With the exception of this department all the others of the city are merely run on political lines, as adjuncts of the political party in power, notwithstanding the civil service law. The abuses of that law may become fewer in number, not through any merit of the present board, but because it has about exhausted itself in filling all the offices with men of one political faith by means already explained. The departments of the County government under a feeble civil service law, different from that applicable to the city, are conducted in the same manner as those of the city for the benefit of machine politicians and their regiments of ward and township workers. They are as corruptly managed as those of the city government. The institutions at Dunning for the insane and the poor, are generally managed by ward politicians, whose appointments are in the nature of a reward for party services, or rather, services to some particular boss. Recent reports of grand juries note some improvement in their conduct. On the whole, however, they are regarded in the nature of spoils by the ring of party loafers, whose views of government consist, mainly, in doing the greatest good to the greatest number of the ring. The traffic in dead bodies, or "cadavers" goes on, as it did when exposure came about a year ago through detected shipments to the State of Missouri for the use of a medical college in one of the towns of that state. These pauper dead "escape," in the language of the employes, from the "killer" ward in which they are stored, a place selected to lay out a corpse suited for the dissecting table. It has been a matter of more than rumor and given currency by the press, that subjects for the dissecting table are selected before the breath has left their bodies. This statement finds more or less verification in the disclosures of the Missouri case before alluded to. Contractors for county supplies pay a percentage of their prices to a county ring, and, consequently, a poorer quality of food, fuel and medicines, is furnished to these institutions than the contracts call for, which cost the contractor an additional sum by way of boodle to obtain them. The sheriff's office has had a standing shame for many years in the cost of dieting prisoners. The county board allows the sheriff for dieting, twenty-five cents a day for each prisoner confined in the county jail. The cost of a day's dieting is estimated not to exceed ten cents, according to the greed of the sheriff. From this one source alone the sheriff's office is regarded as one of the most lucrative offices in the county. The excess above the actual cost is clear profit to the sheriff.