Let us now turn from Governor Hunt, and see what the Press says on the subject.  The New York Herald, which if not highly esteemed is at least widely circulated, thus writes in the month of May, 1852:—­“Look at the proceedings on Thursday last in the 19th Ward.  Voters carried to the ballot-boxes in scores of waggons from, various localities; and, in other wards, hundreds of democrats voting for Scott and for Fillmore, men ignorant and steeped in crime, picked up in all the purlieus of the city and purchased at a dollar a head; and some, it is said, so low as half a dollar, to deposit in the ballot-box a vote they had never seen.”—­The article then goes on to explain the methods employed at elections—­viz., a lazy fellow who wont work, brawls, and drinks, and spouts, and defames every honest man in the ward, till he becomes a semi-deity among the riff-raff, then “his position is found out by those who want to use him.  He is for sale to the highest bidder, either to defeat his own party by treachery, or to procure a nomination for any scoundrel who will pay for it.  He has no politics of any kind.  He has rascality to sell, and there are those who are willing to purchase it, in order that they may traffic in it, and sell it to themselves again at a very high profit....  We have heard of a case in one of the Lower Wards of the city, in which one man got, at the time of the late democratic conventions, the enormous sum of two thousand dollars, out of which it is said he bribed the majority of the electors and kept the balance for himself.”

A few paragraphs further on he suggests remedies for the evil;—­and what do you suppose they are?  First, that honest people should not leave politics to the riff-raff.  Secondly, “there ought to be a registration established, by which no man could sail under false colours, or deposit a vote at a primary election, unless he belonged to the ward, and belonged to the party to which he professed to belong.”  Conceive the state to which secret voting has reduced the wealthy and intelligent city of New York; absolutely, a return to open voting is considered insufficient to reach the vitals of the evil which secrecy has brought about.  Here we have proposed as a remedy the compulsory register of political sentiments; and to prove that things are not mending, in the “Retrospect of the year 1852,” which forms a leading article in the same journal at the commencement of 1853, after a lengthy panegyric upon the state of America, &c., during 1852, he winds up with these most serious drawbacks to the previous eulogy:  “if we are bound to admit with crimson blush that crime is sadly on the increase, and that our municipal institutions have reached the lowest depths of inefficiency and infamy, these but remind us that the work which 1852 has bravely carried on is not yet achieved.”—­I would wish carefully to guard against being understood to endorse the violent language employed by the New York Herald.  I am aware how unsafe a guide the Press ever is in times of political excitement; but after making every reasonable allowance, enough remains to prove the tendency of the secret ballot, corroborated as it is by the authoritative message of the Governor of the State.