board of Aldermen, which is the municipal legislature, is elected by manhood suffrage, and give that body the power of governing the city which logically belongs to it upon the manhood suffrage theory, and in one month’s time, demoralization would be apparent; the police and fire departments unreliable, fire insurance rates doubled, expenses mounting upward, the air filled with political scandals, and the city’s credit stunned and languishing. Such is no doubt the opinion of probably nineteen New York business men out of twenty, based upon history, traditions, experience and observation. If manhood suffrage be right in principle, the government of cities by representatives chosen at ward or district elections would be the most successful feature of the American democracy; for all the adjuncts of a working democracy, public schools, newspapers, conferences and discussion of political questions abound in the city more than in the country; but the contrary is the case. All these advantages are offset and more by the simple fact that the controllable vote is greater in the city than in the country. As to city government by officials appointed under legislative authority, that too has always failed for the reason that it has always been corrupted by the legislative taint. Most of Tweed’s plundering was done with legislative sanction.

There is nothing in the American atmosphere nor in the American blood to prevent a pure civic administration. This appears by the actual experience of the City of Washington. In 1867 Congress established municipal government by manhood suffrage in the District of Columbia. “Under these “conditions unrestricted suffrage produced extravagance, corruption “and other incidents of bad government.” (Lalor’s Cyclopedia, Suffrage.) Result, that in 1878 Congress had to abolish elections in the District and to go back to the system which had been adopted in 1798 of a government by an appointed board of three commissioners. “Nevertheless” (says Eaton) “the City of Washington, under this new system, has “had the most economical, efficient, and respectable government “of any city in the United States.” (Government of Municipalities, p. 156.) Here the appointing power is absolutely free from the influence of the controllable vote or of any vote of the people of Washington. This instance shows clearly that the mischief in our popular system lies in the electorate itself. Meantime the people of Washington are to be congratulated that they are free from the brutality and roguery of a universal suffrage popular government.