THE RESULT.
"The result of all this plunder," continues Mr. Parton, "is, that in thirty-six years the rate of taxation in the city and county of New York has increased from two dollars and a half to forty dollars per inhabitant! In 1830, the city was governed for half a million dollars. In 1865, the entire government of the island, including assessments on private property for public improvements, cost more than forty millions of dollars. In 1830, the population of the city was a little more than two hundred thousand. It is now about one million. Thus, while the population of the county is five times greater than it was in 1830, the cost of governing it is sixteen times greater. And yet such is the value of the productive property owned by the city,—so numerous are the sources of revenue from that property,—that able men of business are of the deliberate opinion that a private company could govern, clean, sprinkle, and teach the City by contract, taking as compensation only the fair revenue to be derived from its property. Take one item as an illustration: under the old excise system, the liquor licenses yielded twelve thousand dollars per annum; under the new, they yield one million and a quarter. Take another: the corporation own more than twenty miles of wharves and water-front, the revenue from which does not keep the wharves in repair; under a proper system, they would yield a million dollars above the cost of repairs."