The first of the Godkin lectures for this year was delivered last night in the Fogg Lecture Room by President Eliot on "Municipal Mis-Government." After a short tribute to Edwin L. Godkin as one who for a generation advocated reform and fought corruption, the lecturer began his outline of the facts of municipal Mis-government, their causes, and results. The succeeding four lectures will relate experiments in reform.

The evils of city government are new because the conditions which have brought about the evils are new. Sixty years ago we had no large systems of water supply, paving, lighting, sewerage, and transportation, to take care of in our cities. Nor did we have in existence the large corporations with limited liability which today are corrupting agencies. The type of our municipal government is one suited to the conditions of sixty years ago and totally unfitted to deal with the problems of today. Our question then is whether by a change in the type of municipal government we can obtain a better management of city affairs.

There are eight notable evils of city government in this country today. First is an evil not peculiar to the city, but having a deeper effect there than elsewhere--the spoils system. In cities even the laborers and mechanics are employed in return for their vote. By padding the city payrolls additional places are found for friends of the administration. Competency is immaterial in appointments under the spoils system, so that there is an utter absence of it in the administration of the city departments. There is no discipline, because each member of a force owes his appointment to someone other than the leader. If a half-day's work is done for a whole day's pay, there is no one to complain. The supplies of the city are purchased by persons who have no knowledge of the kind involved in making the contract, so that the city thus loses immense sums. The worst influence morally is the complicity of the police with the worst vices, for whose protection they take money. By the ingenious device of fradulent letting of contracts, lucrative jobs are given to political retainers at unnecessary cost to the city. Laws requiring competitive bidding are easily circumvented. The purchase and sale of public franchises without regard to the interest of the city, and the neglect of public hygiene by incompetent Boards of Health, with a consequent high death rate and the taxes it makes necessary, complete the list of city evils, whose causes we shall now enumerate.

It is difficult to realize the rapid concentration in cities which has taken place since the Civil War. This is partly due to the great immigration--sixteen and one-half millions in the same period. With overcrowding, and the influx of a body of people unused to free government, has come a depreciation of the intelligence of the suffrage, still further lowered by the creation of a class of industrial operatives whose task of monoto- nously repeating one small operation requires but small intellect.

As a result has come a great increase in expenditure. A majority of the voters in the cities today are not tax payers, indeed the same is true of the majority of office holders. More than two-thirds of the candidates at the last Cambridge election paid no taxes. Those who pay no taxes elect men like them selves, who will favor rockiness expenditure. The debt of cities in the United States is enormous. That of Boston increased in the last 12 years at four times the increase at the property valuation.

The next lecture, tomorrow, will consider the experiments in municipal reform made in Massachusetts and Texas