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Show REFORM. For a number of years there has been an insistent in-sistent cry for reform in the affairs of about all the principal cities in the country. As a result, in some of these cities the reformation has taken the form of investigating committees and grand jury inquisitions and some of the delinquents have been stirred to repentance while others are in the penitentiaries. peni-tentiaries. In other cities the reform of municipal affairs has been confined to an attempt to reform a lot of petty politicians or to. inject into the political polit-ical parties some of the improving virus. But the parties are immune, and the-petty politicians are inoculated with an anti, and efficient municipal administration, ad-ministration, even if honest, seems well-nigh impossible impos-sible of accomplishment. As long as the citizens of any city are bound up in partisan prejudices, and are owned by (which is equivalent to belonging to) a political party which in turn is' controlled by grafters, plunderers and incompetents, what hope can they have of any effective work in the public service ? Political parties in power of course can't see the necessity of reform ; those seeking the offices realize the need of a vast reform as to the men jn office, but of their methods if they are profitable there needs be no change. The reform demanded by the people which is so loudly heralded during the campaign is forgotten between election day and inauguration day, and the ward heelers and place mongers who make up the city governments go steadily on in their earnest work of drawing their salaries. Here in Salt Lake we are on the eve of a municipal mu-nicipal election. Charges of incompetency and i graft and malfeasance in office and embezzlement and misappropriation of money have been made and denied and iterated and reiterated. A campaign is naturally productive of such stories. But if they be true or false surely the authors of the graft or ofthe stories are liable to prosecution. But they will not be punished, for a campaign is a holiday from the strenuous work of serving the public, and the cry of reform has no terrors for the men who know there will be no reform. In all parts of the country where the people have approached the problems of municipal government gov-ernment with earnestness and sagacity and persistently persist-ently refused to be turned aside by pleadings for regularity of party procedure, there has resulted an upheaval, and some of the more ardent votaries of the system have landed in positions where their services ser-vices are penal. It avails ,but little to elect one party one year and another the next, and a few honest and strong men in public offices can accomplish accom-plish nothing of importance in correcting the evils. The malefactors and dullards may still draw the salaries and participate in the graft while deputies do their work. The system is wrong, worn out, pernicious. Voters cast their ballots for party candidates can-didates whom they do not know, never saw or heard of, candidates who may even at the time of the elec tion be living off the proceeds of their wife's employment em-ployment candidates so incompetent in the world as not to be able to make a living. Such cases are not unknown. Reform cannot come through any spasmodic effort to purify politics. Experience has proved such efforts to be failures. Experience has also proved that municipal administration by parties is a failure, too. The boasted intelligence of urban populations is awakening to the enormity of the crimes committed in the name of city governments; gov-ernments; is beginning to realize the disgraces which are suffered by municipalities, and the dangers dan-gers which encompass them as the result of unentered unen-tered authority. A few cities have dumped the wornout methods overboard and their experiences furnish an enlightening contribution to the solution solu-tion of municipal problems. Xo doubt the commission com-mission system lacks much of perfection, but it is simple and it has been effective for good wherever it has been tried. The people of Salt Lake should study it. One thing, at least, in its favor is that it is new, and the barnacles which hang on so persistently per-sistently to the ship of state under the present undemocratic un-democratic system in most cities of the land have not yet attacked themselves to it to retard progress and prevent the reform which is so sadly needed. |