Bryce condemns the giving the suffrage to the immigrants. “Such a sacrifice of common sense to abstract principles has seldom been made by any country.” But it is manifestly absurd to charge all our municipal corruption upon the immigrants. Our native crop of controllable voters far exceeds the imported one. Bryce is compelled to recognize the situation in Philadelphia, where the Gas Ring ruled politics for a generation by controlling the native American vote under American managers. He says that “most of the corrupt leaders in Philadelphia are not Irishmen, but Americans born and bred, and that in none of the larger cities is the percentage of recent immigrants so small.” (_American Commonwealth_, Vol. II, p. 421.) Though nothing will induce Bryce, or any other British or American politician, to see the deformities of manhood suffrage, yet he is willing to testify to the facts. He says: “There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.... In New York extravagance, corruption and mismanagement have revealed themselves on the largest scale.... But there is not a city with a population exceeding 200,000 where the poison germs have not sprung into a vigorous life; and in some of the smaller ones down to 70,000 it needs no microscope to note the results of their growth. Even in cities of the third rank similar phenomena may occasionally be discerned.” (_American Commonwealth_, Vol. I, p. 608--quoted approvingly by Rhodes, Vol. III, p. 62.)