"Have you ever refused to make a discharge where a police justice has signed the discharge?" "No, I do not think I ever have, sir.”

In other words, this power of discharge is a power exercised by police justices for the purpose of securing a political following among the criminal classes and for the purpose of securing votes prior to election. Mr. Porter would be injuring the opportunities for patronage of his fellow-politicians if he refused to consent to a discharge, although under the law he has a right to do so. It is politics, therefore, that prevents the commissioners from doing their duty.

*

How little they are alive to the evils which they are supposed to handle in their department may also be judged from a toleration of the system by which habitual offenders, or "old rounders" as they are called, are regularly committed for drunkenness and disorderly conduct only to be discharged again, and then recommitted and redischarged. Mr. Porter testifies that, in his opinion, they ought to be obliged to serve the whole term of six months; but in this case also he does not exercise the discretion allowed him by which he can refuse to consent to their discharge at a prior date. And so the workhouse is practically converted into a boarding house for drunkards; it can hardly be considered a place of confinement. They are regularly set at liberty, and remain at liberty long enough for a debauch, and

* Id., p. 3350.

are willingly enough committed after the debauch is over during the time necessary for making them fit and disposed for another. Mr. Porter is perfectly alive to the evil, and has apparently not lifted a finger to suppress it.

It has been already stated that the financial authorities in the city, called the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, do not provide the funds necessary for the working of the Department of Charities and Correction. The estimates made by the department are regularly and arbitrarily cut down by the board, and applications for funds necessary for additional buildings are refused. The reason of this is not far to seek; in the language of ward politics, there is no money in this department for Tammany Hall. The voluntary organisation known as the State Charities Aid Association has secured the right of visiting all the public institutions of an eleemosynary nature in the State, and the vigilance of this society makes it difficult for Tammany to make anything out of this department. But nothing, perhaps, serves better to demonstrate the hopelessness of the effort to get good work out of public officials under a Tammany régime than the effect of this aid society upon our charitable institutions. It has undoubtedly accomplished a great work, and is entitled to the gratitude of every citizen who has the interests of the poor and wretched at heart; but because of the very good it does, because of the very vigilance it exercises, Tammany can make nothing out of the department, and Tammany therefore cuts down the

appropriations which otherwise would be lavished upon it. But it is not by peculation only that Tammany ruins our public service, for President Porter testified that he did not do his duty in refusing discharges made for political purposes, and that he owed his position to political influences. It does not require much sagacity to make the connection.

So long as political machines control our city offices, no efforts of the State Charities Aid Association, or the Charity Organisation Society, or the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, or the hundreds of other societies in the city, will do more than dam the evils that flow from municipal misgovernment.

The present administration of our municipal charities in New York is the very best that can be expected from such administration of municipal affairs as we now have; it is a matter for congratulation that it is not infinitely worse. And yet it does not pretend to make an effort to deal with the real problems of pauperism. The commissioners seem to do the least possible in the performance of their duties. There is no idea of improving the condition of the men in these institutions, or otherwise grappling with the distressing questions to which the treatment of the pauper and criminal gives rise. The contrast shown in the preceding pages between what ought to be done for the criminal, the pauper, and the incapable, and what is done for them, taken in connection with the political conditions under which all our municipal departments are adminis

tered, ought to bring it home to the mind of every earnest man that he cannot better employ the time that he has to give to charitable work than in the correction of the political system which puts into office men who, however willing, are, in consequence of the political conditions by which they are surrounded, incapable of executing the law.

It is a matter of record that over ten million dollars are annually spent in charity in the city of New York. This, of course, does not include the millions which are spent by individuals, of which no record is kept. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment, to whom is confided the distribution of the funds of the city amongst the various departments, have year after year refused to appropriate the sum of less than a million asked for the completion of necessary buildings, and the whole appropriation made for the support of our prisoners, paupers, sick, and insane is about two million dollars a year. If the sums which are now willingly contributed by societies to the relief of distress in this city were added to that apportioned by the city for the same purpose, and both were intelligently applied to the treatment of this class, it is believed that, in the first place, more than half the fund would be found to be superfluous; that, in the second place, pauperism would, in so far as it tends to degrade the workingman, practically disappear from the streets of the city; and, in the third. place, a merciful but implacable severity to those who refuse to work would prevent all danger of attracting paupers from outside.

CHAPTER XI.

PROBLEM OF SOCIALISM.

IT has been pointed out in the preceding chapter that the workingman is materially injured by our neglect to intelligently handle the question of pauperism and crime. He is injured by the return to the community of the criminal after imprisonment, without any guarantee that the criminal has been reformed, but rather with the certitude that in consequence of the stigma of imprisonment he is committed to a career of crime. He is injured by the regular return to his neighbourhood of the "rounder," whose release affords opportunity for renewing the offences which regularly return him to the workhouse. He is injured by the incapable man, who lowers wages by his willingness to accept alms; who drains the pockets of his neighbours by appeals to their charity; who renders wholesome dwellings unwholesome by his uncleanliness; who increases the rental to his fellow-tenants by failing to pay rent himself, and who spreads contagion about him-the contagion of laziness, drunkenness, and vice.

The workingman is more heavily handicapped in this matter than he himself at all appreciates. It