The revenue from these sources was estimated at $7,000,000 annually. This did not include contributions from corporations. In 1900 the so-called Mazet Senate Committee conducted a third investigation which brought out evidence tending to show that the mayor (Van Wyck) had been a party to a conspiracy to create a monopoly of ice in the City of New York. The essential meanness of a scheme to fatten on the needs of the poor during the sultry months was apparent even to the most stupid voter; the mayor became unpopular and at the end of his term retired to Paris with great wealth as it was said. The Mazet committee unearthed the fact that the city contracts went to politicians, not to business men. Particulars of other scandals, such as the Ramapo Water Scheme; the system of judicial assessments for office, the silent partnerships of political leaders in city contracts, and police corruption must be omitted here for want of space. About 1900 the New York, Westchester and Boston Railroad Company, an adjunct of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, was seeking a franchise to enter New York City; it obtained it in 1904 from the New York municipal authorities. Ten years afterwards in 1914 it was ascertained in an investigation by the Interstate Commerce Commission that in order to get the franchise the Railroad Company had been required to distribute $1,500,000 in cash to politicians and to give a $6,000,000 contract to a business corporation controlled by politicians. This same corporation obtained other contracts from other quarters, about $15,000,000 in all, through political influence. The foregoing instances of New York municipal scandals are more than sufficient for the purposes of this chapter. For an extended account of some of the evils and problems of American municipalities the reader is referred to _Eaton on Government of Municipalities_, published in 1899, and to other works herein referred to. But you cannot (says Steffens) put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book; and it is probable that a mere sketch of all the actual discovered and known American municipal frauds and malpractices committed or culpably permitted in the past eighty years would fill many large volumes. The statements of the writers hereinbefore quoted in proof of the deplorable failure of American municipal government, though necessarily general in terms are sufficient and convincing; and the specific instances herein mentioned were given not so much to sustain this undisputed general testimony as to illustrate it; and as a local map or sketch may aid a traveller to call to mind the ground traversed in past years, so here to assist the memory of the reader as to the details and quality of frauds and rascalities notorious in their time, and with the story of which he is or has been more or less familiar.