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"Still, when all allowance is made for these laudable tendencies, the dispassionate observer can
hardly admit that New York would be justified in giving three cheers for itself. Nor does the study of a century of municipal history tend to make converts for the philosophy of Pippa and Pollyanna. It is a painful chronicle of alternating indignation, apathy, and despair; if it teaches anything, it is only the old lesson that the solution of political problems is not to be found in changes of political machinery. In the last hundred years New York has tried about everything. Greater measures of home rule have been introduced as a desperate remedy, in the hope that centralization of responsibility would enable the public to keep officials up to the mark; but it was exactly such centralization that made possible the enormous stealings of Tweed and his confederates. In reaction from this the city, or that part of it interested in honest government, has from time to time thrown itself on the mercy of the Legislature, only to find presently, not exactly that it has exchanged King Log for King Stork, but that between storks the one who spends stolen money at home has at least some advantage over the one who plunders the city for the enrichment of up-state."
"In the period of Tweed's supremacy New York had the misfortune of enduring practically all these varieties of political experience, and for some years |
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