twelve-fold in eight years. Of over $7,000,000 expended by the state in six years, the greater part was squandered; only $100,000 was spent for public improvements. A bonded debt of $10,000,000 was fraudulently created and the money wasted on pretence of paying for buildings and railroads which were never constructed. In Georgia the state debt was increased from $6,000,000 to $18,000,000 in three years without any benefit whatever. In Alabama members publicly boasted of receiving large sums for passing measures. The state debt increased from $8,000,000 to $25,000,000 in two years. The value of land fell from $50 an acre to between $3 and $15 an acre. In Louisiana two hundred new offices were created; the public debt in two years jumped from $7,000,000 to $41,000,000. In four years state and city government expenses increased to ten times their normal volume; taxation was enormously increased, and about $54,000,000 of debt created with nothing to show for it. “In North Carolina,” says the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, “the government established in accordance with the views of Congress in 1868 was corrupt, inefficient and tyrannical.” The state debt was increased in a few years from $16,000,000 to $42,000,000 and the proceeds wasted. In Texas the extravagance of the reconstruction period caused a debt of $4,700,000. In all these states salaries and miscellaneous expenses were enormously increased during this episode. Crime was unpunished, pardons were bought and sold and bribery of public officials was notorious. At the close of the manhood suffrage rule nine southern states were unable to pay their debts, amounting in all to about $170,000,000 and had to repudiate them. This is not extraordinary when we consider that these states had been stripped by the war of all property but land, and that in seven of them the increase of state debts ranged from $35 to $94 per capita inhabitant. A New York state debt of $940,000,000 in 1918 would correspond in figures with what was saddled on poor Louisiana in 1872; but in order to express its relative weight, considering the date and the value of money and the wealth of the state, it would have to be multiplied at least five times. Imagine a New York state debt of $4,700,000,000. It seems an impossible misfortune, but granted an illiterate population and we might reasonably expect such a result in about ten years’ time, under a system of universal suffrage.