We have had our stone age, our iron age and our steel age, now we have our graft age. This is the age of the political highwayman who makes the city and her people pay him tribute. This graft comes in the nature of perquisites, commissions and assessments for the good of the machine and those that run it. The graft disease first attacked the men in Congress. The government paid good salaries to all of its servants and even their mileage. But the railroads wishing large slices of the public domain sent the members of both houses free passes. After this other big corporations desiring special privileges were compelled to graft the legislators or receive no favors. Then the disease attacked our State law-makers, which in turn made everybody pay tribute to them, especially rich corporations. To-day, graft is the bane of our Municipal Government. And Tammany Hall has become the horse leach that cries, “Give, Give,” and is never Satisfied! Nor is there any need of denying the fact that we are reaching a period in American history greatly to be deplored. Whatever may be said of our extravagance and high living, it cannot be denied that New York is drifting on the Rocks of Municipal bankruptcy. And the cause of it all is an insatiable desire for money, for which honest labor is not given. With New York’s phenomenal increase in population and material prosperity, since the close of the Civil War, the temptations for money making have become so numerous, that a Tammany contractor can find more wealth in paving one of the streets of the city than in a Klondyke gold mine. As a result the city Government is now in the hands of a gang of political-grafters, who are able to systematize the business affairs in the interest of the House of Grafters on Fourteenth Street, and are able to cover their tracks and “hoodwink” the people.