Page:Writings and Speeches of Grover Cleveland.djvu/473

 public purposes, or purposes in which they all have a direct and practical interest.

The logic of this position leads directly to the conclusion that, if the people are forced to pay their money into the public fund and it is spent by their servants and agents for purposes in which the people as taxpayers have no interest, the exaction of such taxes from them is oppressive and unjust.

I cannot rid myself of the idea that this city government, in its relation to the taxpayers, is a business establishment, and that it is put into our hands to be conducted on business principles.

This theory does not admit of our donating the public funds in the manner contemplated by the action of your honorable body.

I deem it my duty, therefore, to return both the resolutions referred to without my approval.

.  II.

Of the Street Cleaning Contract, as Mayor of Buffalo, June 26, 1882.

:

I return without my approval the resolution of your honorable body, passed at its last meeting, awarding the contract for cleaning the paved streets and alleys of the city for the ensuing five years to George Talbot at his bid of four hundred and twenty-two thousand and five hundred dollars.

The bid thus accepted by your honorable body is more than one hundred thousand dollars higher than that of another perfectly responsible party for the same work; and a worse and more suspicious feature in this transaction is that the bid now accepted is fifty thousand dollars more than that made by Talbot himself within a very few weeks, openly and publicly, to your honorable body, for performing precisely the same services. This latter circumstance is to my mind the 