Year: 1876

physicians Something allied him which was
outside the ordinary experience of medical
practice, and at last, as all his treatment
was theoretical, it is said that after submit
ting in vain to the experiments of others he
tried some of his own, and with such
happy result that he will soon be busy again
In his accustomed fields of public usefulness.


1t is an experiment Of the same kind which
we propose that the body polite of the city
of New York shall try upon itself in the
matter of a spring election, if the State
Legislature will only give us the opportu-
nifty. Never since the day when the miasma
of corruption rose from the sink of Tammany
Hall and spread like fog over the city have
we been permitted to hold a municipal cleo
ton pure and simple. Never have we been
permitted to conduct a political campaign
without overshadowing the discussion of
municipal questions by debates about lines
ofState or national policy. Never has either
party republicans or democrats, been per-
mitted to nominate q ticket Of municipal
candidates without perverting its compost
ton by considerations wholly irrelevant to
municipal affairs, and having relation only to
Albany or to Washington, or TO both those
places All the schools of political doctors
have urged their theories and proposed
their nostrums, and the patient has only
grown worse, and must continue to grow
worse for the haphazard remedies of the
parties, like the guessing Of the practitioners,
co-operates with rather than limits the dis
order But with the political doctors put
out Of doors and their theories thrown out of
the window is there not hope that the
patients vitality and the instructive sugges-
tions of his consciousness may put him in
the right way9


1t would be answering fool according to
his folly to argue with those persons who
contend that separate municipal election is
inexpedient because good citizens will not
give another day in the year to the perform
ance of their political duties Our munich
pal debt exceeds the national debt of the
United States at any time prior to the war of
the rebellion, and is more than double what
that was at the close of the Mexican war.
Our annual municipal expenses are equal to
those of the United States at the height of



cluded the cost of maintaining armies on all
the frontiers and navies ON the ocean and
the lakes. Our rate of taxation exceeds that
levied on any city of equal rank elsewhere
in the world Surely it is not unreasonable |
to expect the people whose serious interest |
in municipal affairs is indicated by this
gigantic scale of expenses to give one day in
three hundred and sixty-five exclusively to
their regulation. Any argument TO the con-
trary implies that the voters of New York |
are not only Indifferent to the prosperity of
their home but careless of their own pecu-
mary profit-a reproach with which the
severest censors of the American people never
have ventured to upbraid us.


Nobody will deny that the city of New |
York is the victim of dreadful and mystic
rious malady. We feed its various depart
ments with almost forty millions of dollars
year, and o large part of the vast sum
passes off undigested. Last year we fed our
local Judiciary with twelve hundred and six
ty-eight thousand dollars, paying some of its |
members salary almost twice as large as
that of the Chief Justice of the Supreme |
Court of the United States, and nevertheless |
q Legislative committee sat here for months
taking testimony about the increase of crime !
We fed the College of the City of New York
with one hundred and fifty thousand dol
lars, sum two-thrds as large as the annual
income of Yale College; and we are ashamed |
to compare the products of the two institu-
tions in quantity, without opening the ques-
tion of quality We fed the street cleaning
bureau of the Police Department with eight |
hundred thousand dollars; and yet in null |
titude of streets householders combine to
sweep the pavements at their private ex-
pense, because the city does not keep them
clean. We fed the Police Department itself
with three million three hundred and |
eighty-seven thousand dollars; and gambling
houses ply their trade in daylight, unli-
censed grog shops distil poison on innumer-
able corners houses are broken into at high
noon, burglars and assassins thrive without
arrest, and in few districts of the city
can young woman walk half a
dozen blocks after nightfall without
the certainty of insult We fed the Health
Department with two hundred and twenty
two thousand dollars; and scores of acres of
flats reeked for months with foul abomina-
tions, and myriad of tenement houses are
suffered to exist under such conditions that
upon the incursion of an epidemic every one
of them would hoist


The yellow dag Of slo,h and sin


We fed the Department of Public Works
with a million five hundred and eighty-two
thousand dollars and our system of sewer
age is so imperfect that typhus and diph-
liberia slay as many victims in a year as
perished at Antietam or Gettysburg in the
fight for the Union. The construction of our
water works is inspected by BARRIERS and hair
dressers, and the employment of laborers is