The Express.
London, England, 1866-11-10 00:00:00

MOT! WATS& AT LONDON BRIDOL

TIM DAY —Morning, Sit. 10m Afternoon, 311. 4Gm.
TO-HOinote—Morning, 411. :ter Afternoon, 4b. 17m.

LONDON, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10.

THE argument against the extension of the
franchise, which is usually drawn at this time of
the year from our own municipal elections, has
this year been drawn from a more distant source.
The North American Review has published a very
remarkable article on the condition of municipal
affairs in the city of New York, and that article
has been made to do suit and service in rousing
fear and suspicion of popular government. The
facts of the case seem very obvious, and to de-
scribe them without showing the relation between
thorn is an easy way of suggesting a relation which
does not exist. Nothing can exceed the corrup-
tion of the New York municipal government Its
extravagance, its peculation, its jobbery, are
all such as perhaps no other govern-
ment, of any kind, has ever exceeded. At
the same time it is a purely democratic gc-
vernment, elected by almost universal suf-
frage, and springing directly from the popular
will. The suffrage is wide and free, and the
government resulting from it is the worst
and most dishonest in the world. But it is ob-
vious that to mention these two characteristics in
connexion with the question of Parliamentary
Reform is to suggest that some connexion exists
between the wide suffrage and the low character of
the resulting representative body, and to assume
that there is some parallelism or relation between
the franchise extension demanded here and that
which has been established there. If this relation
is not pretended to exist, in what possible wal
can the corruption of the New York municipality
throw light on the question of the extension of the
suffrage in Great Britain ? Yet it can only be
in reliance on English ignorance of American
affairs, and in the confidence that very few who
read the arguments against Reform will read the
paper, or even fully ascertain the facts on which
they are based, that any such relation can be even
tacitly assumed. The suffrage in Beaton is even
more widely distributed than in New York, and
Boston is perhaps the best managed city in the
world. The most careless reader of the article
in the North American Review would see at

once that it is in the exceptional circumstances of
New York city that the whole cause of the cot •
ruption of its government is to be found. That

great city is au exceptional place, even in the
domestic politics of the Union. The vast mis-
takes which many of our contemporaries make
in their studies of American affairs arise from
their assumption of the metropolitan and re-
presentative character of New York. Yet in
many respects New York, so far from being
the representative city of the United States,
is the most foreign city in the Union. Recelving
as it does the overflow of the Old World, the vas'.
current of emigration which perpetually flows to
it carries with it much that the Old World is
gladly rid of. It is in the nature of things that
this the worst element of Old World emigration is
detained in a great city, while the better element
flows through it to remoter settlements. At the
present moment we believe that the native born
Americans are in a considerable minority in the
city of New York. Of the actual voters who elect
the municipality seventy-seven thousand are said
by the North American Review to be of foreign
birth, and only fifty-two thousand to be native
Americans. The population is also as fluctuating
as it is foreign. During the five years from
1860 to 1865 the population diminished to the
extent of 87,283, notwithstanding the large
immigration of those years. In a city thus peopled
with a foreign and fluctuating population it cannot
be said that the American system of government
has a fair trial. That great machinery of popular
education which is the glory and boast of the
United States cannot exert its proper influence
over a constituency only one-third of which con-
fide of persons who have been brought beneath its
training. And this is exactly the complaint that
the North American Review makes. Its comment
on the terrible details it has given is :—" Such
" are the consequences that have resulted from