| The Cost of Crime to business men and corporations in Greater New York for Private Police, Detective Agencies and Watchmen | $6,000,000 00 | |
| Property stolen and not recovered | $5,000,000 00 | |
| Bank losses by fraud | 1,500,000 00 | |
| ─────── |
| $12,500,000 00 | |
| Loss in Wages to Families of Men Sent to Prison | 5,000,000 00 |
| ─────── | |
| Total Amount spent yearly on Correction and Repression of Crime | $42,248,738 46 |
The budget for the present year calls for the expenditure of $156,545,148.14 to carry on the city government. A little more than one sixth of the money appropriated by the city government for the year is spent on crime.
Admitting then that the expense of crime touches almost every avenue of domestic and civic life, the only question is how long our national, state and city governments can continue to pay such enormous sums for the maintenance of police, courts of justice and the costliest and most expensive kind of prisons and penal institutions that money can build and furnish, without landing the country in irretrievable bankruptcy.
With all the loopholes in the law which favor the murderer, it costs the city at least $10,000 on an average to send him to the electric chair, or even to State prison for life.
There are 200,000 criminals in the land to-day, who are a burden on the taxpayers to the extent of more than a billion dollars a year. But this loss to the country, as we have already intimated, is incomparable with the greater loss sustained by the kingdom of God. The work of reaching these brothers in stripes belongs to the Church, and she should prosecute it continually till she has brought them to Christ for healing and saving power.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE AGE OF GRAFT.
We have had our stone age, our iron age and our steel age, now we have our graft age. This is the age of the political highwayman who makes the city and her people pay him tribute. This graft comes in the nature of perquisites, commissions and assessments for the good of the machine and those that run it. The graft disease first attacked the men in Congress. The government paid good salaries to all of its servants and even their mileage. But the railroads wishing large slices of the public domain sent the members of both houses free passes. After this other big corporations desiring special privileges were compelled to graft the legislators or receive no favors. Then the disease attacked our State law-makers, which in turn made everybody pay tribute to them, especially rich corporations. To-day, graft is the bane of our Municipal Government. And Tammany Hall has become the horse leach that cries, “Give, Give,” and is never Satisfied! Nor is there any need of denying the fact that we are reaching a period in American history greatly to be deplored. Whatever may be said of our extravagance and high living, it cannot be denied that New York is drifting on the Rocks of Municipal bankruptcy. And the cause of it all is an insatiable desire for money, for which honest labor is not given.
With New York’s phenomenal increase in population and material prosperity, since the close of the Civil War, the temptations for money making have become so numerous, that a Tammany contractor can find more wealth in paving one of the streets of the city than in a Klondyke gold mine. As a result the city Government is now in the hands of a gang of political-grafters, who are able to systematize the business affairs in the interest of the House of Grafters on Fourteenth Street, and are able to cover their tracks and “hoodwink” the people.