n Thursday last in the 19th Ward. Voters carried to the
ballot-boxes in scores of waggons from, various localities; and, in
other wards, hundreds of democrats voting for Scott and for Fillmore,
men ignorant and steeped in crime, picked up in all the purlieus of the
city and purchased at a dollar a head; and some, it is said, so low as
half a dollar, to deposit in the ballot-box a vote they had never
seen."--The article then goes on to explain the methods employed at
elections--viz., a lazy fellow who wont work, brawls, and drinks, and
spouts, and defames every honest man in the ward, till he becomes a
semi-deity among the riff-raff, then "his position is found out by those
who want to use him. He is for sale to the highest bidder, either to
defeat his own party by treachery, or to procure a nomination for any
scoundrel who will pay for it. He has no politics of any kind. He has
rascality to sell, and there are those who are willing to purchase it,
in order that they may traffic in it, and sell it to themselves again at
a very high profit.... We have heard of a case in one of the Lower Wards
of the city, in which one man got, at the time of the late democratic
conventions, the enormous sum of two thousand dollars, out of which it
is said he bribed the majority of the electors and kept the balance for
himself."

A few paragraphs further on he suggests remedies for the evil;--and what
do you suppose they are? First, that honest people should not leave
politics to the riff-raff. Secondly, "there ought to be a registration
established, by which no man could sail under false colours, or deposit
a vote at a primary election, unless he belonged to the ward, and
belonged to the party to which he professed to belong." Conceive the
state to which secret voting has reduced the wealthy and intelligent
city of New York; absolutely, a return to open voting is considered
insufficient to reach the vitals of the evil which secrecy has brought
about. Here we have proposed as a remedy _the compulsory register of
political sentiments_; and to prove that things are not mending, in the
"Retrospect of the year 1852," which forms a leading article in the same
journal at the commencement of 1853, after a lengthy panegyric upon the
state of America, &c., during 1852, he winds up with these most serious
drawbacks to the previous eulogy: "if we are bound to admit with crimson
blush that crime is sadly on the increase, and that our municipal
institu