Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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СКАЧАТЬ politics—the exclusion in several States of absolute paupers from the franchise.

It is true, however, that the corruption never attained anything approaching the magnitude which it reached between 1863 and 1871, when all the powers of the State and town of New York had passed into the hands of the Tammany Ring. At this time four-ninths of the population were of foreign birth. A vast proportion consisted of recent immigrants, and the Irish Catholic vote seems to have ‘gone solid’ in favour of the ring. The majority of the State legislature, the mayor, the governor, several of the judges, almost all the municipal authorities who were empowered to order, appropriate, supervise and control expenditure, were its creatures, and I suppose no other capital city in the civilised globe has ever, in time of peace, witnessed such a system of wholesale, organised, continuous plunder. It was computed that 65 per cent. of the sums that were ostensibly expended in public works represented fraudulent additions. Between 1860 and 1871 the debt of New York quintupled, and during the last two and a half years of the government of the ring it increased at the rate of more than five and a half millions of pounds a year.⁶⁰ A distinguished American writer, who is also a distinguished diplomatist and well acquainted with the conditions of European capitals, has drawn the following instructive parallel. ‘The city of Berlin, in size and rapidity of growth, may be compared to New York. It contains twelve hundred thousand inhabitants, and its population has tripled within the last thirty years.… While Berlin has a municipal life at the same time dignified and economical, with streets well paved and clean, with a most costly system of drainage, with noble public buildings, with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness better guarded by far than in our own metropolis, the whole government is carried on by its citizens for but a trifle more than the interest of the public debt of the city of New York.’

      ‘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 present city debts in the United States are the direct results of intentional and corrupt misrule.⁶⁵

      No candid man can wonder at it. It is the plain, inevitable consequence of the application of the methods of extreme democracy to municipal government. In America, as in England, municipal elections fail to attract the same interest and attention as great political ones, and when all the smaller offices are filled by popular election, and when those elections are continually recurring, it is impossible for busy men to master their details or form any judgment on the many obscure candidates who appear before them. Property qualifications are deemed too aristocratic for a democratic people. The good old clause, that might once have been found in many charters, providing that no one should vote upon any proposition to raise a tax or to appropriate its proceeds unless he was himself liable to be assessed for such tax, has disappeared. ‘It is deemed undemocratic; practical men say there is no use in submitting it to a popular vote.’⁶⁶ The elections are by manhood suffrage. Only a small proportion of the electors have any appreciable interest in moderate taxation and economical administration, and a proportion of votes, which is usually quite sufficient to hold the balance of power, is in the hands of recent and most ignorant immigrants. Is it possible to conceive conditions more fitted to subserve the purposes of cunning and dishonest men, whose object is personal gain, whose method is the organisation of the vicious and ignorant elements of the community into combinations that can turn elections, levy taxes, and appoint administrators?

      The rings are so skilfully constructed that they can nearly always exclude from office a citizen who is known to be hostile; though ‘a good, easy man, who will not fight, and will make a reputable figure-head, may be an excellent investment.’⁶⁷ Sometimes, no doubt, the bosses quarrel among themselves, and the cause of honest government may gain something by the dispute. But in general, as long as government is not absolutely intolerable, the more industrious and respectable classes keep aloof from the nauseous atmosphere of municipal politics, and decline the long, difficult, doubtful task of entering into conflict with the dominant rings. ‘The affairs of the city,’ says Mr. White, ‘are virtually handed over to a few men who make politics, so called, a business. The very germ of the difficulty was touched once, in my presence, by a leading man of business in our great metropolis, who said: “We have thought this thing over, and we find that it pays better to neglect our city affairs than to attend to them; that we can make more money in the time required for the full discharge of our political duties than the politicans can steal from us on account of our not discharging them.” ‘⁶⁸

The evil has, however, undoubtedly, in many cases become intolerable, and the carnival of plunder that culminated in New York in 1871 gave a shock to public opinion and began a series of amendments which appear to have produced some real improvement. ‘The problem,’ says Mr. Sterne, ‘is becoming a very serious one how, with the growth of a pauper element, property rights in cities can be protected from confiscation at the hands of the non-producing classes. That the suffrage is a spear as well as a shield is a fact which many writers on suffrage leave out of sight; that it not only protects the holder of the vote from aggression, but also enables him to aggress upon the rights of others by means of the taxing power, is a fact to which more and more weight must be given as population increases and the suffrage is extended.’⁶⁹ Some good has been done by more severe laws against corruption at elections; though, in spite of these laws, the perjury and personation and wholesale corruption of a New York election appear far to exceed anything that can be found in the most corrupt capital in Europe.⁷⁰ A great reform, however, has been СКАЧАТЬ