In our earlier study of the nature of political corruption an effort was made to distinguish between bribery and auto-corruption. As examples of the latter, legislators may employ knowledge gathered on the floor of the chamber or in committee rooms for the purpose of speculating to their own advantage on stock or produce exchanges; administrative officials who by virtue of their position learn in advance any information which may affect the market (_i.e._, crop reports) can do likewise; knowledge of important judicial decisions before they are handed down may be exploited in a similar fashion; insiders who have access to plans for projected public improvements are in a position to acquire quietly the needed real estate for sale at much advanced prices to the city or state when condemnation proceedings are actually begun. In addition to large and striking transactions of this sort there are innumerable smaller possibilities for auto-corruption which present themselves to public functionaries ranging in rank from the highest places in the official hierarchy to that of the policeman on his beat. Logically the practices under consideration are not separable from the general forms of political corruption as the term is applied in the present discussion. Instead they would seem to be a special method of carrying on corrupt transactions of many different kinds. All cases of auto-corruption, however, have the common feature that bribery by an outside interest is excluded, and this absence of bribery has sometimes led to the assertion that the practices included under this heading are “honest grafts.” An illusory appearance of innocence is also conferred by the difficulty of tracing the incidence of the burdens resulting from such transactions. There is no moral ground for such favourable distinctions, however. On the contrary, auto-corruption is clearly worse than bribery in that an entire transaction of this character must be guiltily designed and executed wholly by one person, and that person an official charged with knowledge which should be used only in the public interest. Moreover the profits of his secret treachery may be turned entirely into his private bank account. If so he cannot even plead in justification that he has been acting in behalf of a party organisation by gathering and contributing the funds necessary to its management. The latter feature of auto-corruption stands in need of special consideration.