The Times last Saturday contained a striking article on the
industrial decline in the New England States, which the writer attributes to the capture of the municipal and political organisations by the Irish. Boston, in which the decline is most patent, has become, in the words of its late Member Of Congress, an Irish city, and he explained its stagnation by this fact. Although it has the highest per capita valuation of property of any city in the United States, it possesses an enormous Irish proletariat, who control elections ; and the result is that the amount of taxes for the year 1904 paid by its seventy-five Councilmen and thirteen Aldermen was only seven hundred and fifty dollars, the yearly wage of a day labourer, out of a total of twenty-two million dollars. There have been some ugly scandals in public life owing to the same cause, and it is a significant fact that Boston asked to be deprived of the right of managing its own police force, fearing future misgovernment. This safeguard, according to the writer of the article, and the fact that the judiciary is not, as in most American cities, popularly elected, alone prevent it from being the worst-governed city in the Union. The article is partisan in tone and probably over-coloured, but the activity in politics and the economic incapacity of the low class of Irish are undoubtedly a grave danger in the United States, and are deplored by the better men among their own leaders.
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