The testimony from all sources and periods since 1840 goes to establish the prevalence of municipal corruption and misgovernment. Here is Ostrogorski, referring to the year 1872 and succeeding years:
“Almost all the cities whose population exceeded one hundred thousand, or even a lesser figure, had their Rings. In the course of these last years, many great cities, such as St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, added new pages of disgrace to the history of municipal corruption carried on under the flag of political parties.” (_Democracy and Political Parties in the United States_, pp. 84, 85.)
Another writer (J. B. Miller) states that the debts of the cities of the Union rose in the twenty years from 1860 to 1880 from about $100,000,000 to $682,000,000; from 1860 to 1875 the increase of debt in our eighteen largest cities was 270 per cent; the increase of taxation was 362 per cent; whereas the increase in taxable valuation was but 157 per cent and in population but 70 per cent. In 1883 the late Andrew D. White wrote as follows:
“I wish to deliberately state a fact easy of verification--the fact that whereas, as a rule, in other civilized 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.” (_Message of Nineteenth Century to Twentieth._)
In a work published in 1899 by Dorman B. Eaton on the _Government of Municipalities_, he summarizes in Chapter II the well known and undeniable evils connected with our municipal affairs. He condemns our municipal governments generally as needlessly expensive and inefficient institutions, wherein bribery, blackmail and corruption are characteristic features. He calls “the management of municipal politics and elections a degrading business by which a class of useless and vicious politicians prosper,” and speaks of the system as discreditable and scandalous. “It is not,” he says (p. 22), “the gifted, the noble or the honored men who generally hold the highest municipal offices, but scheming politicians, selfish, adroit party managers, or men of very moderate capacity and even of not very enviable reputation, who would not be desired at the head of a large private business.” In December, 1890, in an article in the _Forum_ Mr. White wrote that he had sojourned in every one of the great European municipalities; and that in every respect for which a city exists they were all superior to our own except Constantinople, where Turkish despotism produced the same haphazard, careless, dirty, corrupt system which we in America know so well as the result of mob despotism. We quote: “Without the slightest exaggeration we may assert that, with very few exceptions, the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom--the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.” Bryce, writing in 1894, found political rings in existence in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Baltimore and New Orleans. He might easily have found similar, though smaller and less conspicuous contrivances in a thousand other cities, towns and villages in the United States. Writing about 1898, Professor Hyslop recites a statement of some of the various well known forms of municipal robbery prevalent in our city administrations: