The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-02-16

Impaticnt-Give Us n Charter and Let
There Do IN End Of Erie.
We seem to have fallen upon the day Of
small things We have passed through q
season of unusual anxiety and effort and
the people, having expressed their will, are
waiting in patience for its enforcement.
From our City Hall they expect thorough
revision of the municipal affairs, publication
of every department from the corrupnons Of
the old Tammany rule. From Albany they
hope for q charter that will be worthy of the
nations metropolis. From Washington they
demand an Improvement Of our revenue sys-
tenn, reduction of taxation. the re-establish-
ment of our navy. Yet what has been done
for us2 Our Aldermen and Councilmen
have spent most of their time in intriguing
| about the City Hall patronage. Our legis-
lators at Albany have given six weeks to an
investigation of poor Terwilliger for accept
ing his time-honored dividend, and we are
threatened with six weeks more of inquiry as
to whether thrifty clerk carried home a
pocketful of postage stamps. In Washington
| we have had protracted Investigation of
| Colonel Leet for making some money out of
| the general order business and not dividing
all around, and we are threatened with still
more protracted investigation of some military
people for selling guns and cartridges to the
French government.
So all around the horizon we have this
comedy of Liliput. Small men in great con-
Germ about small things; politicians gathering,
contriving, intriguing; Cheap-Jack newspapers
clamoring over their circulation, their honesty,
their influence, their contempt for one an
other, generally high in oath, and offending
all decent wayfarers Here, for instance, we
have had the gravest problem of international
relations that we have known since 1872
problem that threatened war, and brought
with paralysis of business, decline Of our
bonds, an advance in gold-grave enough to
be mentioned in speech from the throne and
discussed in Parliament Yet Cheap-Jack
newspapers have scarcely printed the news
preferring to give column after column on
Murphy and Leet, Terwilliger and Hank Smith,
while Cheap-Jack Senators stand up for hours
and hours, Indifferent to the nations peace and
|
guns to the French. The country is revolving
at this trifing, and plain, honest men are ask
ing, lis it not time to do something, especi-
ally when there is so much to be done2 Can
we not end this magpie gossip and fishwomen's
invective We can well admit certain
| limit to the nonsense and vanity of our public
men, but the time has come to end it. Gull
liver records in his travels that he came upon
a community In high state of political ex-
element. The trouble grew out of an egg
One party contended, if we remember cor
rectly, that an egg should always be broken at
broken ct the small end. The community
divided into two great parties, called the big
endians and the little-endians, and the partisan
auimosities almost led to civil war.
| This is what we see In our own affairs.
The big-endians and the little-endians are in
terrible strife, and decent, fair men can do
nothing. If these strifes were of any value in
impressing public opinion we might tolerate
them. But public opinion In these United
States has its own mind, and sees when a
mist is mist and when there is really smoke
and fire. The country knows that Mr..
Alvord, with his willy tactics, means to de-
feat the charter; that Mr.. Greeley cares more
to have the Fenton strikers engrossed upon
some payroll than to secure good charter /;
that these Erie petitions are signed by Erie
employees that the war on Terwlliger
and Murphy is meant to defeat
Grant; and that If these hungry,
clamoring politicians were in power they
would be as bad and perhaps worse than those
now in place. Public opinion knows quite
we'll that the reason these Fenton men do not
support the administration Is because the
administration does not support them. II
knows, furthermore, that the support of the
Conkng men springs largely from an attach
ment to the payroll. Public opinion remem
bers that every administration Is badgered
by similar oppositions-that 80 long as Pres
ident cannot appoint two hundred Thousand
politicians to fifty thousand places there
will be one hundred and fifty Thousand
patriots In opposition. Political confidence /.
plant of rapid growth. Jonah's gourd, com
pared to it, was as slow in maturing as thu
American aloe. But political confidence
which might be better expressed as politica
mendicancy-has little weight with the peopl
of the United States. The men who pay take
and earn their own livelihood have way O
voting as they please and of enforcing thei
will, in the long run, even upon the big ant
little endans, and ofgiving us Presidents lik
Washington and Jefferson and Jackson an,
Lincoln and Grant.
If this were time for comedies we nigh
laugh with the rest at the antics of these small
men. But, alas! we suffer for wise legisla
| tion Hero in Now York Wa ara like a ahi,