The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-03-29


breakfast at eight and be in his Office in Wall
street at half past nine or ten, the HERALD
duly read, fresh and ready for business.
None Of the delays of the slow, noisy boats,
or of the YEARLY dragged street cars and
omnihuses. the trouble of changing cars, the
difficulty of finding seat, and the temper
harried and fretted and the day begun badly.
Simply seat in cosey, easy chair, and no
care until the HERALD station is reached, and
from thence a quiet jaunt to the counting
house. The laboring man, whose hard fate
compels him to live here and to support
family on twelve or fifteen dollars week,
would not be driven to tenement
house, with typhus and smallpox
and malaria all around, and moral
associations even more deadly to carry the
faint of vice to his children. A hundred
thousand homes could be built, the cunning,
comfortable little houses for which Phila-
delphia is famed, with small gardens and
patch of greenery and roses, sunshine and
pure air, and rented with profit to the owDer
for much less than is paid for miserable
tenement in Baxter street Apart therefore,
from any question of aggrandizement or mu-
nicipal pride or the desire for greatness, we
come to question of morality and health.
There can neither be health nor virtue where
the sun does not shine, and when we throw
our poor, our worthy but helpless poor,
back upon the swamps and the river banks,
to grovel and stife and have no free health
producing life, what can we expect but disease
and vice, and all those sad social problems of
social city life which have so long taxed the
genius and bonevolence of Christian men ?
1t has been said with derison and bitterness
that this stupendous New York is the city
which no one loves. Men who come here
speak of Boston and Philadelphia and Balti-
more, even that poor, pampered almshouse
of Washington, with affection and emotion
and the tender voice with which we always
speak of home. Blu! who loves New York?
People come to see its pleasures and earn
money, and hurry back to the longed-for
home. New York is their money market,
their playground, their wharf, their store
house but it is not their home They do
business, but do not live here. So in public
esteem the city is regarded as hard, selfish,
ambitious and great, uninviting and very
wicked. And, instead of striving to destroy
this sentiment and make our city worthy of the
affection Of its children, it has been made unin-
habitable for all classes but the paupers and
the millonnaires. We shout over reform
because Tweed is out of Office and
Connolly is fugitive. But all this time
it is a mornings journey from the
HERALD Office to where land and rents
are cheap. We have docks that are detr-
ment to commerce, we have highways that
would disgrace Cairo, and this narrow, easily
spanned East River, has been a barrier to our
growth. A reform which does not see this
and generously provide for the comfort of the
present and the future is simply cant and
demagogusm. Reform is embraced in this,
speedy transit over the island That acQom-
plished we want free ferries free bridges and
free highways. All of this will cost money,
a great amount of money. This is precisely
what we wish to pay. Let us have honest
men in Office, and we can well afford to spend
two hundred millions upon the city. This is
the reform we urge upon our reformers, and
it is the only policy that will satisfy the peo-
pie. Our friends have pulled down Tammany
and Erie, the Cog and Magog of corr aption ;
now let them build up and beautify New
York, to be, even in this generation, with her
greatness, her splendor and her ambition,
not only the Empire City Of America, but the
Imperial Metropolis of the world.