Now for the collateral facts. Not more than two months following this hearing, officers of the National Committee on Prison Labor got word of misdoings at the jail in the central New York county and succeeded in securing a Grand Jury investigation. The details of their findings scarcely lend themselves to print. Enough to say that the sheriff’s deputies had made a practice of allowing both men and women prisoners to come and go at will and permitted most disreputable conditions to prevail in the prison. Shortly after the committee hearings the state comptroller completed his investigation of the financial affairs of the Hudson River county. His report reeks with accounts of flagrant and intentional violations of the laws on the part of not one but nearly all of the county officers. As for the clerk from the capital district, he was confronted at the hearing itself with several pieces of special legislation passed, at the instance of the sheriff and the superintendent of the poor, for the increase of salaries of deputies over the head of the local governing body. That this appeal was not so much in the interests of the county as of “political expediency” and at the expense of the taxpayers, he cheerfully admitted. But as for the near-Pennsylvania county, that was the earthly home of a man who had conceived a clever method of breaking into the county treasury by having the board of supervisors create for his benefit, contrary to law, the position of “county custodian.” Once firmly settled in his new position he persuaded the board to turn over to him (quite illegally) their responsibility for auditing the claims against the county, and persuaded the county treasurer to cash any warrant that might have his “O. K.” When he had made away, in this manner, with some ninety thousand dollars, the comptroller discovered his misdoings. Of the whole bad mess, the solution which the “custodian” selected was suicide. But the government of that county had not been fundamentally changed to meet the defects of organization revealed in these disclosures. A collection of isolated facts? Familiar American graft and inefficiency? Perhaps. But in the cities and in the states the public has been going after such things. In the counties of New York the people apparently did not know that such conditions were present. The clerks who appeared at Albany and were, for the most part, the sole representatives of their several counties, seem to have told the truth, at least about the people’s complacency, but they might have been more accurate and more complimentary if they had labeled it “lack of knowledge.”