Moreover, even if legislatures were otherwise competent to manage the local affairs of cities, they have not time enough, amid the pressure of other duties, to do justice to such matters.  In 1870 the number of acts passed by the New York legislature was 808.  Of these, 212, or more than one fourth of the whole, related to cities and villages.  The 808 acts, when printed, filled about 2,000 octavo pages; and of these the 212 acts filled more than 1,500 pages.  This illustrates what I said above about the vast quantity of details which have to be regulated in municipal government.  Here we have more than three fourths of the volume of state-legislation devoted to local affairs; and it hardly need be added that a great part of these enactments were worse than worthless because they were made hastily and without due consideration,—­though not always, perhaps, without what lawyers call a consideration.[13]

[Footnote 13:  Nothing could be further from my thought than to cast any special imputation upon the New York legislature, which is probably a fair average specimen of law-making bodies.  The theory of legislative bodies, as laid down in text-books, is that they are assembled for the purpose of enacting laws for the welfare of the community in general.  In point of fact they seldom rise to such a lofty height of disinterestedness.  Legislation is usually a mad scramble in which the final result, be it good or bad, gets evolved out of compromises and bargains among a swarm of clashing local and personal interests.  The “consideration” may be anything from log-rolling to bribery.  In American legislatures it is to be hoped that downright bribery is rare.  As for log-rolling, or exchange of favours, there are many phases of it in which that which may be perfectly innocent shades off by almost imperceptible degrees into that which is unseemly or dishonourable or even criminal; and it is in this hazy region that Satan likes to set his traps for the unwary pilgrim.]

[Sidenote:  Tweed Ring in New York.] The experience of New York thus proved that state intervention and special legislation did not mend matters.  It did not prevent the shameful rule of the Tweed Ring from 1868 to 1871, when a small band of conspirators got themselves elected or appointed to the principal city offices, and, having had their own corrupt creatures chosen judges of the city courts, proceeded to rob the taxpayers at their leisure.  By the time they were discovered and brought to justice, their stealings amounted to many millions of dollars, and the rate of taxation had risen to more than two per cent.