Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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Название Democracy and Liberty
Автор произведения William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Жанр Юриспруденция, право
Серия none
Издательство Юриспруденция, право
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781614872207



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      The system I have described has proved even more pernicious in municipal government than in State politics or in Federal politics. Innumerable elections of obscure men to obscure places very naturally failed to excite general interest, and they almost inevitably fell into the hands of a small ring of professional politicians. The corruption of New York, which has been the most notorious, is often attributed almost exclusively to the Irish vote; but as early as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when Irish influence was quite imperceptible, the State and City of New York were in the hands of a clique called ‘the Albany Regency,’ which appears to have exhibited on a small scale most of the features of the later rings. ‘A strong phalanx of officers, from the governor and the senators down to the justices of peace in the most remote part of the State,’ we are told, governed New York for the sole benefit of a small knot of corrupt politicians. ‘The judiciaries’ were ‘shambles for the bargain and sale of offices.’ The justices of the peace were all the creatures of the party, and were almost invariably corrupt.58 Between 1842 and 1846, when the great Irish immigration had not yet begun, an evil of another kind was prevailing in New York. It was the custom to allow the inmates of public almshouses to leave the institutions on the days of election and cast their votes; and an American writer assures us that at this time ‘the almshouses formed an important factor in the politics of the State of New York, for the paupers were sent out to vote by the party in power, and were threatened with a loss of support unless they voted as directed; and the number was such as to turn the scale in the districts in which they voted.’59 It was abuses of this kind that led to one of the greatest modern improvements in American politics—the exclusion in several States of absolute paupers from the franchise.

      ‘I wish,’ says the same writer, ‘to deliberately state a fact easy of verification—the fact that whereas, as a rule, in other civilised countries municipal Governments have been steadily improving until they have been made generally honest and serviceable, our own, as a rule, are the worst in the world, and they are steadily growing worse every day.’61

      The case of New York was an extreme one, but was, indeed, very far from being unique. ‘The government of the cities,’ says Mr. Bryce, ‘is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.… The faults of the State Governments are insignificant compared with the extravagance, corruption, and mismanagement which mark the administration of most of the great cities. For these evils are not confined to one or two cities.… There is not a city with a population of 200,000 where the poison-germs have not sprung into vigorous life, and in some of the smaller ones, down to 70,000, it needs no microscope to note the results of their growth. Even in cities of the third rank similar phenomena may occasionally be discerned; though there, as some one has said, the jet-black of New York or San Francisco dies away into a harmless grey.’62 It should be added, that there is no country in the world in which this question is more important than in the United States, for there is no country in which town life during the present century has increased so enormously and so rapidly. The proportion of the population who live in towns of over 8,000 inhabitants is said to have risen in that period from 4 to more than 23 per cent.63

      Mr. Bryce has enumerated from good American sources the chief forms which this municipal robbery assumes. There are sales of monopolies in the use of public thoroughfares; systematic jobbing of contracts; enormous abuses in patronage; enormous over-charges for necessary public works. Cities have been compelled to buy lands for parks and places because the owners wished to sell them; to grade, pave, and sewer streets without inhabitants in order to award corrupt contracts for the works; to purchase worthless properties at extravagant prices; to abolish one office and create another with the same duties, or to vary the functions of offices for the sole purpose of redistributing official emoluments; to make or keep the salary of an office unduly high in order that its tenant may pay largely to the party funds; to lengthen the term of office in order to secure the tenure of corrupt or incompetent men. When increasing taxation begins to arouse resistance, loans are launched under false pretences, and often with the assistance of falsified accounts. In all the chief towns municipal debts have risen to colossal dimensions and increased with portentous rapidity. ‘Within the twenty years from 1860 to 1880,’ says an American writer, ‘the debts of the cities of the Union rose from about $100,000,000 to $682,000,000. From 1860 to 1875 the increase of debt in eleven cities was 270.9 per cent., increase of taxation 362.2 per cent.; whereas the increase in taxable valuation was but 156.9 per cent., and increase in population but 70 per cent.’64 The New York Commissioners of 1876 probably understated the case when they declared that more than half of all the