The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-11-17
WANTED: CLEAN, ABLE MEN
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peHdH Oi proaui generous, non par tisan policy In the conduct of the busi- ness of this municipality. To the vic tors now belongs the opportunity for the public good, rather than the spells for the party. If now the party work CTS shall show some readiness to waive personal claims to party rewards for the sake of the public good, the people are in temper to appreciate any vir- tue of self denial which they may be capable of showing. It is year of awakened public spirit Hence it is a good year for political conventions to exercise care In endorsing bad factional debts. It may prove a poor year for, any deal, however long-standing, for any office like that of mayor, for in stance, to deliver the goods at the polls in fulfillment of partisan contract. The efforts of this club, at the last city election, demonstrated the fact that there is an independent vote in this city large enough to hold a bal ance of power. The nomination by a dominant party of poor, pinched, pig my ticket, would invite its repudiation at once by this independent vote and eventually would break up the power of the party which should perpetrate it upon the people. This Good Gov ernment club may help bring the prev alent public desire for good nomina- tions to bear upon the primaries and conventions, where the battle for a representative business administration is first to be joined. We are generally agreed that an independent ilomina- tion is advisable only when both of the leading parties fail to give the peo- pie a ticket which means business, and not spells.
 Besides nominations for city officials, two vacancies are to be filled, one by each leading party under our bi-patron- age system, in our several city com missions. These commissions, as now constituted by law, are political hy- brids-neither horse nor ass, but mulish. In their apparent impotence to bring forth much of anything for the public good, they offer no excep- tion to the law of sterility which usu- ally characterizes hybrids. In these bi- patronage commissions the election is practically transferred from the polls to the party primaries, for each of the leading parties fiNs one-half of the commissions. This year again by the grace of the last legislature the people of New Haven will be permitted, like so many minors on a railway train, to go through the polls on half ticket, and to vote for one of every two com missioners to be elected. Two elective officers have been created by law, but each elector is allowed to cast his bal lot for but one of them
 This abridgement of the suffrage may be constitutional in this state-as to that am not competent to venture an opinion; you notice that it does not in- volve the principle of minority, or. pro- portionate representation, upon which the courts may have already passed; it brings up a new and altogether differ ent questionable question, namely, whether the legislature, stepping in as the conservator of the city,, has au- thoriry to change the fundamental principle of democratic government by cutting off one-half of the ballot of the elector and granting to the party of the minority equal control in the govern ment with the party of the majority. Whether it is constitutional or not. this enthronement of the minority in equal reign and power with the majority runs counter to the whole idea of popular government from the year one of de- mocracy. It is a law conceived in dis trust of the people, and shapen in the iniquity of the spells system. So far as it goes, it substitutes government of party for the party in the place of gov ernment by the people for the people What more clever device could political cunning conceive for the purpose of fastening the yoke of caucus upon a patient and long suffering people, and of allowing the schemers to get away with the spells? The reason which have sometimes heard advanced for the continuance of this bi-patronge system is that, under different charter, long obsolete, once within the memory of men of a former generation, there oc- cured somewhere in the city some dan- ger of riot at an election Possibly our people might now be willing to in cur whatever risk there may be under majority rule of election riots for the sake of having between elections the privilege of responsible government, in which the majority should have the larger half at least of control and obli- gation.
 But whatever We may think of this half-ticket law for the division of our city commissions, under this law we are compelled to fill, at the approach ing caucuses, vacancies in important boards. As by the law government in these particulars is practically trans ferred from the polls to the primaries to the primaries every citizen must go who wishes to secure the nomination of independent men, and not mere par tisans, to these boards. To the cau- commissioners will be determined, we may urge every wheelman to go, who has jolted over neglected streets long enough to learn that one way to make good roads is not to divide every hon. est dollar intended for the streets into two political halves. While condemn ing the system which puts busy party workers at the executive end of the board of public works and idle party voters at the shovels and broomsticlIs on the other end of it, I believe it to be our duty to strive for whatever good we can obtain under the existing law, and to make the effort to get the best men possibly nominated by the par ties.
 There is one other service in behalf of good nominations which I would