We, therefore, approve, as a step in the right direction, the provisions of the new Charter, which require adequate compensation to the city for all franchises hereafter to be granted, and which limit the terms of all such franchises, with reversion to the city on their expiration. We denounce the Republican party for its wasteful and reckless grant of valuable public franchises to private individuals by special legislation, with no provision for compensation to the municipality, whereby this city has already lost some of the most valuable franchises on its most important streets. [Illustration: THE LATE HENRY GEORGE.] The most significant plank in the platform is that demanding municipal ownership of monopolies of service as essential to the purification of politics and the protection of the citizen against taxation:-- We declare that the functions of street railway transportation, the lighting of the streets and homes of the people, whether by gas or electricity, the carriage of the people by ferries about the waterways of Greater New York, the facilitation of the interchange of speech by telephones or telegraphs, are all purely municipal functions, things which can better be done by organised society than by individuals; we insist that the present system of delegating these functions to corporations has resulted in a heavy sacrifice of public wealth and convenience, the practice of extortion upon citizens compelled to enlist the services of these corporations, and the creation of powerful moneyed interests which, enjoying rich public grants, systematically employ every art of corruption in politics to control the city government for their own profit. Mr. George declared he was a poor man as the candidate of poor men. Mr. George simply stood where he did in 1886. Hence, he simply had to fall back upon his old thunder, and to reproduce the fierce denunciations which he hurled against the existing state of things by which the control of the modern American city was given over to the worst classes of the community. Here, for instance, is a passage in which he lashed the corrupt influences that dominate American politics:-- The influences which have degraded the rich and debased the poor, and, under the forms of Democracy, given over the metropolis of our country to the rule of a class more unscrupulous and more arrogant than that of the hereditary aristocracy from which it is our boast that we of the new world have emancipated ourselves?