The Rights of the People
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THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE.
Almost every measure before the Legislature or the public, brings up the question of the constitutional right of the people to govern themselves—of the inhabitants of this city to select men who shall administer their taxes. The Eagle, in opposing the bills now at Albany, understood to be designed to place the control of the water works and sewers of the city out of the hands of the Common Council, and in that of a self perpetuating Board of Commissioners, disclaims party preferences in the matter, and invites us to show, if we can, how such an enactment can be harmonized with the spirit and design of the State Constitution.
We have no call to defend the Water Commissioners (from some of whom, or their immediate friends, these bills have emanated.) And we certainly are not disposed in advance to advocate the passage of bills which we have never seen, and which every effort appears to have been made to keep from the knowledge of the press here, and its representatives in Albany. But, presuming the general tenor of the bill to be that it creates a commission, to be appointed by the Mayor or some other local officer, and gives the control of the works to them instead of the Common Council, the elected representatives of the people, we are prepared to endorse it in practice, and even to question whether it would be amenable to the allegations of unconstitutionality and tyrranical interference with the people's rights which were so freely preferred against it by Judge Morris and others at the meeting last Thursday.
The water works were to cost $4,200,000 Including the half million for the closed conduit, they will probably cost the city a million and a quarter more than that sum by the time they are finished. Had they been managed by the Common Council instead of the Commissioners, no sane man doubts that they would have cost twice as much, and not been anything like as near completion. The wish of the people was that they should be finished cheaply and speedily. Have not the Commissioners, therefore, acted as representatives of the people, more than the Aldermen would have done?
Take another instance. The members of the Board of Education are not elected; yet is there another department of the local government in which the will of the people is so fully and economically carried out as in the management of the Schools? It is evident, therefore, that the real people, and their true wishes and interests, are represented even better in bodies whose members are not chosen directly by the voters, than in the Common Council itself. The bodies chosen by the voters directly, represent the parties, and not the people; and they sacrifice the public interests, wherever they can, in favor of those of the dominant party. A Water Board elected directly by the people, means one whose members shall be nominated by conventions, and would have to pay the delegates who nominated them, in offices and spoils, at the public expense. Judge Morris, Mr. Barnard, &c., understood all this when they made their flaming speeches about the right of the people to elect their own Water Board, and the unconstitutionality of depriving them of the choice. They knew well that while pleading nominally for the rights of the people, they were in reality advocating the interests of political spoilsmen and unscrupulous contractors, as against those of the people and the city at large.