A government necessarily takes the character of those conducting it. The business of saloon-keeping, which produced the present management of our cities, involves, from the conditions which surround it, a disregard for both law and proper moral ideals. Ordinary commercial motives urge the proprietors, as a class, to increase the sale of a commodity which the State everywhere endeavors to restrict; and a savage condition of competition drives them still further—till a great proportion break the provisions of the law in some way; while a considerable number ally themselves with the most degraded and dangerous forms of vice.
The government by this class has been exactly what might have been expected. A body of men—drawn from an ancestry which has never possessed any knowledge or traditions of free government; educated in a business whose financial successes are made through the disregard of law—are elevated to the control of the machinery of law and order in the great cities. Another type of citizen—men of force and enterprise unsurpassed in the history of the world—by adapting the discoveries of the most inventive century of the world to the uses of commerce, have massed together in the past half century a chain of great cities upon the face of a half savage continent, and left them to the government of such people as these. The commercial enterprise of these cities has been the marvel of the world; their government has reached a point of moral degradation and inefficiency scarcely less than Oriental.
The debauching of our city life by this kind of government has been frequently pictured in this magazine. A government by saloon-keepers, and by dealers in flagrant immorality, finds both its power and profit in the establishment of vice by its official position. The progress of such a government is shown in George Kennan's description of the former régime in San Francisco, published in McClure's Magazine of September, 1907:
"Instead of protecting the public by enforcing the laws, it devoted itself mainly to making money by allowing gamblers, policy-sellers, brothel keepers, and prostitutes to break the laws. Its honest officers and men tried, at first, to do their duty; but the police commissioners, under the influence or direction of Ruef, interfered with their efforts to close illegal and immoral resorts; the police court judges, allowing themselves to be swayed by selfish political considerations, released the prisoners whom they arrested."
Conditions similar to this have been shown in this magazine to exist in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburg, and other great cities of America. The results have been a general disintegration in the moral fiber of cities. Life itself is much more unsafe than under the well-ordered governments of European cities. The murder rate in Chicago and New York is six or eight times as great as in London and Berlin. Even such a primary necessity of civilization as the safety of women is lost sight of. A leading Chicago newspaper said in 1906:
"It has ever been our proudest boast as a people that in this country woman is respected and protected as she is in no other. That boast is becoming an empty one in Chicago. Women have not only been annoyed and insulted in great numbers on the street within a very short time, but not a few have been murdered. In the year before the Hollister tragedy, there were seventeen murders of women in Chicago, which attracted the attention of the city."
The system of government which produces this result was well described some years ago by the late Bishop Potter, speaking of conditions in New York.
"A corrupt system," he said, "whose infamous details have been steadily uncovered, to our increasing horror and humiliation, was brazenly ignored by those who were fattening on its spoils, and the world was presented with the astounding spectacle of a great municipality, whose civic mechanism was largely employed in trading in the bodies and souls of the defenseless."
Aside from giving direct encouragement and propagation to the more terrible forms of vice, the European peasant saloon-keeper government of our cities furnishes a fitting field for so-called respectable men—but really criminals of the worst type—who help organize and perpetuate saloon government for the purpose of securing, by bribery, franchises for public utilities without paying therefor. Thus American cities have been robbed as well as badly governed.
There are signs of amelioration of these conditions in most of the great cities of the country. But every advance is made against the fierce antagonism of just such systems as Bishop Potter described; and those systems exist in every large American city to-day—either in direct control or ready to take control at the slightest sign of relaxation by the forces which are opposing them. And the foundation of this evil structure is the European peasant saloon-keeper.