and semi-criminal classes of New York that her police department was corrupt. The corrupt practices at which the country threw up its respectable hands in horror had for years been the accepted and commonplace facts of their lives upon which all their activity had been conditioned. What chance was there that the state, through the weak precepts and prohibitions of its statute book, could counteract the powerful teaching of this its own bad example? How many years at Elmira would it take to re-form a young man whose character had been formed in the first place by life in the slums of a city so governed?
It would have been fair to base what there is to be said on this subject upon New York and its experience, because New York is, or was, the bright particular star in the firmament of spoils politics. It would have been proper to use it as typical, not because other American cities are as bad, but because it shows clearly what we will come to if we take that road. It is the reduction to iniquity of city government by spoils politics.
It seemed better to refer to New York only incidentally lest those who live elsewhere might fancy that what was said does not apply to them. In fact, as already indicated, the blight of spoils politics is upon the various branches of local administration in a large proportion of the cities and towns of the United States. I venture to guess, and it is nothing more than a guess, that in three-fourths of the cities of the United States having a population of more than 50,000, there are frequent though informal conferences between the officers of the law and habitual law breakers as to how far the laws will have to be enforced—how far it will be necessary to pander to the moral sentiment of the community. Out of the dozen cities with which I am somewhat acquainted there are but two in which the police magistrates are generally held to be conscientious and intelligent gentlemen. One of the two is Washington, D. C., which has no vestige of local self-government. I do not happen to know of one single city or town having local self-government, where the party in power can afford consistently and persistently to defy the criminal and semi-criminal classes. These classes are politically very active,
