With regard to the particular plea that the life and animation and pleasures of a wide-open town stimulate its citizens to greater activity in producing wealth, it should be observed that this amounts virtually to the advocacy of the purchase of a dubious economic benefit at a high and certain moral cost. In the long run most, if not all, the vicious practices which thus find a quasi-justification directly cripple productive efficiency much more than they can possibly stimulate it indirectly. “A short life and a merry one” may serve well as a motto for a criminal career, but not as an economic maxim for a community of sane people. It may be admitted that the world is not to grow perfect in a day. Vice will persist, corruption will persist, although doubtless in less noxious forms, and business will persist with periods of greater or less prosperity under such conditions. It would be arrant folly, however, to expect business to reach its highest development with vice rampant under a corrupt police administration. A policy of repression, firmly enforced, will be best in the long run both for morals and for business. But even if honesty and prosperity were incompatible, it would still be true that it is a higher duty of the state to make men good than to make them rich. Ordinarily, however, both ends may be pursued at the same time and without conflict. Up to this point the discussion of the argument that corruption makes business good has been confined to the forms of corruption under which vice is illegally tolerated. A dishonest government, however, is also frequently appealed to by businesses perfectly legitimate in their general character for concessions of one sort or another, ranging from the privilege to obstruct sidewalks by show windows up to the granting of public service franchises worth millions of dollars. With an open-handed distribution of such favours business is thought to flourish. Of course, all these concessions must be paid for, but only part of the money goes into the public purse, the rest falling into the hands of boodlers, contractors, and politicians. As the latter could not establish the most perfect title to the rights and franchises they sell they are often inclined to fix prices much below real values. Hence a chance for extraordinary profits to those less scrupulous business men who know the political ropes. A still more important feature of such a situation is that almost anything can be bought. In the lingo of those who are willing to engage in corrupt transactions, business men know “where they are at”; the politicians are men with whom “they can do business.” With reformers in power “favours” are not to be expected. Moreover reformers differ widely among themselves with regard to the proper method of dealing with public franchises and privileges of various sorts. Under “good government” these concessions may not be attainable at all, or, if so, only at such excessive