The Demand for Higher Salaries

New York, 1895

Judge Garretson has submitted to the board of Supervisors a draft of an act which increases the salary of the County Judge from $4,000 to $7,500, and the salary of the Surrogate from $5,000 to $6,000, and about which there is some misapprehension. The Roslyn News permitted a correspondent to argue against the increase of salaries as if the County Judge and Surrogate now in office would profit by the increase. They would not. If a law is passed making any increase at all, it will not take effect until 1899, when a new County Judge and a new Surrogate will be installed in office. There is no selfishness in the bill drafted by Judge Garretson.

Judge Garretson's reason for proposing this increase of salaries is that the successors of himself and Judge Weller will be barred from practising law, and the public should make up to them all or a proportion of the loss they will sustain. Whether this policy of the law is wise or unwise, it is the law and must be respected. We do not think it wise in its application to the whole state. In the majority of counties the Judge and the Surrogate are not actually employed with the public business for more than two days in the week, taking it the year through, and for the law to force them into idleness, and make the people pay for their idleness, is not healthy. In Queens county, which is the ninth in population, the law will not work out any public good.

It is commonly supposed that high salaries will place abler men on the bench; that lawyers of ability will seek the bench as much for the profit as for the honor. Experience and common sense show this to be a fallacy. There are lawyers who would covet the honor more than the salary. And again there are lawyers who would throw honor to the dogs and plunge in after the salary merely. If merit were sure to win, the salary should be ample. But every intelligent person knows that merit has little to do with it, for it is the political convention that gives us the candidates, and they are likely to be good or bad, according as jobbery and bribery shall determine, or good and bad relatively. The records of the conventions, both Democratic and Republican, held in this county of late years, give the people no reason to hope that the ability and purity of the bench will count for much in the deliberations of nominating conventions. The vulgar and incompetent, but rich lawyer, would easily distance the polished and able, but poor lawyer. The high salary would induce jobbery and bribery, for the low minded creature would see a way to square accounts financially. We used to see very decent men filling the office of Sheriff when it paid but a few thousand dollars a year. We do not see that any more. The office goes by auction, and $20,000 to $30,000 is the price. The same corrupt state of affairs might control the disposition of the judicial offices.

—The Long Island Farmer, Jamaica, NY, Feb. 22, 1895, p. 4.