The state is a much larger buyer than seller, and manifold are the possibilities of malpractice in connection with its enormous purchases of land, materials, supplies, and labour. Yet nothing in our contemporary political life is more marvellous than the light-hearted indifference with which the public regards the voting and expenditure of sums running into the millions. We recall vaguely that the great constitutional issues of English history were fought out on fiscal grounds, but we find the budget of our own city a deadly bore. We rise in heated protest whenever the tax rate is advanced by a fraction of a mill, but we regard with indifference the new forms either of necessary expenditure or needless extravagance which make such increases inevitable. There is one general advantage which state buying has over state selling, however. A great many of the purchases of government are made in competitive markets where fair price rates are ascertainable with comparative ease. Even large public contracts such as for erecting public buildings or for road construction are usually resolvable into a number of comparatively simple processes and purchases. Of course there are exceptions, as for example government contracts with railroad companies for carrying mail. But as a rule the ordinary purchasing operations of the state are simpler and more easily comprehensible than such acts of sale as franchise grants,—to mention the one of most importance from the view point of possible corruption. It is precisely at this vulnerable point on the buying side of governmental operations that the New York Bureau of Municipal Research has struck home. With a skill that amounts to positive genius this voluntary agency has placed before the people the ruling market prices and the enormously higher prices actually paid by officials for public supplies. Taking the purchasing departments of our best organised private corporations as a model it has drawn practical plans for the installation of similar methods as part of our municipal machinery. Equipped with field glasses and mechanical registering devices its agents have kept tab upon the flaccid activities of labourers in the public service and have contrasted the long distance results thus obtained with the suddenly energised performances of the same men when they knew themselves to be under observation. It has co-operated quietly and effectively with all willing officials in improving the methods of work in their offices, in installing more logical accounting systems and better methods of recording work done; and it has fought effectively, with the penalty of discharge by the Governor in two cases, those officials who were not amenable to proper corrective influences. And finally the Bureau has attacked the city budget and has even succeeded in making that dry and formidable document the object of active and intelligent public interest. Yet the cost of the Bureau’s work has been out of