Similar complaints rose constantly from the _Evening Post_ regarding the foulness of the streets. It said in the early forties that they ought to be swept daily, as they were in London and Paris, and by machinery; that with New York’s hot summer climate and the popular habit of throwing offal into the gutters, it was intolerable to have them cleaned only every two or three days. In 1846 it called the neglect “scandalous,” the dust and odors “insufferable.” The reason why horse-brooms were not employed was that the use of manual labor gave employment to gangs whose votes the ward-heelers wanted at election time; but really no men need be thrown out of work--they could be set to repairing the broken pavements. When the Crystal Palace exhibition was held in New York in 1853, the British section contained two street-sweeping machines, one of which not only gathered together but loaded the dirt. The machines, it was true, could not vote, but by their use, according to the _Evening Post’s_ calculations, the cost of cleaning New York might be reduced from $330,000 a year to between $50,000 and $90,000. Next year Bryant gave publicity to the experiment of John W. Genin, a Broadway merchant, who collected $2,000 from his business neighbors, obtained horse-brooms, and at an expense of $450 a week, for a month, made Broadway from Bowling Green to Union Square look like “a new-scrubbed kitchen floor.” Not until the end of the thirties did allegations of corruption in the city government become frequent in Bryant’s editorial columns. In August, 1843, we find the _Evening Post_ beginning the complaints against the Charter which it was to maintain without interruption until the early seventies. It believed and continued to believe that the two boards of aldermen and assistant aldermen, soon nicknamed “the forty thieves,” had too much power. “They are at once our municipal legislature and our municipal executive; in part also, they are our municipal judiciary; they are the directors of the city finances; they are the fountain of patronage; they are all this for the greatest commercial city in the western world.” Their government it held to be always expensive and arbitrary, often inefficient, and sometimes dishonest.