New-York tribune., 1872-02-26
CHARTER REFORM.

CHAhIhb hEFOhM.
Our Legislature reassembIes this evening
and will doubtless give immediate and earnest
heed to the revision of our City Charter, tax
ing the draft of the Committee Of Seventy as
its text And. while we would give great
weight to the suggestions of veteran public
lists like Messrs. Tilden and AlvOrd, and would
| listen respectfully and candidly to every sug-
| gestiOn of Improvement, it is our emphatic,
invincible conviction that the Seventy's Char
ter should be adopted with no essential feature
| impaired.
| Our City has many thousands Of capable, in
! tellgent, responsible citizens who have too
generally neglected their political duties. This
| deplorable neglect they have excused on many
grounds, but mainly on that of the fruitless-
ness of effort. "The ward politicians" they
say, with too much truth, &" so cOntrive and
manage that we can do nothing at their
primary meetings; if we attend them, we
are regarded as interlopers, and feel like a
cat in strange garnet; even If we vote
them down, they count us out so we stay
away, and save our clothes and our tempers."
We do not admit that their Fhabitual inatten-
ton to the nominating machinery is justified
by these considerations but is it not made
ineligible 2
Last years exposures of the Tammany Ring
rObbeTies alarmed and aroused the nOn-pOliti-
cal class into novel and general activity.
They took the field early and worked hard, to
very good purpose. They may have over-esti-
mated their own potency, as we are all apt to
do but the City could not have been redeemed
from Tammany misrule without them.
Now, we need waste no words on the prop
ositiOn that some Charter Reform is essential.
Our present Charter was framed by the
Tammany managers to secure for themselves
a monopoly of power. Their overthrow makes
it an anachronism-an absurdity. Unless we
mean to find new Tweed, and install him in
a dictatorship based on general corruption, we
must have very different Charter from the
present.
-" But we can't stand the cumulative
vote" shout the ward politicians of all parties
"you must take that out of the Charter"
Why, gentlemen, the main purpose and
object of this Charter is to deliver the City
from your power The fact that you, without
distinction of party, hate the cumulative vote,
as the split-hoofed fellow is said to hate
holy water, is our main reason for insisting on
that system. Yon need not cumulate your
votes no one is required to do SO; but the
great body of those who are not ward poll
ticians hail it as prOfering them means of
escape from your tyranny and they will not
give it up. To relinquish that is to sur
render all rational hope of substantial
reform.
Under our present systcm of voting, you
have just one more choice than HObsOn's-
YOU may vote the Democratic or the Repub
lican ticket, whichever you prefer. But sup
pose you choose not to be skinned for the
benefit of this or that party, you can throw
away your ballot on impossible candidates, or
you can stay away from the polls altogether.
But give us the cumulative vote, and all can
didates become possible. Fifty men gathered
in any ones private parlor may resolve to
elect any good man to the Common Council,
and, by cumulating their vote on him and
urging their friends to do so, they can put him
in. One interest or neighborhood will thus Sc
cure representative in the Council; 80 will
another, and another Irregular nominations" ]"
may remain the regular swindle they always
were, but their power is forever broken. Each
Council chosen under the proposed system will
represent ten to twenty diverse interests-some
of them selfish and mercenary, if you will, but
they cannot fail to check and countervail each
other. Those who stand for the highest gon-
eral good may be sometimes overborne, but
they can never be crushed out. They can at
least resist, and protest, and make themselves
heard, until the people can be rallied to their
support.
-"But the Court of Appeals will upset your
cumulative vote"
We do not believe it. There is not line,
not clause, in the Constitution which for
bids. or even seems to forbid it, On the con-
trary, we insist that no other system of voting
| is so thoroughly accOrdant with the spirit of
the State Constitution as this is 1t will give
us a Common Council elected by the entire
voting constituency, and this we have never
yet had.
If the Court of Appeals should nullify cumu-
lative voting, the popular disappointment and
indignation will he wreaked on the Demo-
cratic tribunal which thus decides; not on the
Republican Legislature which tried to rescue
our City from the clutch of her venal ward
politicians, but was overrulcd.
Friends at Albany you cannot afford to
beat this Charter 1t would array against you
that power which makes and unmakes parties
the quiet men, who are neither party zealOts
nor party satellites, but viii gratefully accept
honest and frugal government at the hands Of