THE MOST EXPENSIVE CITY IN THE WORLD. 17 



of New York was the culmination of a sentiment so fixed upon an 

 ideal that there had been little careful reckoning of the cost. The 

 municipality, by taking in the extra territory and population, dou- 

 bled its debt, added less than one fourth to its tangible assets, and 

 increased the cost of local government $15,000,000 a year. This 

 added cost is the price paid by the taxpayers for a sentiment and 

 for haste and carelessness in the work of completing consolidation. 

 The cost of government for the enlarged city was in 1899 approxi- 

 mately $15,000,000 more than the combined expenditures of the 

 various municipalities for the last year of their separate existence. 

 This increase was excessive and altogether unnecessary to the main- 

 tenance of thorough and progressive government. 



The present charter of the city is supposed to provide a large 

 measure of home rule, yet the salary of almost every officer and 

 employee, from the mayor to the doormen of the police stations, 

 is fixed by act of the State Legislature. The former cities of New 

 York and Brooklyn had been so long regulated and governed from 

 Albany that the commissioners who drafted the charter evidently 

 overlooked the fact that a municipality might be trusted to regu- 

 late the pay of its own employees. To-day the pay of the school- 

 teachers, policemen, firemen, heads of departments, and chiefs of 

 bureaus is fixed at Albany, where the representatives of the city are 

 in the minority. When the charter was prepared the commission- 

 ers agreed that taxation and salaries must be equalized. The mem- 

 bers differed in their views on many questions, but they evidently 

 agreed that the way to equalize salaries was to increase the lowest 

 to equal the highest. 



In extending the benefits of a great corporate government to 

 the many suburban communities included in the consolidation a 

 uniformed policeman, or five or ten of them, at fourteen hundred 

 dollars a year took the place of a town marshal or constable at three 

 hundred dollars a year, and high-priced trained firemen were sub- 

 stituted for unpaid volunteers. This method of equalizing salaries 

 was extended to every section of the city and to every branch of 

 the government. No attempt, apparently, was made to devise 

 some system that would adjust salaries in various localities to local 

 conditions and cost of living. The sentiment in favor of a great 

 city was not disposed to quibble when the cost of maintaining the 

 visible form of municipal government was increased fivefold in 

 much of the outlying territory. 



Aside from the extension of high-priced municipal service 

 throughout the great area of the consolidated city, many useless 

 offices were created and many salaries fixed at excessive figures. 

 Authority was too much divided. The borough system is expen- 



