The constitutional system of political corruption, to make universal suffrage profitable to the court, runs thus: The mayors are selected from men without character or local influence. This is brought about by naming the third candidate mayor, he being generally some insignificant person, whom both the leading parties agree to admit on the list. This individual, when appointed, is nothing more than a creature of the prefect or of the court, which alone possesses the power of protecting him in office, and in the receipt of a good salary for three years. The duty of the mayor is to bribe the aldermen, by allowing them to arrange with the municipal councillors how to divert the revenues of the city into their own pockets, or that of their relations, by the creation of places. The extent to which the court have brought jobbing, is testified by the shifts and tergiversation employed to prevent the publication of any regular accounts of the receipts and expenditure of the municipalities; and the municipal revenues exceed the sum of two millions of drachmas. Athens, with a revenue of three hundred thousand drachmas a-year, would be the filthiest town in Europe, were nature not kinder to it than its magistrates. A single instance of how matters are carried on in the provinces, is sufficient to describe the whole system. A rural commune, placed on an important line of communication, wished to make a good mule road over a mountain pass. It voted the sum of six hundred drachmas in its budget, hoping, by its example, to produce similar votes in the neighbouring communes. The central government was then invited to send an engineer, to trace the best line of road. The deputy of the province was a creature of the court; he and the minister of the interior put their heads together, and sent down an inspector of the road, before it was surveyed or commenced, with an order on the commune which had put six hundred drachmas in its budget, to pay him a salary of fifty drachmas monthly for a year. This ministerial exploit put an end to all projects of road-making on the part of the municipalities.